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Hey, wanna hear some cool jazz? Stick around Mazatlán for a while, and you’re
bound to find some jazz concerts being promoted at the Angela Peralta Theater.
They’re coming for sure because the new director of the music schools at
the Municipal Center for the Arts is a professional jazz musician and a
gringo besides. Jacob DeVries, 40, Cleveland-born clarinetist, also is a
first-rate classical musician. In fact, his list of musical accomplishments
is as long as the wind instruments he plays. To look at him, tall and slim
and prematurely balding, you’d wonder if he ever sits still long enough
to play a note. Being a musician can be a tough way to make a living, he
says. The key is versatility, and his resumé shows plenty of that. DeVries
says he started studying clarinet at the age of 12 and made his professional
debut when he was 17 playing clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, baritone
saxophone and flute. He has played for Broadway-type shows, in ballet and
opera orchestras, in chamber groups and full symphony orchestras. Until
recently, he was first clarinetist in the Sinaloa Symphony Orchestra of
the Arts. Then there’s the teaching side. Like most musicians scrabbling
for income, he has spent his nonperformance time teaching. Despite the achievements
on his resume, including a master’s degree in music from Rice University,
he confesses that he always has been “a frustrated jazz musician” who intends
to organize performances along that line at the Angela Peralta Theater during
the forthcoming Mazatlán Cultural Festival. He recalls that he came to Mexico
around 10 years ago, right after completing a grueling road tour with the
New York City Opera Company. “One of the guys from the tour called me from
Toluca. He was playing with the State of Mexico Symphony Orchestra and they
needed a first clarinet because they had fired theirs and were about to
make some recordings. I was between gigs, so I went, and they offered me
a permanent job. “Musician friends |
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in New York later
got in touch and asked when I was coming back. I took a good look at my
life in Toluca. I was playing with some of the best groups in Mexico, teaching
in Mexico City, and jobs for musicians in the States were getting scarcer
and scarcer. I decided to stay put.” He says he met Gordon Campbell in Mexico
City and was offered the job of first clarinet with the orchestra Campbell
was forming in Culiacán. That brought him to Sinaloa, by now speaking excellent
Spanish. He has continued to play with the Mineria Symphony Orchestra in
the Mexican capital in the summertime. Right now, though, DeVries is busy
getting into his new job at the Center for the Arts, which has two music
schools: the Enrique Patron de Rueda School with 290 beginning and intermediate
students, and the Cruz Lizarraga School with 28 advanced young musicians
who are working towards professional, college-level bachelor’s degrees in
music. He also is conductor of the Mazatlán Youth Symphony, made up of students
who range in age from the mid-teens to about 21. The best of these budding
musicians will be getting valuable experience performing before the public
in a program called “Culture at Your House” that is taking the arts into
the Mazatlán municipality’s colonias and outlying towns. These top kids,
along with their teachers from the Center for the Arts and DeVries himself,
will participate in two gala performances of Mozart’s “Requiem” during the
Mazatlán Cultural Festival, Oct 28 and 29. Administrative work is a new
thing for DeVries, who is single and says he hasn’t time for any personal
life. He also laments the fact that until he has mastered the ins and outs
of his new position, his clarinet “has to be packed away for the first time
in my life. But it can’t happen. I have to make time to play.” And speaking
of that, he sees his main duty as the same thing: “Youngsters start to learn
at a later age here (in Mexico), but I’ve never seen such eagerness. They
really want to work and I want to turn out musicians who can play. That’s
my job.” |
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