South Delta Jazz Festival and Jazz Workshop finishes seventh year
Posted on | July 16, 2010 | 1 Comment
by Jared Burrows
I’m finally cooling down, both literally and figuratively, after a very intense week of making music and teaching at the South Delta Jazz Workshop and Jazz Festival. The Workshop is a summer jazz camp with thirty-five students, six full-time faculty members, and two TAs. The Festival comprises seven concerts during the week of the workshop and the concerts feature faculty musicians and guest artists. This year was our seventh annual event. My friend, Stephen Robb, and I started this event back in 2003 with the idea of providing ourselves with some summer teaching work and a chance to get together and play music with our friends. Since then it has grown to be the most significant arts event in Delta. 
The workshop takes place at Delta Community Music School which is situated in a very cool old heritage house in the Ladner Village. This year we held concerts at Ladner Community Centre, Diefenbaker Park, Kinsmen House, All Saints Anglican Church and our grand finale student show at the Delta Hospital grounds. The weather cooperated beautifully once again and community support and attendance at concerts was better than ever.
As usual, our jazz jam at Petra’s Arts Café was a great success, with kids and adults from the Workshop getting up to play tunes with faculty and musicians from the community. 
It is truly magical to see people, many of whom just learned what a blues is that very morning, get up and play a few choruses with a band they haven’t met before. Some of our more advanced students organized some surprise tunes and personnel combinations including a massive ten-saxophone jam on “The Chicken”. Our genial host, Petra Tetrault, kept the lemonade flowing and made all the musicians and listeners feel right at home as always.
A really wonderful addition to the workshop this year was the Infinitus String Trio. Infinitus is a professional group with an interest in playing jazz. They signed on as students (some of the best students I have ever worked with!) but as we got to know them during the week it became apparent that we needed to get them involved with the faculty concerts. Our bass faculty member, Rob Kohler, quickly wrote some arrangements for his noon-hour show on July 8 and the string trio was featured with various combinations of saxophone, guitar and rhythm section. Look out for the Infinitus Trio. These guys can play anything with gorgeous sound and great time and I’m definitely planning to collaborate with them in the near future. 
Here’s a candid shot of the Infinitus String trio (John Littlejohn, Alex and Anthony Cheung) with faculty members Rob Kohler (bass), Len Aruliah (sax), Stan Taylor (drums) and on of our TAs, Chris Peterson (guitar).
The next day brought more musical delights in the form of a visit from my good friend, Alan Matheson. Alan has been a guest artist and teacher at the Workshop and Festival before, but it has been a couple of years since the last time. As always, Alan brought in a fantastic book of original tunes and standards all cunningly arranged for cornet, alto, trombone and rhythm section. The faculty band had a great time playing these arrangements and listening to Al’s beautiful cornet and flugelhorn playing. Alan is a great musician and a true gentleman in every sense of the word.
Friday night featured theLen Aruliah Quartet in concert at All Saints Anglican Church with Stan Taylor on drums, Rob Kohler on bass and yours truly on guitar. Len is a wonderful saxophonist who lived in Vancouver for a while in the 1980s and early 1990s, but has been based in London for a long while now. We presented two sets of Len’s original music, plus a few of my tunes and one each from the books of Kenny Wheeler and Dave Holland. I had a great time playing this show and the audience gave us a standing ovation. The church turned out to be a great venue for listening and playing and we’ll surely be presenting more shows there in the future.
Saturday afternoon was our grand finale concert. This is the moment for student combos to present the material they work on during the week at a big outdoor show and picnic at the Delta Hospital grounds. Residents from long-term care centre are brought out in their wheelchairs and get to groove along with all the parents and friends and folks from the community. The students played wonderfully as always. The highlight for me had to be our youngest combo of 12- and 13-year old kids playing a latin version of Justin Bieber’s “Baby” in a set with Mr. PC, Sonny Moon for Two, and C Jam Blues. I overheard a very elderly lady in a wheelchair say “I like that Baby song! Why don’t they play that again?”.
Here’s a shot of our advanced students playing at Diefenbaker Park in Tsawwassen.
After seven years of doing this, one of the most satisfying things for me is seeing the audience for jazz grow in this little suburban community and building a family of ‘jazz people’. I have been doing this long enough now that most people think I live in Ladner rather than East Van and indeed, in many ways I feel like a Ladner native. Folks like Willie Germann (our honourary patron saint), Roland Selby, Don Burkett, Bob Miller, Betty Tanney and so many others come back as students and audience members year after year and make me and our teachers and musicians feel so welcome. We have watched kids who started with us as 7th graders go on and graduate from high school. Some go on to study music in college and some don’t, but all are lifelong jazz fans. The adult students really look forward to taking a week off work to make music. Many of our faculty members come back year after year and musical relationships grow and deepen. At the end of each year I feel so exhausted from the organizing, promoting, recruiting, playing and teaching that I often wonder aloud whether there will be another year. In the end it is this community of music lovers that keeps making it happen. Many thanks to all the students, faculty, and audience members who support this event!
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July 17th, 2010 @ 11:48 pm
Thanks for the report about the great stuff you’re doing there Jared, glad to hear it worked out so well this year! .. N