The Bay Area jazz trio Charged Particles re-formed when drummer Jon Krosnick began teaching psychology at Stanford several years ago and connected with fellow professor Murray Low and bassist Aaron Germain. The group’s debut tour included a stop at the Santa Maria Public Library in 2013, where they played to a packed house that gave a standing ovation for the energetic and varied performance of jazz music.
The warm reception is well remembered by the Charged Particles members, who are returning for another performance at the library on March 20. This time though, Krosnick explained, the group will not give a traditional concert, but an educational performance all about jazz.
“This next performance at the library is actually an educational workshop for children and anyone interested in jazz,” he said. “We are educators by trade. Murray, our pianist, and I are both professors at Stanford, and as a thinking musician, you can’t help but think about what you do and how to explain it to other people; so it’s really a fun other way of doing what we do.”
The program is designed for kids aged 6 and older, but also serves as a perfect introduction for anyone interested in appreciating jazz, Krosnick said. Jazz is a style of music often misunderstood or ignored, due mainly to the wide range of styles and ways it is put to use, from elevator “muzak” to heavily dissonant bebop, many listeners don’t know where to start.
Krosnick and his fellow musicians will help eager ears and minds understand jazz from the ground up at the event happening in the library’s Altrusa Theater. It’s the harmony of several basic elements that makes jazz unmistakable, and the workshop will help to identify and understand those elements.
“What we are doing is breaking jazz down into the basic parts,” he said. “The basic parts are rhythm, melody, and harmony, and then the improvisation around that.”
Improvisation is a fundamental factor in jazz, a kind of uncertainty principle that ripples through every single musical moment. Though the musicians all agree on the harmony and rhythm of a piece, what happens when improvisation begins is anyone’s guess. This means no two performances will ever be the same.
The uniqueness of any given solo break, song, or concert is what stimulates the mind of a jazz listener. Unlike a classical piece or a pop song, the listener can never ride the rails of familiarity, and must always be on guard for a dynamic shift of tone or emotion.
“For us, we are trying to create a new kind of experience; it’s not just a band going up and playing 14 songs,” Krosnick said. “We are trying to tell a story.”
Some of the program will include audience participation like clapping and singing. The Charged Particles will take a song the audience is singing and transform it into jazz, illustrating the malleability of songs as simple as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The goal of the workshop is to equip listeners with a mental toolkit for listening to jazz and other kinds of music, Krosnick explained, which can be expanded upon and honed by motivated listeners.
Krosnick and the band hope to remind listeners that music is inherently linguistic, and that we all understand each other musically to some degree based just on the tone we use when talking. Revealing this fact to youngsters and adults alike is also an empowering thought for those hoping to appreciate the art more or even begin learning how to play an instrument.
“We are all musicians because we are all saying stuff all day long with that musical component to it whether we know it or not,” he said. “And, we are all improvising musicians, jazz musicians, because we are always making up everything we say.”
Contact Arts Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 12-19, 2015.