City of Boulder, CO Creative Neighborhoods Projects, 23 Jun 2021

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From YouTube: Artist Interview: Jocelyn Armes

Description

Jocelyn performs with the Last Saxophone Quartet who have been performing for the past few years in Boulder. Since COVID-19 restrictions, the musicians have not been able to perform together. Jocelyn is organizing digital recording sessions to write, arrange, and produce high-quality music. These ‘home edition’ performances will be available online to bring the joyful, well-loved music back to the community. Creative Neighborhoods: COVID-19 Work Projects was launched by the Office of Arts + Culture and Create Boulder: https://boulderarts.org/public-art/creative-neighborhoods/covid-19-work-projects/

A

First, I'm just going to have you introduce yourself and your creative career.

B

My name is jocelyn w arms and I am currently a phd candidate at the university of colorado boulder in music education. I'm defending my dissertation project this week, I'm a saxophone player and I play locally with a group called the last sax quartet, which I founded with our soprano player michael meyer, about four years ago now, and we've been playing all over the boulder area um in busking on the streets or playing at places like the last or um what is it no name bar and the laughing goat?

B

um Can we play a variety of music that really defies categorization? We play everything from old jazz standards to contemporary pop music, to rock ballads, to movie music, to video game music, to arrangements that we write ourselves.

B

For example, I arranged a version of beyonce's halo but like in the form of a baroque feud, so we we play just a ton of different kinds of music and people really enjoy and respond. Well to that, particularly when we play like video game music. If we're busking on pearl street people will come from all over and he's like. I thought I heard zelda it's just um it's great, it's a it's an outlet for us.

B

Three of the members are our phd candidates and music education and we don't really get to be creative um musically unless we're doing this together, and it's like a great outlet for that and our creativity and sharing music with the public, which is something we strongly believe in personally, as well as like educationally.

B

So. That's that.

A

Wonderful, that sounds like great fun. It is it's a lot of fun great um and how has code 19 affected your life and livelihood.

B

Gosh uh coven 19 has affected all of us um in terms of our creativity. We obviously haven't been able to play together as a group since, like late february early march, um actually our last event was the weekend before the leap year uh in february.

B

So it's been sad because it's something that was a great source of you know joy and stress relief for us, but also we haven't been able to share music with people um professionally. It impacted us all differently. uh A lot of us were interviewing for jobs in tenure. Check positions all over the country and search committees have seized all of their searches for candidates. As a result, some of us have had to go back to a traditional nine-to-five job.

B

Instead of pursuing further study at the graduate level, some of us have held fast onto our graduate stipends. It changed. You know all of our lives in different ways.

A

I'm very sorry to hear I feel like it's hit hard on every area. Yeah.

B

Absolutely- and I mean there, you know, but there are hidden silver linings for everyone. You know um in some ways it couldn't have happened during a better time for like seth, our baritone player and myself, because we were both working on our dissertations and suddenly we had a lot more time to be able to complete them, which was nice, um but that was pretty much the only song, otherwise.

A

It's been really tough right, but it's so important to at least just have that and hold on to it.

B

Yeah yeah, I mean we all have to find that something to hold on to, because it's tough to be separated from family and from people. You love and care about for this long, yeah.

A

Truly um so you've obviously been awarded a coven 19 work project. Stipend. Would you briefly just tell me about your project and how it can promote connectivity in your neighborhood? Absolutely.

B

We really miss performing live for people, it's something that is correct to our ethos, as musicians and as educators. We don't think that music belongs only in a concert hall. We don't believe that music is only art if it's esoteric and difficult to understand.

B

uh We believe that everyone is musical and so sharing music with people is so important to us and we miss it. um So our project is that we are compiling videos of ourselves playing in a quartet still and what we do is uh we have a checklist. Actually.

B

First, we go around from seth or berry player to ian our tenor player to meet the altar player to michael the soprano player, and we each build onto a track of us playing all of our parts, and then we compile it and match it up with videos of us playing our parts, and it's taken some trial and error to find which programs and which equipment and which configuration and workflow works best for us.

B

But we finally kind of settled on one and thanks to the financial support of this organization, it's going to make it much more feasible to be able to do this and to share it with our local neighborhoods and our local communities.

B

So what we intend to do is to still do a lot of the things we were doing before, which is to have a big social media presence on facebook and instagram into it, and place posters everywhere um now, especially in our neighborhoods, and people, will be able to find and access and enjoy our music in a different way.

A

That is beautiful. I love that idea. What platform are you guys using.

B

We currently are using facebook and instagram um to make the videos we use um audacity and we record on yeti, mics, usb mics and there it results in a really high quality recording of our music and ian mixes. It, and I edit do all the video editing and we're using a program called filmora9 to do that.

B

We investigated using things like acapella or um imovie or, but they didn't it just didn't, seem to work as for what we needed in the same way. So this was like the best price point and the best tools to use for the work that we're doing, because it's.

A

All again, it's like extra.

B

Work than we were doing before, but it's like a work of joy and it's still something that's really important to us.

A

That's great, I'm very happy to hear you guys found something that worked for you. um So finally, is there anything else you'd like to share.

B

Find us on facebook, the last saks touch awesome.