| In the summer of 2010, the 1990 Institute through its Children, Art and the Environment Program, with the guidance of William Ming Sing Lee, launched its first jazz music program (Jasmine Jazz: Music in the Environment) in Beijing , China to resounding success. Truly an expedition of discovery, Project Director Margaret Booker and Music Director Jon Jang, set out on a six-day journey to the enthusiastic CNCC, the China National Children’s Center, to see if a jazz music program was a viable project. The visit, first designed as an audition trip for interested high school students, turned into an intensive improvisation course for a wide range of instrumentalists—saxophones, trumpet, cello, flute, drums, and bass. Students came from schools all over Beijing, the Xicheng District Youth Palace plus two MIDI school teachers. Jon Jang, the renowned composer/pianist led the group through his own jazz compositions based on Chinese folk songs, so important to the building of modern China as part of the folk literature movement in 1918 at National Beijing University (Beida), as well as selections from the standard jazz repertoire by John Coltrane and Miles Davis. The four day workshop culminated in a public performance at the CNCC which everyone, students and audience enjoyed. Jazz with its emphasis on improvisation, innovation and collaboration proved to be the perfect medium to develop leadership skills and a strong sense of ensemble.
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Currently Margaret Booker and Jon Jang are working on a two-week residency at the CNCC in August which would include support and participation from four Chinese groups—the China National Children’s Center, the All China Women’s Federation, the Xicheng District Youth Palace and the RDFZ High School. The 2011 program entitled “Saxophone Choir with Pianos” would include many more students, including returnees from this year’s program. Remy and Pascal LeBoeuf, recent graduates of the Manhattan School of Music from Santa Cruz and prodigy performers at the Monterey Jazz Festival this past September are going with us to work with the expanded group of students.
1990’s Jasmine Jazz Project seeks to develop a leadership program for kids using the innovative dialogue of jazz to create bi-national communication and looks to future global harmony. As Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at New York’s Lincoln Center puts it: “When a group of people working together trust that all are concerned for the common good, then they continue to be in sync no matter what happens. That is swing. It’s the feeling that our way is more important than my way…it is the core that makes us all want to work together.” (USA TODAY, “Hot corporations know how to swing,” 1/14/2007).
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Rehearsal at the CNCC |
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3 girl sax players--Hu Sichun. Yang Jiayi, Ma Kexin (left to right) |
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Jon Jang (Music Director Pianist/composer), Zhang Dazhi (CNCC Project Coordinator) |
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At the Youth Palace, Xicheng District, Beijing-- Director of the Xicheng District Youth Palace Feng Chiang, Mr. Feng's assistant, 1990 Jazz Project Director Margaret Booker, Music Director Jon Jang, CNCC Project Coordinator Zhang Dazhi (left to right) |
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