My Favorite album:
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Sant Andreu Jazz Band is a project comprised of musical genius hailing from Barcelona Spain. Conducted by Joan Chamorro, the big band brings together children between 6 and beyond. A project created and directed by Joan Chamorro in 2006, musical compositions range from Dixieland, to standards out of the “Great American Songbook” and the big bands of the 1930s and 40s, to lilting Brazilian bossa nova classics — resulting in concerts and recordings that have, for nearly fifteen years, presented the kids' remarkable skills and feel for the musical art form of jazz.
From its early days as a band, Chamorro has encouraged the pursuit of jazz singing as well as musicianship for his students, as seen in the Ramon Tort documentary, A Film About Kids and Music, released in 2012, in which singing teacher Monste Jorba is seen with students Andrea Motis, Magali Datzira, and Eva Fernandez (when the SAJB was still part of the Escola Municipal de Musica de Sant Andreu).
But a big part of Chamorro’s teaching philosophy is to have his students learn by ear, listening to the original artists’ recordings, in addition to taking traditional private music lessons. “Basically they learned their songs by listening to the great singers and improving day by day, through listening.” He elaborates: “One part of the process is to look for good references — Clifford Brown, for example — make them known to the student and say, ‘look how beautiful! Listen to it, sing it, and little by little, without hurry, but without pauses, try to play it with your instrument.’
The student listens and sings and repeats and assimilates, and in his [or her] unconscious, the love that is necessary to dedicate time to your instrument is entering without anybody forcing you — and to the music, without more goal for the moment,[other than]to enjoy playing.” Some of the guys have dabbled as vocalists from time to time, but the highest-profile musician-singers in the band have always been the girls. This is not to take anything away from the non-singing members, who possess musicianship that — if you were to close your eyes as you listen to them play — can easily be mistaken for some of the great big bands of swing’s Golden Era.
The girls through the years have all consistently demonstrated an ever-growing familiarity with several jazz singing styles, including their proficiency with singing the English lyrics to the American standards (and Portuguese for the Brazilian tunes). “They learn the language in their schools,” Chamorro told me, “where they basically do English as a second language. Besides, they listen a lot to singers and imitate them … not all of them have to work the same way. But when working so young, [learning is]very easy.” The same goes for the bossa nova songs in Portuguese, where they have had the help of Ana Moreira — mother of Marçal Perramon, tenor sax of the SAJB — who is Portuguese, and who has helped them a great deal with proper pronunciation. And, just as the learning process on a given instrument can vary somewhat from one student to the next, so does singing. “I believe that they are all different,” Chamorro says, “and that the process, as in the young instrumentalists, is different in each person. Maturity in improvisation comes with time, as does having a voice of its own and developing a discourse of its own, a personality. That a person can have it at 15 does not mean that all people have to at that age. My job, in part, is to believe that wonderful things can be achieved with daily work. The same thing happens with the voice.”