UM’s Frost Concert Jazz Band. Departing from my usual coverage of classical events, I’m using this space today to take note of the announcement earlier this week of the jazz awards given by DownBeat magazine, long the best-known journal of jazz in these United States.

The University of Miami’s jazz program was the source of no less than 12 of the awards in the magazine’s 33rd annual student competition, the university said Monday, and among them was the Graduate College Winner for large jazz ensemble, which went to the Frost Concert Jazz Band. Here’s a video of the band on YouTube, doing Three Weeks Notice, by UM composer and trombonist Kendall Moore. It’s a pleasant piece, with a nice light swing that gets feisty in the middle, and the band sounds good.

It’s common in the jazz world to refer to the art form as America’s classical music, and in many ways this is true. It has a body of canonical work that its practitioners refer to and are expected to know (many of these pieces are individual songs, not compositions written especially for jazz), and it has a core of serious knowledge and practice that is every bit as difficult and daunting as classical music.

And unlike much of the classical world today, jazz shares with its cousins in the classical symphonic band world a concert scene in which new music is routinely played and recorded. South Florida has jazz bands at most if not all of its colleges, and as the Melton Mustafa Jazz Fest in Miami Gardens showed earlier this year, there are promising players at the high school level as well.

Many of us played in jazz bands at the school level in addition to other musical activities, and it was a good education in a different kind of approach to making music. It wasn’t as free-form as playing most rock, but the notes on the page, we learned, were only the beginning of speaking a real jazz vocabulary. Understanding the chord progressions and the sound world of jazz was one thing, but you could grasp it all and still miss that elusive quality of swing.

The DownBeat awards are a further example of the depth of musical achievement in this part of the country, a depth that doesn’t get the national profile it deserves. While the New World Symphony fellows in Miami Beach are building tomorrow’s classical orchestras, the jazz band folks at UM and other schools are busily building a strong future for this music, too, and it provides another reason for local residents to be pleased with the strength of the arts scene in their midst.

DownBeat hasn’t posted the winners on its website yet, so let me do so: The Frost Concert Jazz Band, Frost Salsa Orchestra, Frost Funk/Fusion Ensemble and the Frost Studio Jazz Band were all winners in the magazine awards, as were five students: Timothy Buchholtz (voice), Troy Roberts (tenor sax), Steve Brickman (composition), Luke Moellman (composition, recording) and Bridget Davis (composition). Moellman took four awards all told, one with Davis for work by their pop/rock ensemble, bridget & luke, two for recordings, and one for his piece Misguided Melancholia.