The Garfield High School Boys Soccer Team has finished first in the KingCo League after the regular season and now plays for the KingCo League Championship at 7:30 PM Tuesday, May 11, at Memorial Stadium. The game has high stakes; the winner goes directly to the state tournament as a #1 seed. This is the strongest Garfield team in a long time, it’s been a decade since a team from Garfield has made it to state. Come out to support your neighborhood team, and wear your purple!
While listening to NPR last night, I heard that Garfield High has a fantastic Jazz program and that both Garfield and Roosevelt High Schools are finalists again this year in the 2010 Essentially Ellington national jazz competition. I am proud of our neighborhood kids! Go Garfield!
Here’s more about the competition:
The annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival is one of the most innovative jazz education events in the world. Each year, high school musicians from across North America travel to New York City to spend three days immersed in workshops, jam sessions, rehearsals and performances at the “House of Swing,” Jazz at Lincoln Center’s home, Frederick P. Rose Hall.
The Competition & Festival, held each May, is the culmination of the year-long Essentially Ellington program, during which members are invited to submit a recording and 15 finalist bands are selected through a rigorous screening process. Each finalist band receives an in-school workshop in their community led by a professional musician before coming to New York to put up their Dukes and perform before Wynton Marsalis and a panel of esteemed judges. In the past, finalist bands have had the privilege to work with such workshop clinicians as trumpeter Terell Stafford; Ronald Carter, the widely respected jazz educator; Justin DiCioccio, director of Jazz Studies at Manhattan School of Music; saxophonist Loren Schoenberg; Reggie Thomas, pianist and educator; as well as Jazz at Lincoln Center’s own Victor Goines. Among the past judges have been former Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra conductor and arranger David Berger; Gunther Schuller, who, according to All Music Guide, “is composer, conductor, horn player, jazz performer, writer, administrator, publisher, and teacher, all wrapped up into one tiny bundle of seemingly endless energy”; Pulitzer Prize-nominated jazz musician and composer David Baker; and who else but Wynton Marsalis himself.
The festival concludes with a final evening Concert and Awards Ceremony open to the public at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall featuring the three top-placing bands and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis.