Continuing the series profiling Music Scholars at the University. This week, former BBC Young Jazz Musician semi-finalist , first-year trombonist reading Criminology, Jasper Rose.
I started playing the trombone ten years ago with the Richmond Music Trust, playing in their brass ensembles, concert band and jazz bands. After a few years, I went to the Royal College of Music Junior Department which had an extremely exciting variety of ensembles. Here, my passion for jazz grew under the tutorship of Mornington Lockett and I performed with their Symphony Orchestra, brass groups, choir and jazz groups (at Ronnie Scott’s and the 606 Club). The brass group were lucky to be asked to play on one of the music boats for the Queen’s Jubilee Pageant which was fantastic, despite the torrential rain! While at RCM some friends and I formed our own jazz combo and played private gigs in many places including the TUC Conference and the Albert Hall café.
At my secondary school I was given the opportunity to perform the Davide Trombone Concertino with the orchestra which was exhilarating.
In 2013 I was extremely fortunate to win the British Trombone Society Carol Jarvis Scholarship to study in the USA that summer on the Centrum Jazz Course which turned out to be an unforgettable and life-changing experience. My tutors included Jiggs Wigham and Wycliffe Gordon and it really built my confidence in jazz improvisation.
After reaching the semi-finals of the BBC Young Jazz Musician 2014 I went on to record (alongside Alex Bone, winner of the BBCYJM), with Nile Rodgers and Rudimental, a remix of the Chic single Le Freak. Then last summer, I was very happy to go on tour to Malta with the Stoneleigh Youth Orchestra as a guest player.
I now play with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and have performed with them across the country in places like the Hull Jazz Festival, Oxford Playhouse, Portsmouth Guildhall, Southwark Cathedral and the Rose Theatre in Kingston. I was also thrilled to record on their latest album “NYJO 50”.
Since starting at Kent I have been overwhelmed by the musical opportunities both as a performer and an audience member. I have joined the Orchestra and the Big Band as well as the student-formed Bavarian oom-pah band which are all extremely exciting and filled with possibilities for the next three years. I am hugely looking forward to all the concerts in the future, particularly playing in Canterbury Cathedral.
Read more in the series here.
The festival also offers site-specific sound-installations, spoken word performances and live music; the Quarterhouse will also welcome a Panel Discussion addressing the future of DIY spaces and how they can foster new creative ideas. Folkestone will be buzzing. Probably quite literally.
Fleeing the country and re-locating to England, the Bauhaus-trained Grete Marks had to sacrifice her successful pottery factory – all her pottery and paintings that were left behind were either lost or destroyed. Kurt Schwitters, a leading figure of the German avant-garde, fled to Norway prior to being interviewed by the Gestapo, eventually also travelling to England where, selling small paintings for small fees, he eventually died in obscurity in London in 1948.
The works on display in the gallery, predominantly pictures and some surviving pottery by Marks, include stark portraiture of friends made in England, as well as landscape views created in the Lake District and Spain. The images speak of loss, the post-emigration portraits looking out at the viewer with a sense of isolation. The floating colours of Two Boys from 1930 have a life and movement absent from stark portraits made after her arrival in England, whilst the landscapes seem to show a desire to engage with and to find a new home – they speak of new efforts to build a connection, a need to continue to create.
Amidst the mute testimony the exhibition provides, there is a particular poignancy about some of the music in the programme which Minerva Voices will perform at the #EarBox event next week. Gounod’s intimate motet, Da Pacem Domine, ‘Give peace, Lord,’ acquires a greater profundity in the context of the upheaval and terror implicit in the paintings. The medieval Kyrie setting, written by Hildegard von Bingen, sees two creative women looking at one another across the intervening centuries. There is also something especially moving about Brahms’ famous lullaby, Wiegenlied, which bids a moving, poignant farewell;’ Lullaby, good night…Tomorrow morning, if God wills, you will wake once again.’
The new exhibition reawakens the importance of Marks and Schwitters; come and experience the dialogue between art and music for yourself on Friday 12 February; admission free, more details 
