DODDS jazz seminar takes student musicians to a new level

By Jennifer H. Svan
Stars and Stripes, Published: January 15, 2014
RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany — Kris-Tyan Streeter doesn’t recall precisely how long he’s played the trombone.

“I think this is my fourth year. I think I’ve been doing it for three, but it might be two. I’m not sure,” he said.

The Rota High School senior ended up playing it because his small school band needed more trombone players. “Taught myself,” he said.

Streeter is glad he did. He’s one of five trombonists selected to participate in this week’s Department of Defense Dependents’ Schools-Europe annual jazz seminar.

More than 100 students in DODDS-Europe auditioned for the 33 spots in the program’s big band and small vocal ensemble, said DODDS-Europe fine arts coordinator Hope Matthews.

“Jazz is the premier American art form” she said. “It’s part of a well-rounded musical repertoire.”

The students began rehearsing Sunday for a series of three performances in the Kaiserslautern area beginning Thursday evening.

The music has “been challenging,” Alex Mench, 15, a Kaiserslautern High School sophomore trombonist, said Tuesday. “But I can feel myself getting it. You can see that it’s getting better. You can hear the improvements that everyone is making.”

Many, like Mench, come from larger schools in DODDS-Europe with an actual jazz band or jazz seminar class, such as Kaiserslautern, Ramstein and Patch high schools. But a few are like Streeter, from schools with no jazz programs or very small ones.

“We lost all our saxophones. (We have) one other trombone, a trumpet; we’ve got a tuba,” Streeter said, describing Rota’s “zero-hour” jazz class, which meets an hour before school starts. The auditions for the DODDS-Europe jazz seminar are blind, so the committee that makes the final selections doesn’t know from which schools the students come, Matthews said.

“This is an opportunity for kids that don’t get to play jazz so much to have an opportunity to come and participate in this,” she said. For students who take jazz at school, “this takes them to a new level,” Matthews said. “They get to experience things that they would not do in a normal classroom.”
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