By Frankie Beer MSU NEWS SERVICE
Engineering and psychology students may be some of the last people you’d expect to release a jazz album.
But, between attending social cognition and manufacturing design classes, a trio of recent Montana State University graduates rehearsed album tracks in the School of Music’s Howard Hall and performed in jazz ensembles. On June 26, they released “Something More” on Bandcamp.
“I think that’s really what MSU is all about,” said Kellan Moore, a pianist who earned a mechanical engineering degree in May. “Taking all these people from different backgrounds and finding a common passion project that everybody can work toward.”
The fourth-generation Bobcat from Billings is one-third of the Kellan Moore Trio, which includes Jaden Hopkins, a bassist from South Carolina with a mechanical engineering degree, and Carson Putnam, a drummer from Bozeman with a degree in psychology.
The students found their rhythm playing together in MSU’s Jazz Workshop Band and the One O’clock Jazz Ensemble, a band for the university’s strongest jazz musicians. The trio became official in 2022 and performed more than 30 times at events hosted by the MSU president’s office throughout their undergraduate years.
For Moore, the music felt like an escape from his engineering routine, which allowed him to explore the creative outlet with abandon. When his fingers fly across the piano’s 88 black and white keys, he said, he’s not thinking about anything but the expression of notes and “making the piano sing.”
“When I was a student, it was hard to find a way into a music building if you weren’t a music major,” said Ryan Matzinger, MSU’s jazz director. “At MSU, it’s open for everyone, from the marching band to the wind ensembles. I tell my students, ‘Maybe this isn’t your specialty or dream, but we can find ways for it to inform your education or provide a sense of community.’”
In 2023, the pieces of “Something More” began to fall into place. Hopkins and Moore wrote six original compositions, along with arrangements of Led Zeppelin and Herbie Hancock’s music.
Outside regular rehearsals and performances, Matzinger met with the students once a month to provide songwriting and recording advice, of which he had plenty as a featured soloist and horn section leader on the Grammy Award-winning album “Risin’ With the Blues” in 2007. He said it was rewarding to pass on the wisdom of “living legends” he got to work with as a young artist, such as Sonny Rollins, Ray Charles and Chuck Berry.
“It’s rare that you get to learn from somebody who’s not only a professional musician but someone who’s played in so many different countries with some of those people that you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, you played with them?’” said Moore, who first met Matzinger nearly a decade ago at the Red Lodge Music Festival. “That’s the kind of experience the School of Music provides.”
The album was also a collaborative effort with students from MSU’s music technology program, such as Mason Prince, a senior from Fresno, California. As a mixing engineer, he received recordings from each instrument and blended them together into a final track, lightly adjusting their volume with minimal compression and a “less is more” philosophy.
“I helped everyone fit together, like a puzzle,” said Prince, who has also helped produce rock albums for Californian artists.
Prince said his sophomore-level recording class at MSU encouraged students to take projects into the Montana State Transmedia and Electroacoustic Realization Studios and experiment.
Moore plans to move to Pennsylvania in August and become a field engineer for the firm Kiewit. In spare moments, he’ll continue to play the piano because he loves it too much to quit, he said.
“When I play, I become a lot more carefree,” he said. “I put my whole heart and soul into what I play, and that’s the truth.”
