Fondazione Siena Jazz Summer Workshop
Siena, Italy - July 24-August 7, 2013
While there are those who continue to suggest that the death knell for jazz has been sounded—and loudly—they're clearly not looking at the vast number of young musicians studying the music, both privately and, increasingly, in university programs. It's hard to imagine that only fifty years ago there were no university jazz programs; in fact, most schools that offered music studies steadfastly resisted adding jazz to their curriculum because it was not the "serious music" that so defined their classical programs.
How things have changed. It would be a significant task to empirically quantify the number of universities now offering jazz programs around the world, but with this proliferation of jazz studies, a new challenge has emerged: how to provide students with the necessary technical tools to play the music, while engendering the creative spark that's so necessary in a music that, for the most part, is predicated on interaction and interplay. Jazz, more than many other genres, is a truly social music, but if the emphasis is on learning all of its building blocks without taking its symbiotic nature into account, then the result is a gaggle of musicians emerging with all the necessary tools but no experience using them to actually create.
Fortunately, there are now world-renowned short-term programs like the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, nestled in the Rocky Mountains in Canada, and more complete degree programs like those offered at universities like the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, in Trondheim, Norway—which has absorbed the heralded Trondheim Conservatory—that are going beyond the classic jazz repertoire and its attendant techniques, to help aspiring musicians learn how to speak with their own voices.
But none of them has the kind of organic history that created the Fondazione Siena Jazz, which only last year became accredited to offer a Bachelor's Degree in music, but which has been training working jazz musicians for over 35 years, offering a more extensive winter program and a two- week Summer Workshop that has become known the world over for its ability to so efficiently leverage the jazz stars of today to mentor the aspiring jazz legends of tomorrow.
And it couldn't be in a more beautiful location than Siena, Italy. A town of about 40,000 people (add 50% more when the Siena University is in session), it's broken up into 17 neighborhoods that, even to this day, remain both remarkably competitive—the annual Palio di Siena, an annual horse race taking place in the Piazza del Campo, being so contentious that fights can literally break out between neighborhoods—and incredibly self-supporting and encouraging.
Each neighborhood has its own social club, a garden where people can get together for meals and entertainment, engendering the kind of close personal connections that are increasingly rare in larger cities around the world.
Read more: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=45157#.Ug_5AxbhEhQ
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