Newport Jazz Summer Camp students learn from festival greats – and perform alongside them

NEWPORT – Logan Franklin, an upright bass player, was aware of Newport’s famous jazz festival long before he learned there was a summer jazz camp for high school students associated with it.

When he started researching camps and learned about the opportunity to talk music theory and improvisation from legends like Christian McBride and even play a set at Fort Adams during one of the world’s premier jazz festivals, it was a wrap.

“I had to come,” said the 17-year-old from Knoxville, Tennessee, who said he also plays electric bass and is looking forward to catching live sets from world-class bass players throughout the weekend.

Franklin, alto sax player Nola Gooch and baritone sax player (and Rhode Islander) Ethan Hart gave The Daily News an inside look at their week learning from and playing alongside jazz legends in Newport and offered up their takes on which acts people should be excited about.

Campers get to attend Newport Jazz Festival, perform onstage and rub elbows with the greats

Hart, who is attending the camp for the second time, explained that while the students got to attend the jazz festival last year, this is the first time they are getting the opportunity to play on the festival’s foundation stage – with performances on Friday and Saturday. Hart, a 16-year-old from East Greenwich, explained the students were practicing in small jazz combos all week, and each combo would get the chance to perform one or two songs.

Leland Baker, a Pawtucket native who got his start as a musician thanks in part to a scholarship from the RI Philharmonic Youth Ensemble and now works as the Newport Festivals Foundation’s music education manager, also revealed that one student combo would be selected to play backstage on Saturday during the festival gala’s cocktail hour.

“I’m sure they’ll get to meet and see and share the stage with some of their idols and people who inspire them musically, because there will be artists backstage too,” said Baker.

Franklin’s list of must-see bass players included Derrick Hodge, slap bass player Marcus Miller and definitively new school player Thundercat, who lays down bass lines on quite a few hip-hop and rap recordings on the side of his prolific solo career.

Gooch, a 15-year-old from Foxboro, Massachusetts, who has attended the jazz festival several times in the past as a fan but is attending for the first time as a musician, got started on clarinet before switching to tenor and then alto sax.

“I’m looking for role models who are women in jazz – Lauren Sevian, Lakecia Benjamin; Camille Thurman is a great tenor sax player,” she said.

Hart’s list also included Thundercat, as well as perennial favorite Christian McBride (“He was phenomenal last year, and he is playing with like three different bands”), the Emmanuel Wilkins Quartet and Jon Batiste, who in addition to serving for years as bandleader on The Late Show is also the music director of The Atlantic and the creative director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

Financial aid is available for Newport Jazz Summer Camp students, and there was money left on the table this year

Peter Davis, who in addition to working as the camp’s executive director is a longtime faculty member in Salve Regina’s music department, spoke animatedly about his goal of better advertising the availability of financial aid for next year’s cohort of campers. He explained Newport Festivals Foundation offers a significant amount of aid, which Salve Regina matches, and he noted that not all of the financial aid money was used up this year.

Artistic director Jared Sims, an accomplished jazz saxophonist in his own right who works as the jazz director at West Virginia University during the academic year, spoke passionately about continuing to increase the number of students of color and female jazz musicians enrolled in the program, and encouraged students of all identities and backgrounds to apply to the camp and to apply for financial aid. The weeklong camp is still surprisingly reasonable at full price, with a cost of $1,200 for students staying on campus and $700 for commuters.

Their commitment to offering financial aid to students of color and aspiring women in jazz was echoed by Baker.

Baker, who also said he would be teaching a master class to the camp’s saxophone players at the camp on advanced topics like tone production, sound, phrasing and articulation, called the financial aid and subsequent experience it unlocked for him at the philharmonic “hugely impactful to (his) career and musical development” and said he hoped to see more students like himself – students of color, students from working-class backgrounds, students from single-parent households – take advantage of the unique opportunity to get a full ride to jazz camp in Newport.

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Newport Jazz Festival gives jazz summer camp unique opportunity