Budding jazz musicians hone their craft at Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow

The Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival took over the University of Idaho campus in Moscow this week, with nearly every building bustling with young musicians.

These aspiring jazz musicians attend workshops with music educators and professionals to sharpen their skills at the annual celebration that brings together students as young as sixth grade.

The 58th annual festival brought more than 2,200 of them from places like Bismarck, North Dakota, to Port Moody, British Columbia.

What started as a one-day event in 1967 with only a dozen student groups and a guest artist has now grown into a three-day spectacle with multiple concerts featuring different jazz groups.

“I am very glad we were able to go again. There were at least 10 years when Shadle didn’t go to Lionel Hampton, so it’s an honor to be able to go back,” said Ivy Fitzgerald, a trombone player from Shadle Park High School.

Above all, the festival is about the students. Many in attendance this year were from Spokane-area schools.

Valin Gabriel, a junior at Mead High School, was either performing or accompanying in every single Mead performance of the day. Gabriel had two solo performances for trumpet and piano.

“It’s a representation of where I am at musically; it shows the best of what I can bring to the table. I am trying to showcase that in front of people who know what they’re doing,” Gabriel said, following his second solo performance.

Immediately after a performance, an adjudicator will spend 10-15 minutes giving direct feedback on the students’ performances and even run through a few notes and bars that could be improved in upcoming shows.

Every room has a rotating mixture of adjudicators – university professors or performers – to give students a diverse take on music.

During Shadle Park’s Jazz Ensemble, some 25 students were participating in the big band category.

Kamrynn Archer, a trombone player, says they left the school at around 6:30 a.m. and planned to stay late into the night to listen to the final concerts and await the awards ceremony.

“I think the biggest difference between this festival and others is that you can listen to higher or lower division performances and go to workshops if you’re not performing; at others, you just have to sit and listen to other performances the whole time,” said Corey Hodges, a junior from Shadle Park.

The festival is open to any school that wants to sign up for any of the categories. With the large number of participants, each category is broken into three divisions, depending on the size of the school you’re coming from.

“This is a little more pressure on them to do some academic study on it, because soloing in the jazz form is not just reading the music on the page; you have to know the language of it,” said Rob Lewis, Mead High School’s band director.

Each room is dedicated to a category and division, and at the end of the festival, a winner and runner-up from each room will be announced at an awards ceremony. The performers are scored in several categories: improvisation, time, intonation, articulation and more.

Each performance is filmed, so the judges can return to the clip and review their scoring before deciding on a winner.

Scholarships are also awarded by Avista at the end of the festival for two outstanding vocal soloists and several instrumental soloists to go towards a degree at the University of Idaho. The panel of judges nominates students to perform during the final concert in a combination jazz performance. The winner can earn up to $1,500 with the runner-up being awarded $1,000.

“It’s cool to have Spokane represented; there are a lot of people who come to this festival,” Gabriel said. “Coming here from Spokane and doing well kind of shows that there’s life in Spokane, which no one really knows about.”