Latin Music Celebration set for YVCC, Seasons

John Santos is a five-time Grammy nominee, Memo Acevedo has collaborated with Tito Puente, Carlos Cascante is among the Northwest's most highly regarded Latin music vocalists -- and they'll be here next week, performing and teaching music to local students.

Those three and nine other Latin music luminaries from around the country are part of the Latin Music Celebration, hosted by Yakima Valley Community College and The Seasons Performance Hall. The lineup includes ethnomusicologists such as the University of Washington's Shannon Dudley and dance experts such as Vanessa Villalobos, director of a New York-based entertainment company as well.

"The artists we have coming in are really major players in Latin music," says Seasons marketing coordinator Ellie Strosahl. "They're from New York and Seattle and the Bay Area, and they're coming here to work with students."

Now in its fourth year, the weeklong series of workshops and performances has grown from about 350 student participants to the several thousand expected this year, according to David Blink, YVCC's director of instrumental music and jazz studies.

It culminates with a massive May 8 grand finale concert featuring the visiting artists alongside a 200-student choir and bands from YVCC, Toppenish High School and Sunnyside High School. The show, which will incorporate salsa, marimba, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Peruvian, Brazilian and Colombian music, is a kind of distillation of the entire festival's ethos: that music can inspire, bring people together and foster cross-cultural understanding.

"It's not necessarily about YVCC," Blink says. "It's not necessarily about the professional artists. It's about bringing the community together."

For students, the festival is an opportunity to find role models among professional musicians. Putting them together in such close, hands-on proximity can have a profound effect on students, says Jeff Chapman, the Franklin Middle School band director and participant in the event since its inaugural year. It takes the artists down from the pedestals that students put them on, and allows them to relate on a person-to-person level.

"That's just such an inspirational thing," he says. "It shows that maybe, with a little extra push, they can achieve things they weren't aware they could achieve."

And that lesson can last long after the festival's grand finale.

"Some of them realize, 'I'm not quite able to do it as well as I'd like to right now, but I'm not far off,'" Chapman says. "It just gives them an a-ha moment, and they can take off from there."

The opportunity to see that happen is one reason such accomplished musicians are drawn to the Latin Music Celebration as faculty, says Acevedo, a Colombian-born drum virtuoso and member of the New York University music faculty who has been part of the event since its inception.

"It's this magical feeling," he says. "When you give, it comes back to you."

Core members of the original Latin Music Festival group like Acevedo have spread the word, getting others involved and growing it to the point where it is now. He and Blink have sought out musicians who are not only great players but committed teachers. For those who see the value in music education, it's not a hard sell, says Cascante, a Seattle vocalist from Costa Rica.

"Every time you work at a college or you work with students and young kids, the possibility of opening opportunities for them -- not just as musicians, but as young members of society -- is better," he says. "Music and art and sports keep people out of trouble, keep kids out of drugs."

Indeed, Acevedo says, music has a transformative power. Over the four years of the Latin Music Celebration, he's seen it first-hand here in Yakima. Kids from widely disparate cultural and economic backgrounds end up playing together and gaining some understanding of each other as humans, he says.

"Music unites us," Acevedo says. "You see it here in New York, you see it everywhere. With music, you forget about races. You forget about political differences. You have your art, and the other things are on the side. Whatever it is just disappears.

"It's magic, man. It's just really beautiful."

* Pat Muir can be reached at 509-577-7693 or pmuir@yakimaherald.com.

If you go

WHAT: Latin Music Celebration.

WHERE: Yakima Valley Community College and The Seasons Performance Hall, 101 N. Naches Ave.

WHEN: Main public events include free performances and demonstrations all day Thursday on the YVCC campus and a grand finale concert at The Seasons at 7:30 p.m. May 8. Tickets for that cost $15.

MORE INFO: www.theseasonsyakima.com.