North Texas Daily

Steven James | Staff Videographer

@StevenLeeJames

UNT’s lab bands are part of the Division of Jazz Studies in the College of Music. Jazz Studies currently has nine peer lab bands, with at least one performing each Wednesday evening.

Each concert begins at 9 p.m. They end individually at 10 p.m., 11 p.m. or midnight, depending on which band is performing. Tickets for the One O’Clock Lab Band are $5 per person. Tickets can be purchased at the door at the UNT Gateway Center at 801 N. Texas Blvd., where the concerts are held.

The One O’Clock Lab Band, the program’s premiere ensemble, performed the semester’s first UNT jazz concert on Wednesday, Sept. 2, attracting nearly 300 audience members.

The ensemble, which has six Grammy Award nominations, features both undergraduate and graduate students. It is led by interim director and principal jazz studies lecturer Jay Saunders, who also directs the Two O’Clock Lab Band.

The One O’Clock Lab Band was founded in the late 1940s by then-director Gene Hall, who graduated from UNT. Hall’s master’s thesis, “The Development of a Curriculum for the Teaching of Dance Music at the College Level,” was completed in 1944 and helped create the first U.S. college-level jazz studies program right here at the university.