On May 11, Vidal Orduz, the music director at Morgan who teaches the school’s concert band, rock band, and beginning guitar classes, announced his new idea: a jazz band. Orduz then sent out a form to all current students enrolled in any of his music electives. The form asked if students would be willing to stay after school weekly to practice for a jazz ensemble.

Currently Orduz says he has 12 students interested so far but hopes he can get a few more to form a complete ensemble. “I expect to get around 12, but I would like a full 17-piece Jazz band.”

The jazz band is not new to Morgan, though. “Mr. Smith had Jazz bands through at least his first 20 years of teaching,” said Orduz, “but he eventually had a hard time keeping it up due to the sports schedule and conflicts. For Orduz, the question is whether or not enough students would be interested in this project with sports, schoolwork, and all the other commitments they may have.

When asked about the return of the jazz ensemble, Anthony Strunjo, a four year band student and senior at Morgan said “I would definitely join it because it is something that I wanted to do in Eliot before Covid.”

For Orduz, one of the first things to consider when starting an after school program is sports. Many of the students at Morgan are involved in at least one sport and the unpredictability of the practices and games can make it incredibly difficult to plan for a weekly practice.

However, according to Orduz, to solve this, he “would like to start at the beginning of the year and run rehearsals right up until the start of the winter sports season.”

Planning before the busy winter season starts would make more people available to join the ensemble and have time to practice, Orduz said. But that’s not the only problem, students interested would need to primarily practice their parts at home, which means they need to be dedicated enough to do so. A single weekly rehearsal could be used for putting the parts together rather than learning them.

Orduz had to consider this and eventually decided, “They’re going to have to put some of their own time into it. Yeah. But it’s not going to be the same amount of required repertoire as Concert Band. It might be only one or two tunes through a couple months. It depends on what the group can handle.”

Despite not being able to join next year, some current seniors at Morgan still share opinions about the new ensemble. After four years at this school, and understanding the complicated balance of activities, they believe that despite the tough schedule of sports, if there’s enough passion then they’ll be able to make it work.

According to Anothony Strunjo, a fall and winter athlete, “Jazz is very fun to play and especially fun to listen to, so I would definitely practice at home to make sure it sounds great.”

A Jazz band will be a new way for students at Morgan to express a new form of repertoire that hasn’t been seen at Morgan in years, it may be new and not an official class yet but with student support it has the potential to grow.

“I said, hey, all these people that want to play more, let’s play more. And I think that could work in that model.” said Mr. Orduz