At an August 25 press conference renowned Panamanian pianist and composer Danilo Pérez Jr. announced that the 2009 version of the Panama Jazz Festival will be held January 12 - 17, 2009, with an educational mission expanding again this year and the workshops and auditions moving to Panama Canal Authority facilities in Balboa.
This past January's festival featured four educational institutions, the founding New England Conservatory and Berklee College of Music, and added the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, a small elite graduate program based at Loyola University in New Orleans, the International Association for Jazz Education and the Conservatorio de Musica de Puerto Rico, all of which played various roles, not all of them seen onstage.
Pérez said that the educational institutions participating will be "basically the same as before," and added that Oberlin and Miami University are also expressing interest but that the extent of each institution's participation in a given year is largely a function of the budget that's available for that purpose. Typically some of the institutions send advanced student bands, as the New England Conservatory and the Thelonious Monk Institute did this past January, and those and others also send professors who, along with some of the featured musicians, give workshops and hold auditions. One of the main draws for the jazz festivals is that young musicians from Panama and other Latin American countries are attracted to the workshops and auditions, all of them to improve their musicianship and some in search of scholarships or school admissions that might be won at the auditions. |
