Update: Due to inclement weather, this event has been canceled and will be rescheduled for a future date.

By Gary Alexander, KLOI

Special to The Weekly

The Garfield High School Jazz Ensemble earned another spot at the Essentially Ellington high school big band contest at Lincoln Center, New York last May. Only 15 bands are invited each year. Garfield has earned a spot in 14 of the last 18 years (including the last four), winning the top spot a record four times and one of the top three awards (or honorable mention) 10 times.

This exciting young band has been delighting Lopez Island audiences since October 2008. That 2008–09 school-year band was one of their best aggregations, winning the #1 spot in the national “Essentially Ellington” competition at Lincoln Center, led by Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis. That band also toured Europe and recorded a CD from that tour called “An Italian Love Affair.”

Since 2008, Clarence Acox – now in his 46th year as Garfield’s band director – has brought the band to Lopez Island for their first public appearance of the school year. This year, the Garfield band will return to Woodmen Hall, making music from 2:30 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 15.

The Garfield High School Jazz Ensemble is a 33-member jazz band (with two complete sax sections and a deep bench in the rhythm section), including students from a variety of cultural and economic backgrounds. Garfield is a Seattle-based public high school with such an interest in jazz that it maintains three levels of jazz bands in its curriculum. In addition, Seattle is a hotbed of other great high school jazz bands. This year, Seattle’s Roosevelt, which has been to New York the last 13 years in a row, and Snoqualmie’s Mount Si were also among the finalists.

At the 2016 festival in New York, five Garfield instrumentalists won awards for excellence. Many Garfield graduates go on to professional music careers. Some of the band members also form a connection with Lopez that lasts far beyond their high school years. Three brass players from the 2006–09 Garfield bands (along with trombonist Andy Clausen from Roosevelt High) released an album which they recorded on Lopez Island, “Wish the Children Would Come on Home.” Two Garfield brass players in the Westerlies – trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and trombonist Willem de Koch – were members of that first band that visited Lopez in 2008. (The Westerlies just released their second album, with a CD release party on Nov. 9 in Seattle.)

Whatever fortunes await this band next spring, we on Lopez can say “we heard them first.” You don’t have to travel to France – or even Seattle – to hear this world-class youth band. Come to Woodmen Hall on Saturday afternoon at 2:30 p.m. for the best big band you’ll ever hear here.

Gary Alexander programs jazz and The Great American Songbook on KLOI, 3 to 6 p.m. Friday and Monday. Tune in for an extended sample of Garfield’s big band recordings this Friday on KLOI, 102.9-fm or streaming live audio at www.KLOI.org (click: “Listen Live”).

Special thanks to Dean and Carolyn Jacobsen for making this series possible, along with Friends of Woodmen Hall, Clarence Acox, the Garfield Jazz Foundation, band members and their families.