On Friday, March 15, at Walkersville High School, the 3rd annual ‘Walkersville Jazz Festival’ was held. Organized by Mr. Alex Loy, the school’s band director, the festival featured performances from local school bands and culminated in a performance by the Army Jazz Ambassadors.

“Walkersville Jazz Festival is an annual event for high school jazz bands to perform for the public and show off all the awesome work local jazz bands are doing,” Loy shared. The goal of the festival is to promote jazz to the community offering educational opportunities for local school groups.

“Jazz has always been a huge passion of mine and my fondest memories from high school were performing in local Jazz Festivals,” Loy continued. “There are lots of opportunities for marching bands, concert bands, and indoor groups to perform, but jazz often flies under the radar with fewer events.”

“Jazz is a really fun genre to play,” Ms. Summer Burton, the band director at Oakdale High School, explained why they perform jazz at all. “It’s really great for musicians who want to push themselves to learn music in a different style than you typically see in a classroom ensemble.”

“In concert band, you typically see traditional wind ensemble repertoire,” she cleared-up. “Jazz band explores different sub-genres. For example, there’s Latin jazz, there’s standards, there’s funk tunes, and there’s typical big band swing. There are so many different genres within [jazz to explore.]” Burton has been playing in jazz bands since middle school, and has been running the Oakdale Jazz Band since she joined the staff in 2022. 

The Jazz Festival offers time with adjudicators and clinicians to “give students and directors valuable feedback from experienced Jazz musicians and educators,” according to Loy. 

“We get comments from adjudicators and professionals,” Burton clarified, “One of them is actually one of my college professors from when I played jazz, which is really cool. They give us feedback and then we actually get to clinic with them so they can give us real-time feedback on how to do better.”

As is tradition, the festival concluded with a performance by a professional ensemble. The student performers gathered in the Walkersville auditorium. “The night culminates with a concert by the Army Jazz Ambassadors. They’re very talented musicians, so I’m really excited to see that [performance],” Burton effused a few days prior to the festival. 

Opportunities like the Walkersville Jazz Festival don’t always present themselves for students. Being able to attend with a school band and see all of the other groups and the professionals, makes both a thrilling experience for these musicians and a welcome tradition in the FCPS music world.