Copper Hills High​School’s jazz band spring concert featured backup singers, break dancers, lightsaber duels and an electric confetti finale. With no formal director, the student musicians watched and listened to each other. Occasionally soloists took front stage or the rhythm section took the beat out into the audience, which responded to the music with dancing, beat-clapping and lighting up their phones.

“We’re trying to make jazz more accessible to our community,” CHHS Director of Bands Chris Kuhlemeier said. “Rather than it being a formal dress-up, sit-in-the-back type event, we've had a mosh pit. It's a good time.”

The annual spring concert is the culmination of everything jazz band students have learned to be able to arrange music for the 19-member band to perform.

“Our students are not only learning the music and engaging with that fun stuff, they're getting insight into what it's like to compose, what it's like to arrange this stuff, learning all the music theory and the technical skills needed in utilizing notation software to come up with that, allowing them to take ownership in the performance,” Kuhlemeier said.

For the past three years, students have had the opportunity to arrange and perform music written by professional musicians. This year, students listened to music by jazz-pop band Sammy Rae & The Friends, which has a vocalist, trumpet and saxophone. Without access to the written score, students created an arrangement of one of the group’s songs-- by ear-- with individual parts for a piano, electric guitar and bass, five saxophones, five trombones, four trumpets, four singers, and, in some cases, a string quintet.

Trumpet player Alex Rich said it was an eye-opening experience.

“It definitely helped me understand more about writing and composing harmonies and music, and a better understanding of what they are and how they can help contribute to the overall ensemble,” Rich said. For his arrangement, he added extra rhythms into the trumpet and saxophone parts.

Jazz band pianist Ben Rollins said he has learned something new each of the three years he has written an arrangement for the spring concert.

“We've learned how to now specifically set aside the melody for Asia [lead singer] and then add in new harmonies, rhythms, etc., to figure out how to make the song more full in texture apart from the original track itself, but now to the jazz band,” Rollins said.

Kuhlemeier said one of the best benefits students glean from this experience is more awareness of the band as a group, which he said was a factor in earning a superior rating at the state jazz band competition.

“I'd like to credit a lot of that due to this project,” Kuhlemeier said. “We are diving into the intricacies of each instrument. In their role writing for them, and researching what each instrument provides in the grand scheme, we can better write for those skills and abilities. It, in turn, just raises that awareness and global mindedness of our students to better perform at the end of the day.”

Rather than individuals focusing on their own parts, the students learn to be aware of what is happening in other sections so they become a more unified band, able to react to each other, which is a critical aspect of performing jazz.

The spring concert has become bigger, more unorthodox and more anticipated each year-- there were two shows this year-- which has helped the band gain recognition and status from the student body. In fact, the jazz band's annual fundraiser swing dance has become so popular that it became an official school-sanctioned dance, replacing the less popular MORP. Nearly 1,000 students, 10 times the number that used to attend, showed up to dance to the live music played by their peers.

Everything Kuhlemeier does prepares students for real world experiences.

“It's really cool for our performers to experience it from a more popular standpoint and a more practical standpoint by today's standards, giving them that experience of doing all the things on the back end of managing, arranging and rehearsing all of these pieces,” Kuhlemeier said.

For the spring concert, students also took leadership and management responsibilities and learned to work with a professional audio engineer who was hired for the specialized needs of the performance.

"Our speakers in the auditorium can't handle the size of our band right now,” Kuhlemeier said. “The recording equipment and mixers cannot support the 50 plus inputs that we need for a band this size.”

The audio engineer also mixed the audio for the concert music video, which was filmed and edited by students in CHHS’s video production and recording technology classes. Kuhlemeier also created a documentary of the entire process.

Between the experience of arranging music for a professional touring band, performing a high-energy concert and reliving it through a music video and documentary, the students felt like real rock stars.

These types of real world experiences Kuhlemeier provides help prepare students for future careers in the music industry, in which several students have expressed interest. Rollins, the jazz band pianist, has dreams of becoming a professional composer, and Sean Breyer hopes to write music for concert bands and movie soundtracks.

Breyer already has a headstart. After arranging a piece for last year’s spring concert, he immersed himself in learning more about music composition, poring over the music department’s sheet music collection and practicing his composing.

“I just kept writing and writing and got better at it, starting with arranging pieces, like the jazz pieces,” he said. “I tried to arrange a piece last year that wasn't as good, but I kept working towards it to a point I'm comfortable writing my own melodies and writing bigger, harder pieces.” All the hard work has paid off:  earlier this year, Breyer composed music for the school’s wind symphony and wind orchestras to perform.