Listen to a sample of Extra Credit from the NU Jazz Ensemble’s latest CD:

The Northwestern Jazz Ensemble’s latest recording signifies a great accomplishment of the students and faculty of the jazz department to director Joel Spencer. The album’s title, Extra Credit, fittingly brands his sense of their achievement.

“All the hard work and the efforts and the talent levels that our students possess is just so obvious when one hears the record,” Spencer said.

Extra Credit, the title track, was composed by Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Jim McNeely. According to Spencer it also describes the challenge that the students took on when recording the album in a five-hour session.

“In many ways, they experienced the world of a professional studio musician,” Spencer said, “[The students] really rose to the occasion.”

Spencer views performing and recording as “two of the most valuable experiences for anyone in music to have.” While the debut performance was Friday, the ensemble recorded it in May 2007 at Shure Performance and Listening Center.

Shure, located in Niles, has a partnership with the School of Music in which the studio offered free recording sessions to the school “to demonstrate the tonal differences between different microphones” of their KSM microphone line, according to the studio’s Web site.

The collaboration with the NU jazz ensemble occurred after the School of Music’s director of concert activities, Richard Van Kleeck, passed on the previous year’s ensemble recording, Jazz Spoken Here.

Music senior and pianist for the ensemble, Joshua Moshier, is proud of the album, but wishes that the School of Music would do more to promote it. He believes that the lack of promotion is related to the dismissal of the current jazz faculty, at the end of the academic year.

“None of us would be playing at the level that we’re playing at without the faculty,” Moshier said.

Spencer declined to comment on the lack of promotion saying that “the most important thing is the music and the welfare of our students.”

“Twenty five years from now, our students can say ‘wow, this is what I did in 2007,’” Spencer said, “Their musical voices are captured forever.”