Report To The Community 2022

keeping
the beat
For 25 years, TD Jazz for Teens has offered
performance experience — and a
When GRAMMY®-winning
alto sax player and composer
Mark Gross was just starting
his career, he toured with Lionel
Hampton. As the youngest
musician on that tour, he sat at
the very back of the tour bus.
But the back of the bus was
also its smoking section. On
his first ride, Gross realized
that sitting right in front of
him, relaxing with a cigarette,
was Dizzy Gillespie.
Students from TD Jazz for Teens
perform in the Chase Room
with GRAMMY®-winning alto
saxophonist-composer Mark Gross,
NJPAC’s Director of Jazz Instruction.
connection to jazz history
“I’m sitting there, looking at
the back of his head, thinking:
That’s Dizzy! Right there!” Gross
recalls. He promptly asked his
bandmate to share stories of
playing in the 1930s and 1940s.
“I’m smiling like the Cheshire
Cat, soaking it all in, and
I said: ‘Mr. Diz, I’m an alto
player. Can you tell what it
was like to play with Charlie
Parker?’ He lit up like a light
bulb. For the next two weeks,
I got stories about Charlie.”
It was a formative experience
for Gross, who went on to
work with a roster of greats,
including Buster Williams,
Nat Adderley, Dave Holland
and Wynton Marsalis.
“Those legends poured so
much into me that I feel if I don’t
pour what I’ve gathered from
being around these masters
into young people, they’ll never
understand the full impact of
these artists,” says Gross.
Which is why every Saturday
morning you’ll find Gross in an
NJPAC classroom teaching kids
all he knows through TD Jazz for
Teens, now in its third decade.
(TD Bank, the longtime sponsor
of NJPAC’s jazz programming
and TD James Moody Jazz
Festival, became title sponsor
of the program this year.)
Since 2015, Gross, NJPAC’s
Director of Jazz Instruction,
has managed the program,
which has helped thousands
of high schoolers learn how to
play, compose, perform and
advance careers in jazz.
In addition to Gross, more than
a dozen acclaimed musicians
make up the faculty, including
saxophonist Wayne Escoffery,
guitarist Alex Wintz (a program
alumnus), percussionist
Alvester Garnett and trumpeter
Valery Ponomarev. Eight-time
GRAMMY®-winning bassist
Christian McBride (NJPAC’s
Jazz Advisor), vibraphonist
Stefon Harris and MacArthur
“Genius Grant” recipient Regina
Carter also offer master classes.
Students study listening, jazz
history, theory, composition
and technique. They can also
opt into one-on-one instruction.
Because NJPAC Arts Education
programs embrace the Maker
philosophy — which holds
that students learn best by
creating — composition and
improvisation are emphasized.
Advanced students become
members of NJPAC’s elite
jazz ensembles, the James
Moody Jazz Orchestra and the
George Wein Jazz Scholars.
The latter not only play
together, but annually visit
the Newport Jazz Festival to
meet headline performers.
“It’s a kid-in-a-candy-store
experience,” Gross says. “They
come back over the moon.” •
NJPAC’s award-winning
performing arts summer
programs culminated with a
final performance on the Lizzie
& Jonathan Tisch Stage in the
Victoria Theater.
all in together
Summer students in the spotlight
The range of performances presented on NJPAC’s stages
this season was enormously broad, from stand-up comedy to
salsa and symphonies.
But it’s safe to say that only one performance included a
production number about magical chips that turn late night
snackers into orange monsters and an evil scientist named
“Dr. Cheddarman.”
That would be All In Together, the summer-ending show
presented by 80 students of the NJPAC’s summer programs
in acting, musical theater and hip hop to a full house of
cheering friends and family in the Victoria Theater.
This was the first summer in three years NJPAC’s summer
programs were held in person, and teaching artists worked hard
to ensure that not only did students learn new performance skills
but that they also had plentiful opportunities to build social and
emotional skills.
“Encouragement and support were so important. It’s hard to overstate
what these students had endured the last two years,” says Nicola
Murphy, artistic director of NJPAC’s summer theater program.
In keeping with NJPAC’s embrace of the Maker philosophy, which
holds that children learn best by creating, every scene of the
show was crafted by the students, from the raps and hip hop
beats to several short plays and musicals.
The younger students offered a scene about the mystical origins
of the schoolyard game rock-paper-scissors, and a musical
about supernatural Cheetos, both written collectively through
a process of brainstorming and improvisation.
Older students took on more serious topics. Teen actors crafted
a play about immigrant brothers struggling to stay in America
to pursue their dreams, while musical theater students created a
piece about LGBTQ+ rights in the 1920s, researched via a virtual
tour of the Newark Museum of Art’s Jazz Greats photo exhibit. •
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