PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Students with the Roosevelt High School jazz band have just a week to raise $6,000 to cover their trip to the University of Idaho’s big Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, an event they say is a rite of passage for seniors in the band program.
Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival is one of the largest and oldest festivals of its kind across the globe. Every year, the University of Idaho hosts over 400 student jazz performances, 100 music workshops and a select few world-class jazz musicians for the event.
For most of RHS’ jazz band members, this event will be one of their last hoorahs following a high school experience that has been troubled by COVID-19. In addition to the pandemic, students say that limited funding for the district’s arts programs has hindered the band’s ability to attend out-of-state festivals in past years.
“We’ve been fighting so hard,” Stella Jones, a senior in the jazz band, said. “We got so many first-place trophies just so we can move up a division and now be competing against these bands that are so much better than us… it’s not about the trophies. It’s really about just the experience.”
Jones, who will be attending the University of Oregon after auditioning for the School of Music and Dance, says the festival will be a huge opportunity for students who want to study music in college.
Milo Schwindt, a fellow 12th-grader, says he’ll be studying science instead of music in college. Although he doesn’t plan on playing in a band after high school, he says the festival provides an opportunity for students to be a rockstar for a weekend.
According to the jazz band’s GoFundMe, organized by Jones’ mom, the trip to Idaho will cost $12,000 overall. Half of that has already been covered thanks to a fundraiser organized earlier in the school year.
Jones and Schwindt say they’ll attend the festival regardless of the fundraiser’s success, but the goal is to fully fund the cost of travel and lodging for their bandmates who may not afford it otherwise — and so that the band program isn’t “in debt.”
“We have until the 21st to not be in debt,” Schwindt said. “We did well on our fundraising the first semester, so it’s hard to reach out now and be like ‘Hey, mom, could you donate again?’… We’re reaching out to our community members, and we’re reaching out to parents and people who support our band program.”
Students told KOIN 6 that their out-of-state trip was approved by the school district board about a week ago, giving them a limited amount of time to fund the festival trip.
You can help the RHS jazz band get closer to its fundraising goal by donating here.
“People most of the time think of high school bands as a marching band thing, but we spend so much time in this class and outside of class practicing to really better ourselves in music,” Jones said. “It is not just like an extracurricular, it’s a lot of our lives. I think a lot of the school doesn’t really recognize that.”