Pleasant Valley is known to not only be a powerhouse in sports, but in music as well. Pleasant Valley High School is home to award-winning bands, orchestras, and choirs.
Some of the award-winning musical groups at PV are the jazz choirs. There are four jazz choirs at PV: Leading Tones, Jazz Etc, Belle Tones, and Jazz Nouveau.
Last year at the Iowa Vocal Jazz Championships, Leading Tones placed fourth and Jazz Etc placed third in 4A jazz choirs. There were also 11 students who auditioned for All-State Jazz Choir, and five were accepted: Rishi Wagle, graduate, Cate Byrne, senior, Brendan Wheeler, senior, Vignesh Krishnan, graduate, and Caitlin Lyon, graduate.
Jazz choir allows students to experiment with a different musical styling compared to the traditional choir. Cate Byrne, senior, supports this, saying, “It’s a great opportunity to try out new vocal stylings while still having a blast making great music with some of the best musicians around.”
Hannah Sturtzer, senior, doesn’t only like jazz choir for the challenging music. Sturtzer also enjoys the social part of being in jazz choir. “We do lots of bonding activities after rehearsal,” she says. Sturtzer also adds, “Jazz choir is such an amazing extracurricular and I’m so thankful to have participated in it since freshman year.”
Interested in hearing the wonderful jazz choirs? You can hear their first performance Monday, Feb. 6 at Pleasant Valley High School for District Choral Fest.
