Oberlin Jazz Quintet at King's Academy

Bassist Tim Fenton wrote about the jazz quintet's experience visiting King's Academy, a private school outside of Amman.

     On Monday January 11^th 2016, the jazz quintet travelled about an hour south of Amman to a private boarding high school called King’s Academy. On our way, we passed many small towns, farms, and empty lots filled with trash. The area around the school, which is on the outskirts of a neighboring town to Amman, seemed quite poor. We pulled up to a guard post in the middle of a six-foot tall fence that stretched all around the expansive grounds of the school. The school’s hilly campus was covered in immaculately kept grass, trees and plants local to the East Coast of the United States. I was awestruck by the uniform limestone classroom buildings as we walked on to the campus itself. King’s Academy is named in honor of King Abdullah II of Jordan and is actually modeled after Deerfield academy, a private prep school in Massachusetts, where the King graduated from high school. The King’s son graduated from King’s Academy in 2012.

       We played a 30-minute set for King’s Academy orchestral students, and performed original compositions by Max Bessesen, Matt DiBiase, Zach Resnick, and Chase Kuesel. We closed our set with a mash up of a traditional Arabic song by Fairouz and Dizzy Gillespie’s jazz standard, Be-bop. The students seemed to moderately enjoy the set while we were playing and after we played we answered any questions the students had. Many students engaged with great questions. Some asked how much do we practice or how long have we played music. One girl asked how we can understand jazz when it moves so quickly. Surprisingly, this was the only q & a session where someone asked if we had seen the movie Whiplash (which almost all of us have.)  To close out the session, we brought up any student musician who wanted to come up and we played a blues called Now’s the Time. This was one of the most fun musical experiences for me because we got to musically interact with students in a playing type setting as opposed to teaching.  The students skill levels varied, but all seemed to have some proficiency playing their instrument.

       Two teachers took us to the dining hall for dinner after our set. The dining hall served lamb pita and rice that I thought was very tasty. It was very interesting to see students in the dining hall and talk to the teachers about them. I was surprised to see tables of American students and Asian students. The teachers told us that 75% of the population there were boarding students, but more than half were from Jordan or nearby in the Middle East. The other half came from all over the world, including the United States, China, Korea and many other places.

I couldn’t help but think about how the students were able to ask such informed questions because they have access to so many resources at King’s Academy. Our experience playing the blues with students offered a great example of their access to information because many of them knew the blues form or were at least familiar with blues and jazz, which was not the case at some other schools. All things considered, I enjoyed our trip to King’s Academy not only because it was musically engaging but it was very eye-opening and thought provoking.