Monterey, Calif.; July 31, 2015; Paul Contos, Monterey Jazz Festival Education Director and saxophonist, recently left for Japan on a six-day educational and performance tour in Japan. Among the highlights of the tour will include his guest conducting of the Mad Hatters Jazz Orchestra from Tomisato High School; instrumental and improvisational workshops led by Contos; and performances with the Mad Hatters and the High Notes Jazz Orchestra at the Tomisato Jazz Festival.
“The relationships we have forged in Japan are important and inspirational to our educational model, especially in the arts,” said Contos. “In the process, we have impacted the lives of many young people on both sides of the Pacific.”
The Japanese tours have been an important element of Monterey’s experiential jazz education programs for 27 years. In 1988, the city of Monterey was approached through a series of business networks and educational touring entities from the coastal town of Nanao on the Noto Peninsula in Japan. Having a similar boom-to-bust commercial fishing industry, Nanao analyzed Monterey’s post-cannery era revitalization strategy to become a sister city, and used the Monterey Jazz Festival as a model to develop the Monterey Jazz Festival in Noto as a tourist attraction.
Beginning in 1989, the Festival’s California High School All-Star Band began to travel to perform at its Japanese counterpart. Less than a decade later, the Tomisato Jazz Festival was added to the tour, with additional performances for the California High School All-Star Band in Tokyo, Nagoya, and many other locations.
The tours include an important part of the Monterey Jazz Festival’s experience for youth: participation in student exchanges with local music students, and residential homestays with local families. Receiving a cultural experience similar to a “study abroad” program, student musicians also gain a realistic and insightful understanding of what “being on the road” as an artist is like.
The city of Tomisato has also reciprocated by sending their own Mad Hatters Big Band to Monterey, consisting of young Japanese high school musicians to perform as guests at MJF’s annual Next Generation Jazz Festival in the spring. The Mad Hatters last visited Monterey in 2013, and also engaged in homestays with local Monterey Peninsula families.
The Mad Hatters is directed by trumpeter Masaki Shinohara, a protégé of Wynton Marsalis. Mr. Shinohara and Mr. Contos share teaching resources, repertoire, and educational learning strategies to create state-of-the-art music programs, performances, and workshops.
Other Japanese groups, including the Ishikawa Junior Jazz Academy, directed by acclaimed pianist Junko Moriya, has been modeled after Monterey Jazz Festival’s student bands and educational system. The Ishikawa group has also traveled to stay in Monterey with performances at the Next Generation Jazz Festival in recent years.
Contos has been an essential part of the Monterey Jazz Festival’s jazz education programs since 1984, and is active as a saxophone clinician, educator, and performer at various educational festivals, clinics, concerts, and workshops in the United States, Japan, Europe, Canada, and Brazil. His work for the Monterey Jazz Festival’s Traveling Clinicians Program, Next Generation Jazz Orchestra, and the Monterey Jazz Festival High School All-Stars is distinguished.
Contos is a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz, has taught at Monterey Peninsula College, and developed the curriculum and pedagogy for the Music Recording/Technology Concentration at Cal State University, Monterey Bay. He has received three performer grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as serving as a three-year term as Artist-In-Residence for the California Arts Council. In 2009, Contos was featured as saxophone soloist at Carnegie Hall as part of New York City’s Distinguished Concerts International. Later that year, he was appointed as the director of the SFJAZZ High School All-Stars.
Mr. Contos has performed and conducted performances in concert with Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Christian McBride, Dianne Reeves, Joe Lovano, Regina Carter, McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, Terence Blanchard, Joshua Redman, Cal Tjader, and many others.
About Monterey Jazz Festival
The Monterey Jazz Festival celebrates the legacy of jazz, expands its boundaries, and provides opportunities to experience jazz through the creative production of performances and educational programs.
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