Community Notebook > Our Community, Our News
Jazz for all Ages: Hudson Valley Youth Jazz Orchestra
by Anne Pyburn; photos by Beth Blis

For an aspiring jazz musician, finding the Hudson Valley Youth Jazz Orchestra (hvyjo) is a little like Harry Potter’s discovery of Hogwarts’ School of Wizardry. “I was living through cds,” says 17-year-old saxophonist Sam Ryder of Cornwall. “There was really nobody around me I could share this with. Now, it’s like I’ve found home.”

The hvyjo is the brainchild of Kingston High School musical director Robert Shaut, who’d observed that in youth jazz competitions the odds were stacked in favor of schools with a specific performing arts focus. “There are maybe two or three kids in any given district with the interest and talent levels that competition demands,” observes the band’s managing director, Richard Wixom. “Pull those kids together, and you get magic.” Eighteen of the best of the best—“a music director’s dream, these kids,” says Wixom—have paid $150 tuition and pledged alternate Sundays to rehearsal.

The group’s current goal is Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington contest, sponsored by Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Fifteen bands will be selected from over 1,000 entrants to share the showcase, which takes place in May. “That would be the absolute coolest thing ever,” says Ryder.

At a recent rehearsal at the Hurley Reformed Church, the room initially resembles a discordant beehive as students grouped into trios and quartets run through tunes or perfect riffs. Stand close enough to any given subgroup, though, and discordance disappears—your body starts to move despite itself. There’s a focus among these teens that’s far too intense to be ruffled by the presence of strangers. Parents sit with needlework and newspapers, but when Shaut draws all 18 together to run through a number, conversation stops and the room fills with the seductive, ample sounds of Duke Ellington’s I’ve Just Seen Her. Squint a little and you can almost see Bogey and Bacall swaying together in a corner. The music is rich and nuanced. The musicians—none of whom were even close to being born when it was written—seem to draw it out of their very souls, perhaps out of some innate archetypal sense granted only to the few. Ryder’s solo is pure passion.

The 18 musicians in the hvyjo represent several Hudson Valley high schools: six from Kingston, two each from Niskayuna High and Newburgh Free Academy, and one each from Cornwall, FDR High in Hyde Park, Goshen, Highland, New Paltz, Rondout, Onteora, and Washingtonville. “These kids are just amazingly dedicated, and it’s not as if this is the only thing in their lives,” says parent Ron Chiasson, whose son Matt, a ninth grader, plays alto sax. “He could be anything he wants, and he chooses this…or maybe, as one of the kids said to me, with the music you don’t choose it. It chooses you.”

The band begins another number; this time, Shaut isn’t quite satisfied yet and stops them. “Do it again from two bars before F, and really listen for the nuance,” he says. During a break, he explains that a scheduling conflict will mean that they have to rehearse on Martin Luther King Day. No groans about giving up a free afternoon; clearly, this is Priority One.

Certainly that’s true of Ryder. I call him and can hear the sax in the background when his mom answers the phone. As adults who heard his solo were remarking at the rehearsal, this is a boy who’s found his path. “I had a middle school music teacher who played sax. I’d been studying trumpet, but the sax just grabbed me and wouldn’t let go,” he says. “I’m going to audition for the Manhattan School of Music. I know arts careers are tough, but I know I’ll be doing something I can stand to be doing for the rest of my life. That’s what matters.”

Members of hvyjo are attracted largely through word of mouth, recommended by various local music directors or brought in by older students who know of a promising musician a year or two younger. Shaut and Wixom would like to raise the group’s profile a little, both to attract even more talent and to let the Hudson Valley enjoy the stellar talents of its young Dream Team. To that end, several appearances on area radio stations are scheduled for late January. On Sunday, February 2, there’s an opportunity to hear them live, as they join with three Kingston High jazz ensembles—also aiming for Lincoln Center—to present an afternoon of classic American jazz—that event will take place at the Miller School in Lake Katrine at 2pm. There will also be a radio performance on WAMC-FM (90.3 Albany/90.9 Kingston) on Wednesday February 5, from 8-10pm. The hvyjo will be the special guests of the Joey Thomas Big Band. The group will play their three audition pieces from the Ellington competition plus a vocal number.

Later in February, the band will record its audition tape and cross its collective fingers—at least when those fingers aren’t busy making music, which is rare. “Ten of the 15 winners will be groups who’ve never won before,” says Wixom. “If these guys keep growing the way they are, they should have an excellent shot.”

For more information about the Hudson Valley Youth Jazz Orchestra,
call Richard Wixom at 336-5290.