Earlier this month, the Saint Xavier Jazz Band traveled to New Orleans for the first time to attend the Jazz Education Network conference. While the band is currently busy with the semester just starting, several members of the Jazz band were able to allow the Xavierite a moment of their time to talk about this monumental trip.
Those interviewed were Luke Hodorek and who you might hear on the university’s radio station WXAV as well as the Jazz band’s director, Dr. Shawn Salmon.
When asked what the purpose of the JEN conference is, Luke Hodorek had this to say, “Its for a bunch of educators in jazz from throughout the country. So Jazz professors and performance teachers like Dr. Salmon, they have bands from schools all around the country and they have them put on conferences and seminars on how to better your playing and how to promote your music. They had a lot of bands play and they had some pretty high profile jazz artists too.”
When interviewing Dr. Salmon about this, he mentioned that one of those people was the saxophone player for the Dave Matthews Band, Jeff Colin, as well as other members of another band that he is a part of, Béla Fleck and The Flecktones.
During that same interview, I asked Dr. Salmon what made him want to take the band on this trip, he said that this all started a couple of years ago when he had gone to the conference by himself as a presenter and thought about how much fun it would be for the band to experience New Orleans and learn more about the music they love.
Out of the three days and two nights that the band stayed in New Orleans, both Dr. Salmon and Luke, recounted how outside of the conference, one of the other things they did aside from taking in the sights of the city was taking a New Orleans-style cooking class where they learned how to cook five different dishes.
When I asked Dr. Salmon about what moment stood out to him the most, he responded by saying “One of the groups that I heard at this conference and at a past conference too was a high school band from Israel and they were just phenomenal. Then I heard a big band from New Zealand and they were playing the blues and they were slamming. It was like they were speaking the language, but it was still their own accent on it…. It got me thinking about what made them sound that way?”
“We had some really good clinicians there with one of them being the head of the saxophone department at the University of North Texas, which is a world renowned jazz school. So it was fun, he even tried to recruit one of our players there.”
After this, I asked him if the conference had been a bit of a mixture of being very humbling and a proud experience to which he said, “Absolutely, absolutely, and grateful as well. So proud of our students. We were representing the south side of Chicago, representing SXU, we probably got the best clinic I ever received or been a part of.”
As the interview was coming to a close, I asked Dr. Salmon if he had anything he would like to say to the students of St. Xavier as well as any students interested in Jazz and he had this to say, “For students in Jazz, keep enjoying. It is a great form of music. It takes a lot of work and can sometimes be frustrating, but don’t let it bother you. It’s a beautiful art form… As well for students, whatever you do, do with passion and joy and it will make it memorable whether it’s writing an article for the Xavierite or playing the blues. Your voice is very important and it’s a beautiful thing to be sharing your passions with .”