By: Julia Nijjar, SFU Student
For the past few years, I’ve felt like a soprano singer trapped in the body of a student. How wondrous would it be to sing again like I once did in the good old choir days of high school? My longing to sing again sent me on a quest. I began my expedition at the SFSS club directory, searching for information about the SFU Choir when I stumbled across another choir, the SFU Vocal Jazz.
I reached out for an interview to find out more. “We’re getting bigger every year but we’re still smaller than the SFU Choir,” Sage Fleming, the co-marketing coordinator for the club, told The Peak. “Our choir is completely comprised of SFU students, which is not the case for the SFU Choir. So, we are a club run by students for students.”
Kiara Bender, the club’s president, shared that
“SFU Vocal Jazz is like “a get-together of friends, and we all sing together.”
— Kiara Bender, club president
“You need no experience to join,” adding, “that’s what I appreciate the most about this club.”
The SFU Vocal Jazz is the perfect opportunity for those who don’t just love music, but, more specifically, adore the genre of jazz. Fleming said, “We do some choral holiday songs. And then there’s some variation; there’s some more bossa nova jazz, some more swing jazz, upbeat, slow.” Fleming later shared, “I have fun every time. It’s also not too stressful. We’re all busy with school so we’re coming in to learn and we do hope that members learn and practise a little bit outside of rehearsal with some of the tools we give them, but everyone’s stressed, so it’s not like we come to choir and stress about not practising. It’s a chill environment.”
The SFU Vocal Jazz typically holds rehearsals once a week, at a time that works best for members each semester. When asked about rehearsals, Fleming said, it’s a “It’s very supportive. We are very open to members with all experience levels, so some people have taken music lessons and have really learned how to sing, and some people have never done it before.” Bender added, “If you can’t read music, that’s fine. We have ways to work around that and we really just try to get as many people as we can to just come sing with us.”
The SFU Vocal Jazz comprises around 50 students. It’s divided into sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses. Bender explained the leaders “talk people through” the various vocal ranges and get them to self-assess and place themselves in the vocal range they think would suit them best. “We tell them, ‘Try it out for our first rehearsal. If you find that you’re singing too high of a range, or too low of a range, next rehearsal, you’re free to switch to another one that you think you might do better in.’ Usually, by the second rehearsal, people will have sorted themselves out.”
When asking Bender about her favourite thing about working with the SFU Vocal Jazz, she said, “I love how passionate everybody is about music and I think I really enjoy the dedication everybody has to the club. You know, people have really busy lives and everybody’s studying.
Whether it’s midterms or final season, people choose to come to my club and people choose to be involved and have fun and make friendships. It makes me so happy to see people just enjoy, enjoy singing and enjoy music.”
Fleming said her favourite song the club has performed is “You’re Looking at Me” by Nat King Cole. “I didn’t like it when we first started doing it. But then I just came to love doing it so much that it’s one of my favourites now. So that’s what I think is so special about the choir too. If you don’t like jazz that much, you might discover some songs that you actually do from the jazz repertoire.”
You can see the talented SFU Vocal Jazz for yourself, as they perform their Christmas concert on Saturday, November 29 at 6:00 p.m. on Burnaby campus in the Diamond family auditorium! Tickets are $10. “I love our concerts because we work with the SFU Jazz Band and usually have a joint piece. So, just having the dynamics of singing and live instruments — it’s like a whole band — is pretty phenomenal,” said Bender. “It’s one of the most magical fun things ever to do a joint piece with them.” The concert will also include some solo pieces sung by vocal jazz members.
