RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany — When the final school bell rang at Ramstein High School on Tuesday afternoon and kids swarmed toward the exits, the eight students exercising their vocal chords in the music room didn’t budge.
Their day wouldn’t end for about two more hours.
On the second day of the DODDS-Europe Honor Jazz Seminar, there was still much tweaking to be done before Thursday evening’s concert in Landstuhl, Germany, the culminating event.
The annual workshop aims to bring together the most talented student musicians in Department of Defense Dependents Schools-Europe and give them the opportunity “to show their chops and play with other students from other schools,” said Hope Matthews, DODDS-Europe fine arts coordinator.
Why jazz?
“It’s the original American art form,” she said. “We think that ... as part of our heritage, it’s really important to reinforce the learning of jazz.”
This year, 190 students from throughout Europe tried out, a process that involves a blind audition and the submission of an instrumental or vocal recording. Students can try out for both categories and for more than one instrument, though instrumentalists are selected for only one instrument.
Thirty-three students made the final cut, most composing the band.
Ivy Griffin, a senior trumpet player from Kaiserslautern, Germany, was back for her third year.
“It’s just exciting to be around people that share the same passion for music, and they’re all so very talented,” she said. “I mean, at lunch, everyone was just jamming, and some of them, that wasn’t even the instrument they were” picked for. “It’s really exciting to have that energy.”
Vicenza, Italy, senior Diego Nacionales was selected for bass guitar, but the first-time seminar attendee clearly had talent on the keyboard, which he displayed in one of those spontaneous jam sessions Griffin mentioned.
Nacionales casually revealed he plays six or seven instruments, from the trombone to the ukulele.
“Piano is my favorite,” he said. “I tried out for that, but I didn’t feel right doing all the jazz progressions, so I also tried out for the bass guitar.”
Vicenza has a jazz band, so Nacionales has played jazz before, “but not at this caliber,” he said.
Marcelus Harris, a Kaiserslautern senior who’s one of two tenors in the vocal ensemble, said he’s learned a lot about jazz in just two days.
“I hadn’t really sung that much jazz before,” he said. “I’m seeing all the ways you can do different stuff, how fun it is, how laid back it can be.”
In four short days, the students have to master a range of big band tunes from the likes of George and Ira Gershwin, Bernie Miller, Thad Jones and Charles Calhoun, while the vocalists have five songs to master.
The teenagers are unabashedly enthusiastic about the music genre.
“Oh, man, I love jazz music,” said Ramstein junior Emanuel DeGuzman, a baritone saxophonist who is participating in the jazz seminar for a second time.
He was introduced to jazz through Ramstein’s jazz program. “I just wanted to move up in band and get better,” he said.
The students are supposed to know the material before the seminar, which focuses on bringing the notes on the page to life.
Darmon Meader, a vocalist and instrumentalist with the jazz quartet New York Voices, is this year’s seminar clinician.
The challenge of playing jazz, he said, “has to do with stylistically understanding how to lift it off the page and actually make it swing, make it dance, make it do whatever it’s supposed to do that makes it have that life that we all love when we hear really good jazz.” Meader said he gladly agreed to come back for a second year to lead the seminar.
“We remember the important teachers we had when we were the age of these students and how those teachers are really the reason why we decided to go into music,” he said of himself and fellow New York Voices members.
“We know that not all of these students are going to go on and have careers in music ... but we know how important it is for music to help shape them as well-rounded people.”