Students Showcase Diverse Music Talent

In a diverse display of campus musical talent, a group of about 20 undergraduates brought jazz, heavy metal, hip-hop, rock and traditional Hindi drumming to Lowell Lecture Hall Friday night in a show devised by two student musicians.

The show, entitled “Drink my wine…dig my earth,” found its genesis in Music 91r, an independent study class. As a class project, Michael D. Ramos ’02 and Matthew T. O’Malley ’02 sought to create a showcase of musical diversity. Even the title, a line from Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” they said, was meant to serve as a poetic offering of their music.

“We wanted to put on a show featuring all of Harvard’s [musical] talent in different genres,” O’Malley said. “It seems to me like a very Harvard kind of thing to do.”

Beginning with a classic jazz piece by Dave Brubeck called “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” in which O’Malley played piano and Ramos played guitar to the accompaniment of a four-piece jazz band.

From there, although they played mostly jazz, the evening expanded in several different musical directions. O’Malley and Ramos took the show into the realms of classical, metal, rock, hip-hop and choral with original compositions and adaptations of popular songs.

After the first song, O’Malley explained that they were simply “aiming to have a lot of fun.”

With the aid of the breathy, nightclub-esque vocals of Sara Wajnberg ’04, their band transformed Led Zepplin’s “The Rain Song” and Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android,” two loud rock anthems, into soft, slow and yet powerful jazz songs.

Also making an appearance was the Black Yankees, an undergraduate hip-hop duo of Richard W. A. Maye ’04 and Dominique C. Deleon ’04. Going by the emcee names “Will Amaze” and “Satchel Page” respectively, they displayed lyrical skill by freestyling along with several of the songs.

In the spirit of the evening’s musical fusion, the rappers even ventured into rock territory by joining into the jazzy rendition of “Paranoid Android.”

The evening even wandered from the realm of serious music and ventured briefly into improv territory. O’Malley plays piano for Immediate Gratification Players (IGP), a campus improv comedy troupe, and he briefly presented a routine with fellow IGP member David Modigliani ’02.

In the style of the television show “Whose Line is it Anyway?” Modigliani asked the crowd for a non-geographic location—the audience suggested IHOP, the International House of Pancakes—and proceeded to make up a story on the spot, basing the plot on O’Malley’s thematic accompaniment.

Most of the players were members of the Harvard Jazz Band. But throughout the show, the instrumentation became quite diverse. Early on, for example, a string quartet made an appearance, playing an original composition by O’Malley.

After the classical piece, they were joined by the jazz musicians as well as Mallika L. Mundkur ’04 and Amol K. Tripathi ’03, both members of the campus musical group Tarana, who played Hindi drums called tablas.

After the show, the participants thanked O’Malley and Ramos for inviting them to be a part of what had begun as a class assignment and turned out to be an incredible night of music.

—Staff writer Steven N. Jacobs can be reached at snjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.