Rio Americano High School performs dream date with jazz greats including Wynton Marsalis
The latest edition of Rio Americano High School’s AM Jazz Ensemble is just three weeks old but on Sunday they were preparing for the biggest moment of their young musical lives.
The world-renowned Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra on a rare Sunday off between performances — a two-night engagement last week at the Hollywood Bowl and shows in the Bay Area and Reno — spent the afternoon with the students in workshop and in an open rehearsal before a special night show.
It would be a dream day for the young band, capped by a dream gig that night at the Arden Arcade campus opening for the celebrated orchestra featuring Wynton Marsalis, the trumpet giant, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, educator and face of jazz for a generation.
“It’s a real honor that they’re coming here. It’s a great experience to rub elbows with the giants,” said Josh Murray, the AM ensemble’s director, now closing in on 25 years at the helm. “I’ve been doing this a long time. This is way up there.”
Murray’s young musicians understood and relished the moment, one made more special after a year and memories surrendered to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It gave us this tremendous motivation after a year of having not much to look forward to,” said pianist Salome Ospina, one of the ensemble’s new members. “I’m just really grateful to be a part of this.”
On Sunday afternoon, the ensemble rehearsed compositions they would perform ahead of the orchestra’s set during the evening, penned by two of the genre’s most revered figures: the pioneering pianist Mary Lou Williams; and the legendary bassist and composer Charles Mingus, fine-tuning the charts under the approving eyes and ears of Jazz at Lincoln Center trombonist-composer-arranger Chris Crenshaw and drummer Obed Calvaire.
“Playing, like the way they played it — it serves a legacy in a way,” said senior Anna Wilson, the ensemble’s baritone saxophonist. “It continues the memory of those great players.”
That has been Jazz at Lincoln Center’s goal since its founding in 1987. The 15-member ensemble is made up of some of the music’s finest musicians and composers working today.
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s educational mission is equally as important, providing jazz curriculum to more than 5,000 high schools through its Essentially Elllington program while promoting and cultivating the music through its annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival in New York. The competition is the largest country for high school jazz bands and features the works of Duke Ellington.
Eleven times Rio Americano has performed in the competition. The banners hang on a wall of Rio’s rehearsal space, opposite the multicolored flags of the countries where the bands of past years played. Six of Rio’s number were honored among the festival’s top instrumentalists at last year’s festival at the vaunted center, including four now playing in this year’s ensemble.
The 18-member Rio ensemble greeted Crenshaw and Calvaire with the brassy bounce of Williams’ “Roll ‘Em,” her classic 1937 composition for Benny Goodman, clarinetist Paloma Cobb Silva’s singing solo work standing out.
“That’s what you come up with at three weeks?” an impressed Crenshaw asked. “That was beautiful. Keep working on that, but keep your identity together. With Mary Lou Williams, keep that steady beat, that steady pulse, then everything’s going to jump off.”
For the next 90 minutes, Crenshaw at the baton, Calvaire working closely with the rhythm section, dissected the tunes with the young musicians. They coached them on the songs’ tempo and tone, and exhorted a soloist on one soaring passage (“When you get to that high concert A-flat, you’ve got to sing it,” Crenshaw told trumpeter Brady Kerr. “You’ve got to establish yourself on lead trumpet.”).
Calvaire briefly sat behind the drums to guide drummer Zachary Long through the sumptuous Mingus ballad, “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love.” For Long, a quick study, and the band, the payoff was immediate; Long injecting new drama with a roll of his floor tom and a wash of cymbals to sign the horns’ dramatic entrance.
“It was a different way of playing drums. He showed me how to add more to make it feel better. It made the horns sound better right away,” Long said after the afternoon session.
The Rio band earned the guest appearance. The touring group knows the band well, penciling in the date months in advance of the orchestra’s West Coast swing. The orchestra calls on Essentially Ellington schools near their tour dates for sessions like Sunday’s.
One of the nation’s premier high school jazz programs going on two decades, Rio Americano has racked up shelves of honors and has been a near-annual entry in Ellington festival. They just may return again this year, continuing the legacy shared Sunday afternoon.
“They’ve got the pedigree,” Lincoln Center trombonist Crenshaw said after the AM ensemble’s afternoon rehearsal. “They really listen to one another and they understand they’re part of something bigger than themselves. We may see them in New York if they keep up this pace.”
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