Tuesday Afternoon

When the Esplanade is bursting at the seams with some 650 children, you probably picture Bert and Ernie or Toopie and Binou taking the stage—not a world-class, 13-piece Latin jazz band. But today, over 1200 Medicine Hat children got to experience a variety of musical stylings from the Latin traditions, and this fact alone leaves me breathless with the possibilities, the expanded horizons these children just discovered.

Hilario’s musical prestige, and also that of his special guest, Jane Bunnett, is covered in the JazzFest brochure. Please read it. If your children were at this concert, you should know whose presence they were in for an hour today. They, too, deserve to know.

I’d like to tell you what it was like to be in the Esplanade witnessing this mass uniting of children and music. There was an Afro-Cuban chant; there was a Spanish love song; there were European melodies mixed with Cuban/African rhythms; there was an African lullaby, and a Peruvian song dedicated to a girl selling flowers in the street. There were drum solos during which all audience wiggling came to a standstill. There were percussion instruments I don’t know the name for—strings of bells, a wooden box, some kind of wooden vessel. There was a soloist who told the children, “This song is hard to sing because there are so many words”—he was singing in Spanish, and the children knew they would not understand the words—“but I assure you, they are beautiful words!”

And away we went.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There was plenty of squirming. Trips to the bathroom. “Sssshhh!!” Some seating rearrangements. There were also uproarious applause and cheering, sleepy bodies curled into seats, yawns, and little bodies on the edges of seats, fingers drumming on armrests, little hands trying to clap to the rhythms.

What do the children get from listening to unfamiliar sounds and rhythms, to songs whose words they don’t understand, to music they’ve never heard before and maybe, at times, don’t even like?

They get a bigger world. They get a notion—not one expressed in words, but one that thumps in their chests with the drums, that hums in their ears with the voice of the clarinet, the saxophone, the flute—that there are ways of being, ways of doing, ways of making, that they never imagined. –CGS

Aytahn Ross warming up students before second student show

Hilario Duran

Hilario Duran's band.

Hilario Duran's band.

Hilario Duran and his band.

Lyle Rebbeck introducing Hilario Duran’s Latin Jazz Band.

Aytahn Ross warming up students before the first show.


Aytahn Ross warming up students before the first show.

Jazzfest “Ivana” (and Julie, Jessica, and Tom) greeting the students – where will Ivana turn up next?

Arrival of the first buses for the Hilario Duran student performance.

Hilario Duran, Yaelin Duran, and Joaquin Hidalgo.

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