Kiwanis Jazz Festival 07
Well, it's Tuesday evening, the festival's finished and I am bagged. It has been very busy for the last few days. My brain capsized late this afternoon and I've been running on autopilot ever since.
A bit of background: The Kiwanis Music Festival is the largest series of annual student music festivals across the country. Starting in Toronto in the 1920s, it takes place in more than a dozen cities across the country. In this city in 1964, The Kiwanis Club of Vancouver took over the operation of a student festival that had been run by The Knights of Pythias. I mention this because the building the Knights had constructed as their lodge is now The Western Front. Today the Vancouver Kiwanis Music Festival has over 10,000 annual entrants, with seperate sub-festivals for jazz, concert band, choral and finally individual classical music categories. It's a huge event funded by the Kiwanis club and it gets little or no recognition in the media. Good news doesn't sell newspapers. Maybe we need an adjudicator to club a baby seal or something.
I'm mainly involved with the jazz segment. I am the titular chair of the event, but really there is a small committee that does the bulk of the work. Brenda Sleightholme is the administrator and Ken Osterreicher and Michelle Workman are the teacher coordinators from Argyle and Sutherland respectively. John Sharp superbly handles the tech details. We work in conjunction with Cap College, where we get great support from their administration and faculty. We have feature performances by Nitecap, their vocal jazz group , and also from the A Band. Tom Lee Music is a corporate sponsor and each year they are very generous in supplying keyboards, guitar and bass amps, also Taye drum kits for our main stage, warmup rooms and clinic rooms. Coastal Jazz & Blues sponsors a noontime presentation by a prominent local musician, or someone they may have in town for one of their events.
One the main functions of my duties is to ensure that things run on time. If things start getting behind schedule, adjudicators can burn out, teachers get impatient and our costs may start to rise if room rentals and tech crew run into overtime.
In this regard, we did very well, moreso today when we actually squeezed an extra band into the morning schedule. By moving one band on stage the moment the previous group vacated it, we were able to utilize the collective gaps in our 25-minute rotation. We were back to our original schedule remarkably fast. In all we had 11 vocal jazz groups, 40 stage bands and 1 combo entered in the festival, comprised of one elementary school and the rest either junior or senior high schoolers.
When I first got involved with Kiwanis in 1995, the festival was a fairly dry affair. The MC was retired high school principal (acutally very charming and funny at other times) who kept the youth firmly planted in their auditorium seats and well-shooshed. The adjudicators were more academics with music education credentials rather than working musicians. I became the MC the following year and the first thing I did was lighten up the atmosphere. Jazz is cool. Jazz is fun. It's full of self deprecating humour and practical jokes. Over the years I developed a repertoire jazz jokes, aimed at maligning as many different instruments as possible. "What's the difference between a chainsaw and a baritone sax? The exhaust." That sort of thing.
It's hard for some categories, like jazz singers, to find jokes that can be told in public to high school kids. I'm sure many of them know worse ones, but the teachers would flip out if I told them. There's too many trombone jokes. And then there's a definite lack of piano jokes, just a few. A couple of the best of those are in the unmentionable category, like the one that finishes off "Do you know there's a hole in your pants and your balls are hanging out?" "Know it? I wrote it!" Cam Ryga is a great one for walking by me as I am onstage and telling me the absolutely foulest joke, basically daring me to repeat it on mic. Anyways, I keep it relatively clean. Kids love to hate my jokes, then pester me for more. It keeps things rolling between schools and while the adjudicators are doing their thing.
As well, I harangue them to get out and support live music, keep playing after high school, and basically to make music part of their lives.
On the whole, I'd have to say this year's edition was a success. The changes we have made in the past year worked out well. We always find aspects to tighten up and refine, and this year is no different.
Well, it's Tuesday evening, the festival's finished and I am bagged. It has been very busy for the last few days. My brain capsized late this afternoon and I've been running on autopilot ever since.
A bit of background: The Kiwanis Music Festival is the largest series of annual student music festivals across the country. Starting in Toronto in the 1920s, it takes place in more than a dozen cities across the country. In this city in 1964, The Kiwanis Club of Vancouver took over the operation of a student festival that had been run by The Knights of Pythias. I mention this because the building the Knights had constructed as their lodge is now The Western Front. Today the Vancouver Kiwanis Music Festival has over 10,000 annual entrants, with seperate sub-festivals for jazz, concert band, choral and finally individual classical music categories. It's a huge event funded by the Kiwanis club and it gets little or no recognition in the media. Good news doesn't sell newspapers. Maybe we need an adjudicator to club a baby seal or something.
I'm mainly involved with the jazz segment. I am the titular chair of the event, but really there is a small committee that does the bulk of the work. Brenda Sleightholme is the administrator and Ken Osterreicher and Michelle Workman are the teacher coordinators from Argyle and Sutherland respectively. John Sharp superbly handles the tech details. We work in conjunction with Cap College, where we get great support from their administration and faculty. We have feature performances by Nitecap, their vocal jazz group , and also from the A Band. Tom Lee Music is a corporate sponsor and each year they are very generous in supplying keyboards, guitar and bass amps, also Taye drum kits for our main stage, warmup rooms and clinic rooms. Coastal Jazz & Blues sponsors a noontime presentation by a prominent local musician, or someone they may have in town for one of their events.
One the main functions of my duties is to ensure that things run on time. If things start getting behind schedule, adjudicators can burn out, teachers get impatient and our costs may start to rise if room rentals and tech crew run into overtime.In this regard, we did very well, moreso today when we actually squeezed an extra band into the morning schedule. By moving one band on stage the moment the previous group vacated it, we were able to utilize the collective gaps in our 25-minute rotation. We were back to our original schedule remarkably fast. In all we had 11 vocal jazz groups, 40 stage bands and 1 combo entered in the festival, comprised of one elementary school and the rest either junior or senior high schoolers.
When I first got involved with Kiwanis in 1995, the festival was a fairly dry affair. The MC was retired high school principal (acutally very charming and funny at other times) who kept the youth firmly planted in their auditorium seats and well-shooshed. The adjudicators were more academics with music education credentials rather than working musicians. I became the MC the following year and the first thing I did was lighten up the atmosphere. Jazz is cool. Jazz is fun. It's full of self deprecating humour and practical jokes. Over the years I developed a repertoire jazz jokes, aimed at maligning as many different instruments as possible. "What's the difference between a chainsaw and a baritone sax? The exhaust." That sort of thing.
It's hard for some categories, like jazz singers, to find jokes that can be told in public to high school kids. I'm sure many of them know worse ones, but the teachers would flip out if I told them. There's too many trombone jokes. And then there's a definite lack of piano jokes, just a few. A couple of the best of those are in the unmentionable category, like the one that finishes off "Do you know there's a hole in your pants and your balls are hanging out?" "Know it? I wrote it!" Cam Ryga is a great one for walking by me as I am onstage and telling me the absolutely foulest joke, basically daring me to repeat it on mic. Anyways, I keep it relatively clean. Kids love to hate my jokes, then pester me for more. It keeps things rolling between schools and while the adjudicators are doing their thing.As well, I harangue them to get out and support live music, keep playing after high school, and basically to make music part of their lives.
On the whole, I'd have to say this year's edition was a success. The changes we have made in the past year worked out well. We always find aspects to tighten up and refine, and this year is no different.
It was the general concensus that the overall quality of all of the participants this year, even the beginner bands, has risen in comparison with previous years. We did not have any achingly bad groups. I've got to give the teachers all the credit. Despite mounting external pressures, they continue to improve the quality of music education. They bring kids who are willing to learn and the teachers themselves seemed to be soaking up the information presented by our facilitators. Frankly, it's hard not to spend time in a room with guys like Hugh Fraser and not feel their infectuous energy. And they in turn get a boost from working with young musicians.
We always put on an evening showcase performance. In the past it's been the likes of VEJI, the Brad Turner Quartet and the Hugh Fraser Quintet. This year it was the NADEN band from CFB Esquimault. The fact that the Canadian Navy has several excellent bands across the country is largely unknown in Vancouver. It's more remarkable because these guys play over 200 gigs a year. They are full-time working musicians. We had them perform two years ago and three of our adjudicators, Cam Ryga, Brad Turner and Hugh Fraser sat in for a few numbers and shot the band into the stratosphere, truly a memorable show. The put on a solid performance for us this past Monday evening, very mainstream and most capably played.
But there was no question what was the highlight of the festival for many of us, and certainly for me. It was the A Band's one-hour set Tuesday noontime. They opened and closed with Thad Jones Mel Lewis Band charts, already more contemporary than anything we had heard the previous evening, and included pieces by Dave Holland and Maria Schneider. It was very exciting and the overflowing crowd was extremely enthusiastic.
We always put on an evening showcase performance. In the past it's been the likes of VEJI, the Brad Turner Quartet and the Hugh Fraser Quintet. This year it was the NADEN band from CFB Esquimault. The fact that the Canadian Navy has several excellent bands across the country is largely unknown in Vancouver. It's more remarkable because these guys play over 200 gigs a year. They are full-time working musicians. We had them perform two years ago and three of our adjudicators, Cam Ryga, Brad Turner and Hugh Fraser sat in for a few numbers and shot the band into the stratosphere, truly a memorable show. The put on a solid performance for us this past Monday evening, very mainstream and most capably played.
But there was no question what was the highlight of the festival for many of us, and certainly for me. It was the A Band's one-hour set Tuesday noontime. They opened and closed with Thad Jones Mel Lewis Band charts, already more contemporary than anything we had heard the previous evening, and included pieces by Dave Holland and Maria Schneider. It was very exciting and the overflowing crowd was extremely enthusiastic.
And in that performance was one of those moments that keeps me involved in the festival year after year. They had a high school student sub in on one of the tenor sax chairs. Director Réjean Marois had the eminently good musical instincts to feature the two tenor players trading off solos over an extended time. For the third time in three years, we got to hear real excitement, what the real potential of a big band is, when it really gets going and then the soloists stand up and blow their asses off. This time it was Evan Arntzen and Eli Bennett matching each other phrase for phase, showing yet again that they both are the real deal. I don't know if they've ever played toe to toe before, but the two of them were clearly having a great time onstage together. It was thrilling to see and hear.
Evan and Eli light it up with the A Band
It was one of those performances that will leave an indelible mark on many who saw the show. I hope it really inspired the kids in the audience and judging from the raucous ovation at the end, it did. My one regret was that Stan Karp, mentor to both of these fine young musicians, wasn't there to see it.
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