Summer Jazz Workshop offers more for everyone

Students of all ages enrolled in UNC’s Summer Jazz Workshop kicked off a week full of classes on music theory, improvisation and all that jazz on Monday.

Students from all over the state have flocked to Chapel Hill for the summer program since it began in 2011.

Rising freshman can opt to receive college credit for their work over the week, but the program also offers a Community Summer Jazz Workshop to encourage community participation and continuing education.

Professor Jim Ketch, director of jazz studies at UNC, has donated his time to the camp since the program’s inception. For the distinguished trumpeter, every performance is an outlet to express himself musically.

“Jazz is among the most honest of art forms,” Ketch said. “You constantly seek to refine your language and creative impulses so that when you perform you are truly playing you, your ideas, your feelings, your emotions, your experiences.”

Ketch is one of over a dozen musicians that will serve as coaches this week. The workshop offers students a fully rounded jazz experience; starting with this year’s jazz workshop, in addition to professors who specialize in instruments from the piano to the saxophone, professors instruct on small groups, jazz history and music journalism.

UNC professor Juan Alamo, who was born in Puerto Rico and has performed all over the world, is returning as an instructor at the camp after volunteering his talents for the first time last year.

“I think the number one reason I teach, more than anything else, is because I’m given the opportunity to share my passion and whatever knowledge I have about the music I teach with my students,” Alamo said.

“And having been born in Puerto Rico, music gives me a perfect platform to share my culture and my heritage.”

Many of the instructors teaching this week are UNC faculty, but the workshop also features two guest performers from the Dominican Republic and musicians from other universities.

Alamo and Ketch credited their attraction to jazz to the deeply emotional nature of the music, the reason Alamo thinks jazz has universal appeal.

“It doesn’t matter where you were born. You’re going to be touched by this music — sadness, happiness, everything that you can express,” he said.

“And there’s a certain freedom that all human beings pursue — when you improvise, you feel like you are free.”

Ryan Raven has been a counselor and instructor since the workshop began when he was still an undergraduate at Carolina.

Raven has taught in the program every summer since then, continuing through his graduation in 2012. Though he’s now on the opposite side of the student-teacher dynamic, Raven said the transition was easy.

“The attitude that I come to the camp with is that everyone is here to learn, and I’m going to be a student,” Raven said. “The students teach us and the teachers teach the students. Everybody is here to learn, faculty included.”

The fruits of this instruction will be on display and free for the public on Friday evening.

According to Ketch, concerts like these are a true treat. He said it best when he said it simply:

“Jazz is a gift that I feel the world benefits from.”

arts@dailytarheel.com