MHCC to host local jazz competition

Daniel Davey, MHCC Jazz Director rehearsing with the MHCC Jazz Ensemble for the event on Saturday. Photo by Megan Phelps

Daniel Davey, MHCC Jazz Director rehearsing with the MHCC Jazz Ensemble for the event on Saturday. Photo by Megan Phelps

All day Saturday, from 9 a.m. to roughly 6 p.m., the Mt. Hood campus will be jumping with 45 jazz ensembles from high school and middle schools from the surrounding region, performing in the Northwest Jazz Band Festival.

These bands are classified into six different divisions, and are all competing in the name of jazz. The group that wins the highest score will be invited to perform at the Cathedral Jazz Festival, a professional jazz festival organized by the Jazz Society of Oregon and held July 14-16 in North Portland.

Both events are free and open to the public.

The organizer of the Mt. Hood festival for a second straight year is none other than Daniel Davey, the MHCC jazz director. This year he has invited six talented individuals to host workshops here for students.

Workshops in the Jazz Café include Tim Gilson, teaching Constructing Bass Lines; Collin Wilson, leading a Saxophone Clinic; Dan Balmer, teaching Keep It Simple: Simple solo ideas to make you sound great!; and Ben Medler, teaching Rhythm Section Tips for Big Band.

Two more workshops feature Ryan Meagher, who will lead “Brazilian Beat: A Clinic in the Rhythms and Culture of Brazilian Music,” in Room 2104, and Clay Ciberson, who will head a Jazz Piano Clinic in Room 2103, a piano lab.

Davey’s initial goal for the event was to create the environment that was inspirational for him as a student, he said. He began his jazz musical journey in sixth grade when the high school band teacher invited him to play piano for the jazz ensemble.

From this, Davey fell in love with jazz. “Having that opportunity opened up to me as a sixth-grader kind of fueled a passion that I didn’t even know I had.”

From there, he studied at the Berkley College of Music, in Boston. He savored the high-energy jazz atmosphere there, he said.

“When I was in high school we used to go to the Berkley Jazz festival. That was the biggest one on the east coast,” he said. “We could see college bands, Berkley bands performing, faculty bands, go to workshops to learn about how to play jazz.

“You were just hit over the head with all of this inspirational cool stuff. As a student that was amazing, so that’s what I’m trying to create here for this festival, is that inspirational environment for students that they’re just like ‘Oh my god, I love music!’ ” he said.

Plans for next year are already in the works. Davey has been in contact with PDX Jazz Festival leaders and Susie Jones, the chair for the MHCC District board of directors, who was the last president of the board for the now-dormant Mt. Hood Festival of Jazz. He said he hopes to bring together the elements of the legendary Festival of Jazz as well as the educational element of the current middle and high school competition.

Without a doubt, the event on Saturday will reach prospective students for the music program at Mt. Hood, Davey said.

The Mt. Hood Jazz Ensemble will play from 12:30 to 1 p.m. in the College Theatre, and will open for the faculty performance with guest artist, noted trumpet player Dominick Farinacci.

Farinacci is the Global Ambassador to Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. He personally started at a community college in Cleveland before he transferred to Julliard for serious music studies. He also will host a workshop after he plays with the Mt. Hood ensemble.

A full schedule of Saturday’s festival is available online at danieldavey.net/schedule. More information about the event as a whole can be found at www.danieldavey.net/nwjbf.

The event is free and open to the public.

There are bound to be over a thousand students and faculty alone coming to the Jazz event. Visitors should keep in mind there will also be the Gresham Saturday Market in Parking lot “W,” in the northwest corner near Northeast Kane Drive and Southeast Stark Street.

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