As the summer heat and rain danced in the Valley this past week, 41 high school students immersed themselves in the Jazz in the Sangres week-long summer camp hosted by the Colorado Conservatory for the Jazz Arts (CCJA).
Founded in 2001, the Jazz in the Sangres camp for high school students emerged alongside the Jazz in the Sangres festival, which ran from 1989 through 2007. The festival “wanted an education component,” camp director Jonathan Zimny explained, “that we ended up providing with this camp…it’s been one of our best programs all these 25 years.”
The enticing nature of a small town and a beautiful setting made Westcliffe the perfect jazz camp setting. “We liked it so much that when the jazz festival stopped, we wanted to keep coming up here,” Zimny explained. Students are removed from the fast-paced nature of a city and can focus on just music for a week without any outside distractions, Zimny remarks.
For example, on Wednesday, the campers and faculty drove as a group 10 miles south to the Music Meadows Ranch, where, as Zimny explained, “we all sit together and try to be as silent as possible for as long as we can.” They listen to the sounds of nature and the vast Valley silence, and “as musicians, the silence is kind of our canvas,” Zimny remarked. “So we kind of try to get in tune with that silence, and it’s really cool to just be with 50 or so people all in complete silence.”
And then from out of that silence, a jam circle begins, and nature responds. “That’s my favorite part of camp each year,” Zimny shared.
Each camper is split into one of six small groups for the week — these groups could consist of six to eight students and an instructor. To help teach the 41 campers this summer, there are six faculty instructors as well as six near-peer mentors. The near-peer mentors are fellow jazz students who are in college or just out of college but who are closer in age to the high schoolers. “They’re learning themselves, but they’re the next step ahead of our campers,” Zimny explained. “So it’s kind of cool to see…that bridge there.” Most of the time, the near-peer mentors are students who have gone through the summer intensive program themselves.
In honor of this summer being the 25th anniversary of CCJA, the camp brought in the jazz band Convergence to serve as camp instructors, “which is a band that the executive director has been in for 30 plus years,” Zimny clarified. “And they were the original jazz faculty for the first couple of Westcliffe camps.”
Convergence is made up of Greg Gisbert on trumpet, John Gunther on saxophone, Mark Patterson on trombone, Eric Gunnison on piano, Mark Simon on bass, and the artistic director of CCJA, Paul Romaine, on drums.
As the week goes on, students go from their small groups to play with the big bands. There are two big bands — large ensembles — this year with four trumpets, four trombones, five saxes, and a rhythm section — “that music is still jazz but it’s more arranged,” Zimny clarified. And while there are still elements of improvisation, the small groups are primarily improvisation-based, whereas the big bands consist of “more arrangements and tunes with a lot more writing happening there,” Zimny explained. The students get both sides of the jazz spectrum.
Along with the six group instructors and six near-peer mentors, there is a camp nurse and a camp chef named Patrick. “We’ve got really good food,” Zimny remarked. Every meal is served at the Hope Lutheran Church, and the camp members stay at the Westcliffe Inn.
The students participating in the week-long intensive in Westcliffe auditioned for their place to be here. “We want the most serious people that are ready to really steep themselves in this and that really want to learn the idiom of jazz,” Zimny said.
Jazz in the Sangres camp is the only CCJA program which requires students to audition. CCJA hosts several 10-week-long programs — a winter session, a fall session, and a spring session. These sessions are for students of all ages — from middle schoolers to high schoolers to adults who are revisiting their instrument for the first time in years. Paul and Chris Romaine established the first group in early 2000 – “They got a couple of jazz musicians to come and teach a group of kids. . . . But each session kind of just started growing, and now we have three different locations,” Zimny explains. Sessions are hosted in Denver and the Boulder area as well as sometimes in Fort Collins and Colorado Springs. Around 2020, an adult program was added as well.
From the Westcliffe camp to every 10-week session CCJA hosts, each student is learning right from the source. “The music kind of flows right into them and they really pick it up fast,” Zimny explained while speaking about the high school students in Westcliffe this past week. Over the course of the week, students rehearse all day, and then after rehearsals are over, the students jam together and play together. “So they’re really immersed in it and it really shows up in the performance…they sound very mature.” And with jazz music, Zimny added, the better you know each other, the better you can play together.
Many of the high school students first began playing their instrument in middle school, and their first introduction was “mostly classical stuff,” Zimny said. “Once they’ve been playing for a year or two, then they start to figure out what kind of music they like, and some of them tend towards jazz. That’s where we kind of pick them up.”
The majority of students already have a bit of familiarity with their instrument, but not any with jazz. So Zimny and CCJA start them with the jazz process “because it’s very different from a lot of other forms of music,” Zimny explained.
While the Jazz in the Sangres camp varies in rehearsal spaces each year — this year students rehearsed at All Aboard Westcliffe, Custer County Schools, and the Custer County Library. Throughout the years, “we’ve rehearsed at a couple of different churches around town, as well as the school and in the past the Historic Jones Theater,” Zimny explained. “But each year we’re walking around the town all the time, between the church and the Inn and our rehearsal rooms.”
The majority of students are from Colorado, but “people find us from a lot of different places,” Zimny said with enthusiasm. Yet, if you are a musician here in Colorado, you are no stranger to how the dryness affects instruments.
For wooden instruments, the continuously dry air causes wood to lose moisture, shrink, and then crack. While permanent damage is possible but unlikely with precautions, the dryness of Colorado affects the tuning above all else, Zimny explained. “And then for reeded instruments, like saxophones, they use wooden reeds. So those can dry out really fast, which makes the tone a bit worse than usual.” And for brass players, the music comes from the power of their lips and lungs — the added layer of altitude tires them out a bit quicker than normal.
Whether from Colorado or not, “Westcliffe is kind of the center of everything,” Zimny said. This week-long intensive is for the students who have been playing for a few years, but they’re ready to take it to the next step before going off to college. “A lot of our students end up going to college for music. So, this kind of helps them get ready for that.”
There is not one single moment that sticks with Zimny throughout his time putting on the Jazz in the Sangres camp. Rather, it is “seeing the personal growth of kids, both musically and socially. Just seeing them kind of open up and blossom a little bit,” Zimny elaborated. “That’s one of my favorite things as a teacher, just to see their kind of evolution throughout this week, because it happens really fast because it’s so intense.”
For Zimny and every instructor, from the Jazz in the Sangres to every session CCJA puts on, the “biggest thing for us is that we teach music, but we teach a lot more than that,” Zimny remarked. CCJA wants to cultivate good humans and the connection between every student, because “music is such a wonderful tool for that,” Zimny added. Music helps you understand other people and communicate with them, even if a common language is not spoken.
“That’s kind of one of our slogans…it’s about the hang,” Zimny said. “We want people who have never met each other before to be best friends by the end of the week, to be playing together, to find what they have in common, and create those relationships that’ll last for a lifetime through the music.”
The same approach is taken for anything CCJA is doing. There is someone who is playing jazz for real, and every student is learning from them, Zimny said. “And we’re getting to know each other and how to work with each other on this music.”
“It’s almost a holistic approach, really,” Zimny said. “We try to approach everything the same way through that cultivation of the hang” — or, in other words, the human connections strengthen the music, and the music strengthens those connections.
“It’s just this positive feedback loop that we try to keep going no matter who we’re teaching or where we’re teaching or how long we’re teaching,” Zimny emphasized.
The continuous loop CCJA emphasizes through their jazz education enhances the jazz scene in Colorado and around the world. Through those connections, students play many jazz standards — tunes most jazz musicians have memorized. “They’re able to play with each other just by calling it,” Zimny said. “And that’s one of the coolest parts about jazz, is it’s kind of a shared language, these tunes.”
The emphasis of community is evident and illuminated brightly this past Friday as students gathered for their final day of audience-attended performances. While students are able to come to the Jazz in the Sangres camp the year before high school and through graduating, many of the students are “maybe a little quieter or some of them know each other,” Zimny said. But then “they go up on stage and play really well together.”
Whether you enjoyed the abundance of jazz festivities around town or you saw 41 high school students bowling at Cliff Lanes — the emphasis and mission of CCJA and the Jazz in the Sangres camp is clear: if you want to play, you’re welcome.
– Brett LeVan
