NAU Jazz Festival 2021

All festival activities will be livestreamed from our beautiful performance facilities on NAU’s mountain campus. Links for each event are listed below. Guests may tune in after the festival at the NAU Jazz Festival YouTube Channel.

Thursday, February 25:

1:30pm-3pm—Guest Artist/NAU Faculty Open Rehearsal and Jazz Combo Workshop

Friday, February 26

10am-2pm—Masterclasses presented by our Guest Artists and NAU School of Music Faculty

• 10:00-10:45am Drumset Masterclass with Rob Moore
• 11:00-11:45am Improvisation Masterclass with Brice Winston
• 12:00-12:45pm Rhythm Section Masterclass with Russell Schmidt
• 1:00-1:45pm Trumpet Masterclass with Dr. Stephen Dunn

7pm—Concert: NAU Jazz Combo I and the Guest Artist/Faculty Quintet

• Brice Winston, saxophone
• Stephen Dunn, trumpet
• Russell Schmidt, piano
• Chris Finet, bass
• Rob Moore, drums

Saturday, February 27

10am-2pm—Masterclasses presented by our Guest Artists and NAU School of Music

• 10am-10:45am Drumset Masterclass with Dr. Steven Hemphill
• 11am-11:45am Saxophone Masterclass with Dr. Jonathan Bergeron
• 12pm-12:45pm Bass Masterclass with Chris Finet
• 1pm-1:45pm Trombone Masterclass with David Vining

4pm-5pm—Conversation on Critical Improvisation Studies

Dr. Blase Scarnati  (NAU School of Music) & Dr. Rob Wallace (NAU Honors College)

Join Blase Scarnati and Rob Wallace for an interactive discussion (via Zoom) about the connections between improvisation, jazz, and social justice. Drawing on their collective experience in music education, innovative liberal arts programs, and performance in jazz and other improvised musics, Scarnati and Wallace will explore the ways that jazz has inspired new insights into human interaction. Incorporating scholarship from the innovative and relatively new field of Critical Improvisation Studies, this discussion will assess strategies for improvising a better world. Free and open to all.

Join us on zoom
Meeting ID: 865 3582 0980
Password: jazz

7pm—Concert: NAU Jazz Ensemble II and Jazz Ensemble I with Brice Winston, Russell Schmidt, and Rob Moore.

A major component of our annual festival is the performance, adjudication, and clinic of participating school bands. While the present circumstances make this a challenge, we invite school bands to submit video performance recordings for evaluation and feedback from our guest artists. The NAU Jazz Festival is a non-competitive event and this year we will be providing comments and feedback only, foregoing the normal rating system consistent with ABODA festivals.

Participating schools may submit performance recordings February 22 – 27, and schools will receive written and recorded evaluations from all three of our guest artists. This opportunity is offered at no cost and will be limited to 20 bands in total. We ask that entries be limited to one band per school initially to provide the opportunity to as many schools as possible.

Performance submissions will be limited to 20-22 minutes and feedback/evaluations will be returned no later than Monday, March 8^th. Bands will be registered on a first-come, first-served basis.

To register for this opportunity please send an inquiry to NAU Jazz Studies faculty, Chris Finet by email at Christopher.Finet@nau.edu

Brice Winston, saxophone

Saxophonist and composer Brice Winston is a native of Tucson, AZ, but cut his teeth learning jazz in the city where jazz was created – New Orleans. For more than 16 years he lived in New Orleans performing with countless local musicians and several world-class figures including such notables as Brian Blade, Ellis Marsalis and Nicholas Payton.

After touring with Nicholas Payton’s band for a year, an acquaintance with band leader and composer Terence Blanchard developed into a close musical relationship that continues to this day. Brice has been touring with Blanchard for over fifteen years, an association affording him the opportunity to perform all over the world with some of the greatest musicians alive including Herbie Hancock, Dianne Reeves, Lionel Loueke and Dave Holland. Brice has recorded 7 CD’s with Blanchard including the Grammy Award winning CD, A Tale of God’s Will – A Requiem for Katrina as well as more than 15 movie scores for film director Spike Lee among other directors.

After returning to Tucson in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Brice found himself becoming increasingly involved in jazz education. After teaching briefly for the Tucson Jazz Society’s educational program Tucson JazzWerx, Brice joined forces with bassist Scott Black and trombonist Doug Tidaback in 2008 to form the Tucson Jazz Institute (TJI). TJI has since gone on to win top awards at festivals and competitions all over the United States, becoming a model of jazz education for the world. September 19, 2014 marked the release of Brice’s sophomore recording, Child’s Play , recorded in Brooklyn, New York with some of the most cutting edge and in-demand musicians on the jazz scene today, with Mike Moreno on guitar, David Virelles on piano, Joe Sanders on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums.

Most recently, Brice has joined the music faculty at the University of Arizona, is a resident artist/educator at Northern Arizona University, and continues to perform in jazz clubs, concert halls and jazz festivals all over the world.

Russell Schmidt, piano

Pianist/composer/educator Russell Schmidt has performed with such celebrated artists as Carl Allen, Eddie Daniels, John Hollenbeck, Joe Lovano, Gerry Mulligan, Lucas Pino, Arturo Sandoval, and Clark Terry. Among his recordings as a leader are Anachromysticism (2012), which highlights his wide-ranging efforts as a jazz composer, Jazz Triptych, Volume I – The Sacred (2018), a collection of hymns and spirituals reimagined in the jazz language, and his most recent release, the companion album Jazz Triptych, Volume II – The Secular(2019).

As a composer and arranger, Russell has written for artists as varied as saxophonists Bob Berg and Michael Brecker, the Ying String Quartet, and the chamber music group Rhythm & Brass. His compositions and arrangements have been released by Advance Music, GIA Publications, the Penfield Commission Project, and VJC Publications. As an author, he recently contributed two chapters to the Oxford University Press publication Teaching School Jazz: Perspectives, Principles, and Strategies (2019).

After a distinguished career in academia, Russell joined Music Serving the Word Ministries in 2014 as Coordinator of Education. He currently directs MSW’s Valley Jazz Cooperative program and hosts the VJC Q&T (Questions & Tangents) podcast. Previously, he served as Director of Jazz Studies at Bowling Green State University and the University of Utah, and also held faculty appointments at UNC–Asheville and the Eastman School of Music. A student of legendary jazz pedagogue Rayburn Wright, Russell holds two degrees from Eastman.

Rob Moore, drums

A graduate of Arizona State University’s School of Music, Rob Moore is an A-list professional jazz drummer in the Metro-Phoenix area. His work experience includes stints with the pro-audio division of the Yamaha Corporation of America, and the Apple Store. More recently, Rob served as Adjunct Faculty at Scottsdale Community College where he taught drum set and directed small jazz ensembles. Currently, Rob is the resident audio engineer at Ravenswave Recordings in Carefree, AZ as well as the drummer and FOH engineer for Music Serving the Word. Rob’s career has seen him playing myriad styles of music, from jazz to Top 40, as a sideman to the best leaders in the Southwest. His creative bent has led to immersion in avant-garde projects such as Inner Journeys, Trio Oro and his eclectic electro-acoustic solo project, “Momo and the Modern Musical Adventure.”