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August 22, 2003/Av 24 5763, Vol. 55, No. 52
Hot notes in cool climes
RAEANNE MARSH
Special to Jewish News
This time of year, Phoenicians typically jump at any opportunity to leave the Valley of the Sun. Prescott, whose cool pines are only a short hop north on I-17, is turning out to be "the place to be" this summer with exceptional music festivals practically back to back. This weekend it's the Prescott Jazz Summit and next weekend there's the Red Rocks Music Festival.
The Prescott Jazz Summit (Aug. 22-24) is the brainchild of Clare Willey, long-time Prescott musician and music businessman. International jazz musician Mike Vax, discovering both Prescott and Willey together five years ago and impressed with both, has brought Willey's vision to life. A big name in his own right, Vax brings together for this third annual Summit such international jazz legends as Terry Gibbs, Lennie Niehaus and Jack Petersen along with Arizona jazz favorites Margo Reed, Mel Zelnick, Barb Catlin and Armand Boatman.
Calling jazz "America's true art form," Vax lauds the dedication of everyone involved in the Prescott Jazz Summit to perpetuating that art and creating enthusiasm for great jazz music. In the spirit of a jazz party, the "all stars," as Vax refers to his illustrious cast of musicians, will perform with each other in various configurations for the different concerts throughout the weekend.
A free concert on Prescott's Courthouse Square (at the corner of Montezuma and Gurley streets) kicks off the weekend at noon Friday, featuring local musicians. The "all stars" will be prominently in attendance at Friday night's "Meet the Musicians Dinner" at the Hassayampa Inn. Guests for the dinner will not only mingle with Gibbs, Niehaus, Roy Wiegand, Gary Hobbs, and the other artists but will enjoy their camaraderie as they roast each other and share stories of their days on the road.
All concerts will open with a local youth band - Chino Valley High School Ensemble under the direction of Josh Kervin on Friday night; Prescott High School Jazz Ensemble under the direction of Dan Bradstreet on Saturday night; and Sedona Jazz on the Rocks Youth Band under the direction of Tim Mattson on Sunday.
The weekend is a series of highlights. Steve Annibale, widely traveled local trumpet player and educator who has had the honor of performing for President George Bush, will be featured Friday night along with singer Danny Anderson. The performance will take place at Prescott's Historic Elks Theater.
Saturday night, at the Ruth Street Theater, Terry Gibbs will reprise his acclaimed Tribute to Lionel Hampton. Gibbs, in his seventh decade of performing and considered one of the greatest vibes players in the history of jazz, is both an international jazz legend and a Jewish jazz legend.
Sunday morning's Jazz Brunch at the Hassayampa Inn will feature a guitar duet with Jack Petersen on steel guitar and Brian LaChance on acoustic. Petersen, who recently retired to Prescott, is considered the dean of guitar playing, according to Vax, who is excited about presenting the jazz guitar duet.
The closing concert will be a matinee on Sunday at the Glassford Hill Middle School Theater. Performers will include Margo Reed, who has been voted the top jazz singer in Phoenix, and Armand Boatman, another Arizona favorite.
Festival Director Vax has a double agenda for the Prescott Jazz Summit. Bringing "the best of jazz music to northern Arizona" for the delight of audiences is only half of the vision. The other half is to support the music programs in the local schools, raising funds for local school music departments, jazz camp scholarships, and the Clare Willey Memorial Scholarship Fund.
A very special educational opportunity is included in the Summit program. The extraordinary talent gathered for the weekend's performances will also present clinics, workshops and panel discussions on Saturday afternoon, for five full hours at Prescott High School.Thanks to grants from both the Margaret T. Morris and the J. W. Keickhefer Foundations, these sessions are open and free to all children in grammar school through college. Adults may also attend, for a minimal charge of $10.
This aspect of the weekend's program is very important to Vax, who spends 200 days on the road each year doing workshops, master classes, concert performances and jazz festivals. Over the past 30 years, he has performed workshops in more than 1,500 schools. Now leading several bands of his own - the Mike Vax Jazz Orchestra, the Mike Vax Big Band (featuring alumni of the Stan Kenton Orchestra), the Great American Jazz Band, TRPTS, and the Mike Vax Quintet and Sextet - Vax recalls the first jazz combo he ever played in. "It was at a Jewish Community Center in Oakland (Calif.) when I was about 9 or 10 years old," he says. Many of the members of that combo, he adds, went on to become top musicians in the Bay Area.
To describe the collective background of this year's Prescott Jazz Summit cast of musicians would be to name some of the biggest names in the history of jazz - Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Dorsey, New Orleans' Dukes of Dixieland and Stan Getz. Individual anecdotes stand out as well, such as Gibbs, who began his professional music career as a youth performing at bar mitzvah receptions and who credits his father, an accomplished violinist and band leader, with instilling in him an appreciation for Jewish music. Gibbs has been a musical innovator since the bebop days of the '40s, and left Tommy Dorsey's big band after one night because he found swing tame and unchallenging.
Prescott Jazz Summit shares several coincidences with the Red Rocks Music Festival that follows it: time, place and the Jewish background of prime performers. Most important is the remarkably high caliber of musicians involved.
The Red Rocks Music Festival (Aug. 28-31), which splits its venues between Prescott and nearby Sedona, presents a diverse repertoire of world-class string orchestra and chamber music. The vision of founder and executive director Moshe Bukshpan is "to grow the festival into a major cultural event in Northern Arizona....and become a cultural magnet for music lovers and attract talented musicians from across the world."
Bukshpan and his co-founder, internationally acclaimed Shlomo Mintz, studied with Isaac Stern and are celebrated violinists in their own right. As a youth in Israel, Bukshpan played in the Israeli Youth Orchestra, as did two other of this year's Festival headliners: David Ehrlich, former first violinist with the Audubon String Quartet, and Ohad Bar-David, cellist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. In fact, Bukshpan was in the orchestra together with each, but at different times.
The other principal musicians at this year's second festival are Elmira Darvarova, who performs with the Metropolitan Opera New York and is their first woman concertmaster, and Peter Rosato, principal viola with The Phoenix Symphony.
Bukshpan has organized a pre-Festival performance on Aug. 27 for the students at The King David School in Phoenix. And a Festival Sampler - sort of a performance teaser - is open to the public Thursday, Aug. 28, at Church of the Beatitudes in Phoenix. Prices for performances vary.
For more information on Prescott Jazz Summit, call 928-771-1268 or e-mail Mike Vax at Vaxtrpts@aol.com.
Further information on the Red Rocks Music Festival is available on its Web site, www.redrocksmusicfestival.com.
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