In the annual festival, performers ranging from high school students to professionals will be featured.
Although the Athens Jazz Festival takes place during the same weekend as Number Fest, Andy Edelen, the teacher assistant for the jazz percussion ensemble, said he isn’t worried about low attendance.
“I didn’t even know Numbers Fest was this weekend,” he said.
The Ohio University Jazz Percussion Ensemble and Jazz Ensemble I will be joined by saxophonist Chris Madsen for the Athens Jazz Festival from Friday to Sunday.
In addition, high school jazz groups were invited to perform Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium.
Jazz saxophonist Madsen is the guest performer for the festival. He currently works as a full-time faculty as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He will perform with the Jazz Ensemble I, as well as with OU faculty, during the festival.
Edelen, a graduate student studying music performance, said the percussion ensemble has been preparing for the festival for most of the semester. Having performed in the festival last year, he said he enjoyed the range of experience of the performers — ranging from high school performers, to college students and professionals.
While jazz ensembles themselves aren’t anything out of the ordinary, Edelen said a jazz percussion ensemble is a somewhat rare sight.
“We get to do things with percussion that we don’t normally get to do in other jazz ensembles,” he said. “We get to do harder things, things that are cooler, things that interest percussionists that may not interest a brass player or something.”
John Obringer, a junior studying music education, said performing in the jazz ensemble is a nice change from the classical music the ensemble members normally play. All of the members of the jazz percussion ensemble are also members of an orchestra or the regular percussion ensemble.
“It’s kind of a more laid back environment, instead of the classical music we usually play,” he said. “We can kind of just relax, dance a little and have fun.”
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The idea of teaching jazz can seem contradictory — it’s a genre that is centered around not following the conventional rules of music.
“It’s was never really something that was meant to be taught in a classroom,” Madsen said.
Madsen studied for three years a Juilliard School in 2003, and even though bustling cities like New York are a sort of haven for musicians, he said he prefers the quiet of the suburbs. However, his time there was invaluable to him for growing as a musician. He added that the sheer number of talented musicians in the area was particularly sobering.
“You’re never going to be the best, no matter who you are,” Madsen said. "So what you have to figure out how to do is to accentuate the parts of your musical personality that make you unique.”
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