Students Swinging at the Hong Kong International Jazz Festival

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This article is a collaboration between Jacky Liu and Stanley Wang.

On October 29, the AISG Jazz Band, led by Mr. Bott, and the AISG Jazz Strings, led by Ms. Lin, went to Hong Kong to participate in the Hong Kong International Schools’ International Jazz Festival. The festival, like the ones before, featured a whole day of workshops with professional musicians or clinicians and a performance at the end done by all of the participating bands. Overall, it was a great trip and definitely one of the best experiences.

This trip is pretty similar to last year’s in that the jazz band and the strings left on Friday around noon and spent a night in Hong Kong. The night out was always part of the highlight of the trip. This year, we all gathered and ate together in the same restaurant as last year and it was incredibly nostalgic for many of us. “It was kind of exciting and sad. On the one hand we were so happy that we had some new members with us, but on the other hand, a lot of us graduated and it felt almost incomplete without them”, said Jim Lin, a saxophonist.

After the dinner, it was our free time to roam around Time Square in Hong Kong. In the past, I remember the jazzers would shop at Forever 21, eat at fancy restaurants, and just enjoy the view at Time Square. “The night before the festival, we went to Time Square in Hong Kong and I got to buy my favorite tea and eat at my favorite curry restaurant with Jim and Jacky”, commented Stanley Wang, another saxophonist of the Jazz band.

While many people enjoyed their night, Stanley suffered his worst encounter with ice cream. Stanley, Jim and I went to get more food after dinner. Since the restaurants were full of people, we decided to go get some ice cream first. However, after we ordered some ice cream, we changed our minds and decided that someone should stay and eat the ice cream while the others go and wait in line. So, Jim and I left to go wait in line at our favorite curry restaurant and Stanley had to finish his Snow Mountain alone. It was extremely difficult for him since Snow Mountain was huge and it was supposed to be eaten between three people. After a while, Stanley finally managed to finish the Snow Mountain and joined us at the curry restaurant. Stanley commented on his experience, saying that “I can still remember how I shivered as I was eating. I had to constantly drink warm and hot water to keep my mouth from not being frozen. At one point I was certain that I would get hypothermia from finishing the giant ice cream mountain.”

The morning of the festival, jazzers woke up early and got some amazing breakfast at the hotel and then loaded their luggage and instruments onto the bus and headed for HKIS. On our way there, we were supposed to pick up some guests and other schools, but none of them showed up. It was until we arrived that we had discovered that the clinicians and the students from other schools took the wrong bus and thus workshops and classes had to be delayed. The delays surprisingly didn’t cause too much disturbance and the festival was able to go on being virtually unaffected.

The first session for many was the jazz history session with Dr. Aitken. According to Stanley, “The jazz history session was one of my favorites. It gave us information on the history of jazz as well as musicians and songs that we can listen to.” Then there were the clinician workshops. In the workshops, all of the musicians worked with a clinician to improve their music skills. For me, this was the third time that I’ve been through an electric bass workshop. In there, the clinician usually starts off with something simple. For bass, it was the walking patterns. Then the clinician progresses to something more challenging like improvisation based on scales.

After lunch, the jazz band met together and worked on sharpening our improvisation skills. Improvisation is one of the biggest parts of jazz music. Mr. Bott often encourages us to improvise more with our music, especially for the rhythm section since the music that is written out is often extremely boring. Unlike orchestra or band, Jazz features plenty of solos, mostly unwritten, and the player has to stand up and improve according to the mood, melody and tone of the piece.  One question that people often have is how? The workshop helped answer that. In the workshop, we started off by playing one of our songs, “What Now”, and using the rhythm and melody from a part of that song as the basis for our improvisation. We started with four bar improvisations with only three notes, then we moved on to more complicated practices such as mimicking the clinician.

The rest of the festival was basically each of the bands playing their music and getting feedback from the clinicians. According to Stanley, “I feel like we were much better than last year. We had less problems and we were not working so much on learning the music or getting something correct, but on how to perfect it.” After a whole day of workshops and practices, we performed. The AISG Jazz Band and Strings, as well as all of the other bands there, performed their songs.

I thought we did great. We tried our best and we gave a great performance. We learned, we played and we had fun. It was an amazing experience overall.