Wow! What a great 10 days. I just concluded a whirlwind tour
of Northwestern Montana and Eastern Washington, with my non-profit: The
Institute for Creative Music. Last summer, my drummer friend Chris Teal and I
decided to put our heads together to formalize some of the educational
clinics/touring that we had done between 2007 and 2010 and the Institute for
Creative Music was born! You can check
out the IfCM at www.ifcmusic.org
Thanks to a generous grant from the Plum Creek Foundation,
we were enabled to travel to Kalispell, Montana and work with five high schools
there, as well as with the surrounding music community. We presented workshops,
clinics, and performances for almost 1400 students, and taught for a combined
total of 37.4 hours! We had two appearances in the local papers (with a third
on the way), and a big hit was of course, free IfCM stickers! After our time in
Montana, we traveled west to Spokane, WA (Chris’ hometown) and had a day of
whirlwind visits to Mt. Spokane HS, Eastern Washington University, and
Whitworth University. It was a productive tour for sure!
It is an amazing thing to spend time with energetic and
passionate music students. Their energy and willingness to try new things (even
if they are foreign or challenging) is truly inspiring. We worked with concert
bands, orchestras, jazz combos, big bands, and choirs. Each and every one of
the students we worked with was improvising and participating in creative music
making.
Spending time teaching with the co-director of IfCM Chris
Teal, and our teaching artists: Mike Kaupa (trumpet), Chris Ziemba (piano), and
Matthew Golombisky (bass) was a real treat. We are excited to be moving ahead
with a number of projects to continue the momentum that was started this past
week!
