Since the church organ’s my main instrument, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard I had received the scholarship for my second discipline of jazz piano. Although I’d already had lessons for one year at school, I was still new to it and the upcoming galas were quite something for me to work towards.
Just before my first gala in December, we’d been on an away day to the American Museum – an excellent opportunity for me to view the artistic exhibitions in light of the upcoming performance. In fact, that was a recurring theme of the whole programme – even though everyone else was talented in completely different forms, it gave me motivation and inspiration for my unique ideas.
The final gala in March has got to be the highlight of the programme. Since I’d never played jazz completely on my own until that point (other than the gala the previous December), I was so nervous for it. A lot of this was because I just tended to repeat the same ideas during practice. Therefore, in the run-up to it, I listened to so many solos from the great Oscar Peterson to hype myself up and come up with inspiration, which certainly paid off! It resulted in probably (and luckily), the best performance of my set I’d ever done, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the turnout that day, especially from the wonderful donors.
Needless to say, I’m incredibly thankful for the whole programme, just as much for the events throughout the year as me now being able to invest in lessons over the summer, and I’m super excited to see what the other scholars get up to beyond the programme.
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