By Shaudi Bianca Vahdat | Berklee Post Grad Teaching Fellow with FEDUJAZZ
Dominican Republic Jazz Festival GRAMMY-Award winning performers empower local youth through music
Dear FEDUJAZZ supporters,
We are thrilled to share with you some of the incredible moments you made possible this past week in the Dominican Republic.
The fall edition of the 22nd Dominican Republic Jazz Festival ran from October 26th, and from November 1-4, 2018, and included eight free music education workshops in five Dominican cities. Over 1,000 children attended the workshops, which were conducted by the internationally acclaimed musicians performing in the Festival, including GRAMMY Award-winning and GRAMMY nominated artists.
The workshops were varied and diverse, and in all cases, the students were exposed to new music from around the world and participated with singing and clapping. The artists who led the workshops also performed each night in the festival shows that were free and open to the public, as they are every year. VIP tickets were also available, with all of the proceeds going towards future FEDUJAZZ programming.
Dominican Republic Jazz Festival - Music Workshops for Children
At Mustard Seed, an organization in Cangrejo, the Berklee Global Jazz Institute Ambassadors and their leader, Marco Pignataro, played a lively set for abandoned children with severe physical disabilities. The children, who are largely nonverbal and use wheelchairs, responded to the music in a manner that was incredibly moving to each person present. The children swayed their bodies in time with the music, clapped and smiled as the FEDUJAZZ volunteers walked among them with their instruments, giving the children a chance to see up close and touch a saxophone, flute, hand drum, and violin. FEDUJAZZ is honored to have a continued relationship with Mustard Seed, and we are able to bring artists to work with these wonderful young people each year thanks to your generous support.
At Playa Alicia in Sosua, festival artists Tutti Druyan (vocalist), Edmar Colon (saxophone) and their band taught their students to clap and sing along to a song in Hebrew. At Playa Cabarete, GRAMMY-winning vocalist Luciana Souza led the children in a Brazilian song. Colombian harpist Edmar Cantañeda worked with children in Santiago, where he taught them about the rhythm of the joropo, a traditional music and dance genre of Venezuela and Colombia.
Several young students expressed their gratitude after a workshop at Hogar Luisa Ortea, a school in Puerto Plata, voicing how much it meant to them to have musicians come to their school from so far away to share their knowledge.
Again, we at FEDUJAZZ want to thank you, the donors, for helping to make this happen. Your support allows us to keep all of our classes and concerts accessible and free, to stock and repair the instruments we use to teach our classes, and to maintain our facility in Cabarete, a home to our students that is open six days a week year-round.
We invite you to consider donating to our project again, to ensure that we can keep expanding our reach and bringing music into the lives of more children and youth in the Dominican Republic!
Muchisimas Gracias, FEDUJAZZ
Links:
By Kelly Mearkle | Project Leader
By Alex Dyring | Fedujazz Academic Coordinator
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