Photograph Courtesy of Mabel Smith
The Berkeley High Jazz Program is world renowned for many reasons. Founded in 1975 and led by Sarah Cline since 2011, the Jazz Band has concerts both in and outside of Berkeley High School (BHS), such as their swanky performances at Freight and Salvage.
One of the most unique aspects of the program is the trip to Cuba that the ensemble gets to take, where they learn about Afro-Cuban jazz, a subgenre of jazz.
Oliver Cooper, a senior in Berkeley International High School (BIHS) who went on the trip, said that he appreciated connecting with Cuban culture and “the focus on connecting with others.”
Immigrants from Cuba living in the United States birthed Afro-Cuban jazz. Although white audiences often eschewed Afro-Cuban jazz and jazz in general during the 1940s and 1950s, times of intense racial segregation, jazz grew in popularity and Afro-Cuban jazz even reached Carnegie Hall with Mario Bauza and Dizzy Gillespie despite racism.
This is the fourth time the jazz ensemble has traveled to Cuba. They went in 2012, 2014, and 2016. Cline proposed the trip soon after assuming her position as director, inspired by her trip to Cuba in 2003.
Students are asked to pay for at least fifty percent of their costs for international travel, but students fundraise so that every member of the ensemble can go on the trip, regardless of their ability to pay out of pocket. This year’s trip spanned from January 26 to February 3.
The Escuela Nacional de las Artes (ENA), a very large high school for music and art in Havana, invited the BHS jazz ensemble to collaborate in cultural exchange. The 23 Americans in the jazz ensemble this year visited Cuba under the “auspices of an organization that sponsors and organizes such programs to promote people-to-people contact” as defined by the Treasury Department. PlazaCUBA, an educational tour group, organized the trip.
On most days of the trip, BHS students attended classes with ENA students and played music with them. First, they took lessons divided by which instruments they played and after that they split into two big bands, each half BHS students and half ENA students. “BHS students also have the opportunity to hear great music,” as Isaiah Hammer, a senior in Berkeley International High School (BIHS) said. This year as well as in 2014, the ensemble saw Interactivo, one of Cuba’s top pop bands. Oliver Cooper, a senior in BIHS, ranked this as his favorite band out of all the ones BHS students saw there. In addition to sheer musical endeavor, BHS students travelled through Cuba to see other aspects of the country’s culture. For example, they observed different traditional religious festivals and visited tobacco farms that provide the raw material for Cuban cigars.
Students also had the opportunity to see a live performance by Buena Vista Social Club, as well as people playing music on the street. Cooper thinks that his music skills have definitely improved, but that the most important thing he took away from the trip was the “power of human connection and music as a universal language” in the face of his “mediocre” Spanish and Cubans’ poor English.
The legacy of the Cuba trip will be one that lives on in the careers and minds of these talented student musicians who participate in the BHS Jazz Band and Jazz Program.