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First Prize: Alex DugdaleRoosevelt High SchoolSeattle, Washington Taking the "A" Train I am no stranger to jazz. At least, not since I discovered what it meant to me. However, before this discovery, I knew jazz only as the music I danced to. Jazz was like the person who lived across the street from you. You know where they live, and maybe know their name, but you have never been over there for coffee. That was my relationship with jazz then, but it all changed down in the subway. In the summer of 2001, I was eleven years old and had been tap dancing for about four or five years. My dancing took me to New York that July for the NYC Tap Festival. When I stepped outside after an intense late afternoon workshop, I hardly noticed a difference between the heat generated by 30 dancers in the tap studio and the intense burning of the sun on the street. I was waiting at the 42nd St. subway station. Even the subterranean platform felt like standing in an oven. Then, I heard a sound. Not the sound of the subway, but a train of a different sort. I heard a man playing Duke Ellington's "Take the "A" Train" on the steel drums. People stood around and didn't seem to take much notice of him, nor did they seem to hear the train steadily approaching. I heard it though, the quiet yet unmistakable sound of a train rolling in at medium swing. I put on my tap shoes, and took the "A" train with the steel drum player and we started jamming to it. The people in the station started to hear our conversation and watched and listened as we spoke through the music. As we conducted this train, the crowd got with the beat, and followed us on board. Jamming with him, I was beginning to see more sides of jazz than before. I felt like the neighbor across the street had just invited me in for coffee. I saw jazz in a new light. It was not just music, but a language spoken by all those who listen and play. Up until that moment, I knew only the rhythmic dialect of that language, but I came away from jamming in the subway with a thirst to be fluent in all of its aspects. I wanted to move with it, play it, see it, read it, and hear jazz in its entirety. Two months later I had doubled my CD collection, started taking saxophone lessons and had signed up to be in my middle school's junior jazz band. From that point, I began to immerse myself in the language of jazz. I realized that many of the rhythms that I made with my feet correlated with the rhythms I played on the sax. Learning how to express myself in ways other than words opened doors for me. The "A" Train has taken me across the country and around the world, inspiring me to continue with Jazz, and encouraging me to inspire all those who listen. |
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