Jake Harper was as awkward as any seventh-grader. And he didn’t want to make it any worse.
“I was playing trumpet at the time,” said Jake, a 17-year-old senior at Winston Churchill High School. “When you’re playing the trumpet, your only two choices are playing classical music—which when you’re in the seventh grade is kind of uncool—or jazz, which is a lot better.”
He was good—good enough to be selected to play in the Blues Alley Youth Orchestra, a program of the iconic Georgetown club. Jake recalls first arriving for the Youth Orchestra’s rehearsal and finding a room full of high school students, people he immediately recognized as “serious musicians.”
Five years later, Jake has remained closely tied to Blues Alley and now boasts a calendar full of gigs, which he has lined up both through his Blues Alley connections and outside auditions. At the club, he has played in an ensemble that opened for Wynton Marsalis and Roberta Flack.
“All my jazz training, everything I’ve ever done in jazz is in some way related to Blues Alley,” Jake said.
So, when Jake won $250 earlier this month as runner-up in the first annual Jonathan T. Deutsch Musical Arts Memorial Award for Excellence in Jazz and Creative Music, there was little doubt as to where the money should go. He’ll donate $100 to the non-profit Blues Alley Music Society, which sponsors the Youth Orchestra.
The Memorial Award, judged by working jazz musicians, remembers Jonathan Deutsch, an music lover and amateur musician who graduated from Churchill in 1997 and died in a highway accident in 2002 (see box).
Jake grew up hearing his father’s jazz CDs around the house.
“It was sort of like perplexing to me. I knew I dug it. It was a cool sound. But I didn’t really understand what was going on—the relationship between the instruments,” he said. That befuddlement didn’t stop Jake, who considers it natural and is quick to point out that many people appreciate Latin chants or operas sung in Italian without understanding any of the words.
“If you talk to a jazz musician and you’re like, hey man what are you thinking about when you play … they’ll say they just don’t think, they just play,” Jake said, “Which is kind of frustrating to hear if you’re a student of jazz trying to figure it out.”
But he knows that fluidity on stage is only the result of countless hours of hard, meticulous, analytical practice.
This summer Jake is practicing 4-5 hours a day, then packing up and heading to the Summer Jazz Academy of Music, a jazz camp run by Washington DC-based saxophonist Paul Carr. He might play a bit more when he gets home.
During the school year “my thing is to practice first, and make sure I have all my practicing done. Then hopefully I get all my homework done after that,” Jake said.
Jake now plays mainly jazz piano. He felt he wanted to make the switch from trumpet because he wanted to have a role in both the harmonic and the melodic aspects of a number.
“I guess I’m a controlling person,” he said.
Getting braces in 8th grade, which he still wears provide an “excuse” to start moving away from trumpet and into piano, which he has been playing full-time for two years.
Jake called the Deutsch award a “validation” that gave him some objective measure of something that is hard to measure objectively—his own musical talent.
This year, he’ll visit music conservancies and colleges with strong music programs, with an eye to playing—and teaching—jazz as a career.
“As a jazz musician, it’s impossible to make a living just playing. You have to also teach,” Jake said. “It’s a tough life. But if you work hard, you’ll make it. It’s all about making your luck.”