THE CUT SESSION

In jazz, when two instruments go back and forth on the improvisation tip, it's commonly known as a "cut session", or battle, to see which musician can 'cut' the other, or who is better than the other. Sometimes it's just friendly competition, however, it can get serious and very heated at times. As a jazz musician, I was informed about and thrown into "cut sessions" at a very young age and throughout my time...

Example: Senior year of high school, I was at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music for an audition to get into their jazz program, along with 25-35 musicians from all over the world. The professors selected 2 people to audition at a time, where we played an F blues w/ 3 choruses of improv as well as improvising on 'rhythm' changes. I realized the other saxophone player and I were the only people left to audition about 3 hours after auditions began. We're both called into the room. The professors leave the other sax player and I up for what blues we're gonna play while they set up the camera to record it. The dialogue, in a nutshell, went as follows:

Me: F blues
other guy: Which melody do you wanna play?
Me: you cool with "Billie's Bounce"
other guy: I'm cool with that.
Me: rhythm section ready? let's go... 1,2...1,2,3, and...

I counted the blues off kinda fast to throw the other sax player off, but he was ok, so he was able to stick right with it. We played the melody twice, then he started soloing, and was corny as fuck. His whole solo was bland, and had no soul or feeling to it. As he finished his solo, I ended up starting my solo real smooth, throwing some season jazz vocabulary here and there in the first chorus. The second and third chorus I went off. It was a wrap. The professors didn't even wanna hear another song. A couple weeks later, Oberlin offered me a dope scholarship, but due to its location, I had to pass and roll with MSU...

Anyways, that's just one of the experiences I had with Jazz. Anyways, peep this dope cut session between trumpeters Sean Jones (in the white shirt) and Marcus Printup (in the black shirt)...who do you think won? leave a comment and let me know...