The Orange Juice Combo brings experimental zest to jazz
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During the Orange Juice combo’s biweekly practice, vocalist Ania Kapllani suggested a new song: “Invitation” by Bronisław Kaper. The director told the group to try it in a new way, but Kapllani couldn’t imagine the song not in bossa nova — until drummer Grady Collingbourne began to play it with an R&B style.
“We totally changed the feel of ‘Invitation’ and it was like a song I had never heard of,” Kapllani said. “We’ve been playing that since and have worked on it now, and every time I hear it in that version, I’m like ‘That’s the OJ version.’”
The Jazz and Commercial Music Orange Juice combo, or OJ, is the most advanced jazz ensemble the Setnor School of Music offers. The band consists of a drummer, a bassist, a keyboardist, two saxophonists, one trumpeter and one vocalist, Kaplani said. Director of Jazz Studies John Coggiola, the band leader, created OJ eight years ago and has directed the band ever since.
OJ meets twice a week as part of a class the students take. Alongside playing jazz, students learn about the genre and increase their versatility as musicians. These skills are important because members of the ensemble might want to be professional music producers, sound technicians or performers, Coggiola said.
“It’s my job to give them some guidance, getting a connection to some of the historic jazz in commercial music that they could play, perform, learn,” Coggiola said. “It doesn’t just mean like real early jazz, I mean, everything from the beginning of the 20th century, we’ve played.”
As the group is the most advanced jazz ensemble at Syracuse University, they don’t just play the music they’re given, they change it completely. The students bounce off of each other and have the opportunity to pitch new ideas, like Kapllanni’s “Invitation” suggestion or Collingbourne’s different beat. Jazz is typically the same songs being performed with a twist by each artist, which is what OJ exemplifies, Kapllani said.
Coggiola will take a step back and allow students to go through the process of experimenting until he feels he needs to pitch something, he said. Through this process, students can gain skills they can continue to use.
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“We have to, in this setting, have the ability to do something and succeed but also do something and fail and realize the choices that we made —- why they didn’t necessarily work for us,” Coggiola said. “And remember those lessons and then you know, move on, so it’s very much a laboratory.”
Because of their experimental approach to music, the group is more “laid back,” Kapllani said, and might seem like there’s no structure. However, she said they are getting things done even if it just looks like they are hanging out and playing together.
The caliber of the students involved drew Kapllani to want to play for the group, especially because Kapllani wanted to work with students also dedicated to producing good jazz even if it was rigorous. Trumpeter Xaden Nishimitsu, who has been in the group since his first year, thinks he is the weakest in the group but being around the group pushes him to get better and better.
“I feel like in Orange Juice, we kind of just get together and play. It sounds really like ‘Oh, you’ve heard everybody say that,’” Nishimitsu said. “It’s a good hang because everybody in there is at such a level that you want to keep getting better.”
Last year’s vocalist, junior McKenna Fenimore, learned jazz history more in-depth at OJ than in her jazz minor classes. She felt fully immersed in jazz and its history from being in the ensemble and learned everything from New Orleans jazz to bebop.
Fenimore was also the first vocalist in OJ, so there was a different pressure. She had to learn different styles of singing so that she could blend into the jazz group.
“I was learning a lot of music I had never heard before,” Fenimore said. “I was being taught to scat and learn scales appropriate to the time period as well, which I had never really, I guess thought as in-depth about before.”
Fenimore also felt intimidated by the instrumentalists because their learning processes were very different, but working with the band helped her a lot. Similarly, Kapllani said the group made her feel more confident as a vocalist because she had a band she could trust.
OJ’s performances are more “regal” than other music performances at SU, Kapllani said. Last year, the band performed for the Board of Trustees and at Convocation. The members probably wouldn’t have had a chance to play in these gigs unless there were other bands that were really “killer,” Nishimitsu said.
While playing in OJ, many of the members are in other bands as well. Kapllani plays in a band called Gunk, which is jazz fusion, and Nishimtsu plays in the marching band. Fenimore is playing in Setnor’s big band and is applying what she learned in OJ.
“It’s an honor for me to work with them, because they are so creative, and they’re so thoughtful and what they do, and they’re really trying to evolve into the best artists they can be,” Coggiola said.
