Stage Bands & School Jazz Labs

Stage bands, usually associated with a university or high school, are blaring swarms of mainly brass players that crowd the field at half-time during a football game. Mardi Gras bands, the Mummers' Parade, and other events featuring parade bands comes close. Recorded stage bands offer the same appeals as most rare grooves: rare breakbeats and extended soloing, limited regional or local pressings, odd (sometimes very odd) covers of popular tunes. The most famous is the funky Kashmere Stage Band of Texas.

Schools and universities often maintain a "jazz lab" for incubating talent indoors, away from the pressures of nonmusical events. Each class year typically produces an album, or an album documents an inter-school competition (or "festival"). Sometimes the ensemble is not called a "jazz lab," but the idea is the same. In some cases the music is funk or rock or something else, and the responsible school department may be Music, Drama, Art, or a mixture. Student productions fascinate, much as do military-recruitment albums, chiefly for reflecting a battle between the hip (usually the students) and the square (usually the adults).

Hank Levy of Towson University in Maryland (just north of Baltimore) literally wrote the book on directing a leading jazz lab. "A Time Revolution" spells out his expertise in getting an unwieldy student ensemble to use odd time signatures, meters, etc. Closely associated with Stan Kenton, Levy frequently judges stage-band festivals and leads workshops. The highly original, professional-level records usually include breakbeats and at least one funk or funky-rock cut.

Buying: Regional records traditionally have been the stuff of local sales, but increasing interest means more records are being discovered and circulated farther. Avoid any that are definitely pointless (patriotic, religious, or antique music with no indication of even one fun tune). Many look dull but the proof is in the listening.