The Lyrical Workers, Long Beach City College’s jazz ensemble, had the experience of a lifetime traveling to New Orleans last month to perform and take in all of the Jazz history that the city has to offer.
The ensemble attended the Jazz Education Network Conference that is held every year where teachers, professionals and recording artists come together to showcase their work and take workshops.
The trip was a total of seven days with the conference taking up three of those days.
Lyrical Worker, Angelique Cheung said, “I’ve been thinking about how far I’ve come since my first attendance of the Network Conference, my first time at the conference I was just a spectator and now I was there as a performer.”
The group performed for 20 minutes on stage with the theme being “LA to LA,” meaning Los Angeles to Louisiana, having all of their songs be composed by local Long Beach composers.
They sang a total of four songs in their set, one of them being an arrangement from the group’s director, Professor Andrea Calderwood called “In the Hall of The Mountain King,” where she added a section to the song to nod to a local jazz musician.
Along with the conference the Lyrical Workers attended, they spent a lot of time in the French Quarter, where Jazz music is prevalent and performances are on every quarter.
“It was a complete culture shock for these students to travel to New Orleans. The city has a mix of culture that has been protected in some ways and there’s things that have just been forgotten over generations that are still very prominent and more traditional there compared to where we live,” said Professor Calderwood.
The trip was entirely funded through the student’s fundraising, LBCC and the Ella Fitzgerald Foundation.
Professor Calderwood has noticed a large shift in the students ever since being back from their trip, both emotionally and musically.
“They learn their music quicker, they’re more focused in class, they’re motivated, I hear it in how quickly they learn their music versus music we learned in the fall. There’s excitement in them that has increased in them since last semester,” said Calderwood.
The Lyrical Workers are excited to hold their spring concert on June 2 at 2 p.m. in the LAC auditorium.