Canadian jazz band lodges at Colfax for music festival

A group of students from Revelstoke, B.C., finished breakfast Sunday at the Top Notch Café in Colfax and walked south along Main Street to the Siesta Motel where they had resided since Wednesday.

Musicians from Revelstoke Secondary school boarded their charter bus Saturday morning to travel to the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival and play their competition set. Travel time home Sunday was expected to take 10 hours.

They were walking back to the motel to give their bus driver some extra snooze time before he took the controls of their charter bus for the long trip back across the border and home.

Tessa Davis, band director, expected the trip home would take about 10 hours. She also expected the journey north to be relatively quiet because the 35 student musicians in the group had put in some long days at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Pullman.

They finished by attending the Saturday night concert, the sendoff event of the four-day festival on the University of Idaho campus.

“They were still playing at 11:45 when we left over there,” said Tervor Wallach, one of the adults in the group. The last shuttle back to Colfax marked the end of a 14-hour day on the campus.

The annual jazz festival attracts many Canadian bands who travel south to mix with bands from all over the United States. The unique part of the Revelstoke trip is their decision to make their headquarters in Colfax and commute to the festival events in Moscow.

The key reason for lodging in Colfax is to separate from the festival scene, catch some rest and a breakfast before heading back to Moscow for another day of music and workshops.

Wallach admitted the Colfax routine doesn’t guarantee that all members of the crew have restored their energy level each day.

“Some of these guys have all-nighters in their room,” he reported.

The Revelstoke band travels to the festival every-other year. Revelstoke Secondary, which has an enrollment of approximately 450 students, has five grade levels, so that means most of the musicians can make the trip twice during their high school years.

Drummer Jacob Wallach marked his third trip to Colfax and the festival last week. Wallach noted veterans in the group have the option of stepping aside to give younger players a chance to perform.

Davis said the band’s primary fund raising activity is selling flowers, mostly hanging baskets. Last year they sold $25,000 worth of flowers to help pay the expenses.

Revelstoke, which has a population of about 8,000 has an economy mostly based on railroading, tourism and timber.

Although 35 students made the trip this year, the Revelstoke entry in the festival competition included 18 members. They performed Saturday morning at the LDS stake center on Warbonnet Drive. The 20-minute competition set included “Barbados,” “Just Before Sunset” and “Runaway Baby.”

Davis said the band this year booked their highest score ever.

Most of the four days on campus were spent attending the workshops conducted by jazz festival participants.

Kevin Kanner ‘s classes on drumming basics to advanced techniques at the UI Administration Building auditorium was a favorite for Wallach.

The Revelstoke drummer said he liked the way Kanner called up a student drummer and worked on technique with him while the audience observed.

Another top workshop for the Revelstoke students was the Friday session on Gypsy Jazz which was presented by Jonathan Harnum of Chicago. He told the students about the career and techniques of Django Reinhardt, the legendary guitarist in the 1930s and 1940s who reached fame in Paris.

The band expects to return to Colfax and the jazz festival in another two years. Director Davis noted the trip south to the festival is not the lone long-range adventure for the group; last year they went to New York.