Although It has been a very quiet year for the Jazz Band, I’d like to thank all band members for their dedication and compliment them on the work that they have done in ensuring that we have progressed steadily.

We participated in the annual Victoria Park High Jazz Festival to great acclaim this year. For the first time the Jazz festival formed part of the Festival of the Arts. It was a fantastic evening of entertainment, with the jazz band and Mo-Jazz putting together two hours of toe-tapping, hip swaying jazz.

The Jazz band has seen a lot of new faces this year, with Daniella Patsalos and Joash Soobramoney joining on the tenor saxophones; Chad Perils adding great value on auxiliary percussion; Grant Allison really showing off his superb talent on the bass guitar and the latter part of the year we have Jade-Beth Vergoes Houwens on the keyboards.

As an experiment this year I decided to introduce combo jazz playing to the jazz band members and the jazz fest saw the debut performance of the combo band. The concept introduces young musicians to Improvisation in a much more intense manner as two thirds of every song would be improvised by a lead instrument. In this we are broadening the young musicians’ scope of playing by teaching them to listen more attentively to what the music is requiring them to do.

We say farewell to Chad Willatt, Danielle Durandt and Sivenathi Makhubalo this year they have served the jazz band well and we wish them all the best in their future endeavours.

A special mention must be made of some musicians and their extra-mural achievements this year:

Alyssa van Rooyen for her trumpet playing in Gilbert and Sullivan’s High School Musical and Thoba Goba and Grant Allison who performed as part of the New Afro Teens Band on SABC television and who this year recorded their first album as a band.

I am very excited about 2011 as we are sure to surprise the Port Elizabeth public by the standard of musicianship that the Victoria Park Jazz band will be producing in the next few years. The current group of musicians is very young and yet is already showing tremendous potential.

Keep on blowing and remember great musicians are made of 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

M. LOUIS