Neil Morley and his alto saxaphone was among start of the 2010 Kiwanis Festval of Music. JAMES MASTERS/The Sun Times.
BILL HENRY/Sun Tmes staff
Alto sax player Neil Morley moves fluidly between music genres.
The first-year University of Toronto student from Owen Sound is auditioning to move from general arts studies into a classical music program, but his main love is for jazz.
And for the first time this year, the longtime Kiwanis Music Festival participant was able to blow some jazz sax as a competitor in the new solo jazz class introduced for the 78th annual event.
“Jazz is what I enjoy playing the most,” Morley said Monday. “I think it’s a recognition of jazz as an awesome art form.”
Based on his performances of the George Gershwin standard Summertime, When Sunny Gets Blue,popularized by Nat King Cole, and the first movement of a saxophone sonata he’s composing, Morley was among musicians selected to perform at Division Street United Church Monday night.
It was the first of two Grey County Kiwanis Festival of Music concerts featuring some of the most accomplished participants during the two-week event, which ended Friday. Monday’s show featured soloists and small ensembles.
There’s another show tonight at OSCVI Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. for community choirs, bands and orchestras.
Morley has competed at Kiwanis events since Grade 6, missing only the 2009 event. He was also part of the West Hill Senior Jazz band throughout high school, competing frequently with that ensemble, which will be among groups performing tonight.
Despite his own focus on jazz, broader training in classical music will
help with his teaching goals, he said.
“If I want to be a music teacher, a classical background makes a lot of sense.”
But jazz is more fun, he said.
“I think it’s a lot easier to demonstrate creativity when you’re improvising, rather than when you’re interpreting a classical piece,” he said. “In jazz, you can take a piece and just basically write a solo. It’s much more open. I find it a lot more enjoyable to play and more interesting.”
Even without the new Kiwanis jazz category, added this year along with the music theatre class, Morley said he would have competed in this year’s festival both to develop as a musician and to pursue an eventual career as a school music teacher.
“(Kiwanis competition) is a nice goal,” he said. “It sets a nice deadline to work toward and to perfect a piece of music.”
The two new classes are a response to local and provincial musical trends, Kiwanis spokesman Bert Hood said. Both the new jazz solo instrumental class and a new music theatre vocal class are a result of more emphasis on jazz and music theatre in area high schools, he said.
As a longtime festival participant who has watched numbers fall off in recent years, Morley said he welcomes the new jazz class and hopes it will appeal to more young players as the word spreads.
“I’m really, really glad that they decided to add jazz to the spectrum of music that they have there. It’s definitely needed. A lot of students get put off, I think, by the idea of classical music, so the option of jazz kind of opens things up.”
Morley values the competitive music festival for its feedback.
“I think it’s really healthy. It’s not cutthroat or anything, and no matter how well you do in comparison to the other competitors you always get some useful feedback from the adjudicators.”
Monday’s highlight concert was the first at the recently renovated Division Street United Church for the festival. The stars of the event and the other show tonight at OSCVI were selected by nine adjudicators from among more than 1,000 singers, instrumentalists, bands and choirs who competed in more than 600 individual classes.
Musicians invited to perform Monday night included;
* Brothers Franz Greenfield and Jacob Greenfield, who earned top marks in junior and intermediate piano respectively.
* Sabrina Perry, fiddle, who also earned a scholarship for classical violin.
* Bomee Kim, senior piano.
* Christine Camidge, senior piano.
* Julia Chaisson, for the new music theatre category.
* Abigail Wagner, Sasha Dobisz and Alexandra Rodgers, junior piano trio.
* Carolyn Desbiens and Heather Whaling, trained vocal duet.
* Rachel Lustig, clarinet.
* Emily Shaw, Becky Shaw and Keith Hundt, guitar trio.
* Reanne Kruisselbrink, violin.
* Thomas Beard, cell
.* Kathleen Chayer, trained vocal.Tuesday’s OSCVI Kiwanis showcase concert at 7:30 p.m. included vocal music from the elementary choirs of Dufferin and Derby schools, the Grade 7/8 choir and handbell choir from Timothy Christian School and the West Hill Singers.
West Hill’s Jazz Band and classroom music band are among instrumental groups to perform tonight, along with the OSCVI Orchestra, The St. George’s Ensemble and the Hillcrest Husky Jazz Band.
