Asagaya Jazz Street Student Banners

Asagaya Jazz StreetSuginami Number One Primary School

Jazz is a visual art form just as much as an aural one. A marvelous example of jazz’s visual expression could be found at the Suginami Number One Primary School’s gymnasium. For the Jazz Street weekend, the gym was hung with spectacular visualizations of what jazz looks like. Students from the school must have spent weeks of their art class, not to mention after school hours, painting their interpretations of the images, colors, feelings and beauty of jazz music.

The result was the most amazing overhead decoration of any jazz venue I have ever been in. It was startling, and enlivening, to see the results of their hard work. Everyone who walked in to the gym, after removing their shoes, immediately looked up at the banners. It was such a pleasure to drop back to an earlier stage of engagement, when music would sink deep inside you in ways that you could not explain, but that you still wanted to react to and do something with. The students at Suginami number one did something marvelous with the music.

Pablo Picasso said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to paint like a child.” The impressive jazz banners students made were an excellent remind of the importance of keeping that child’s eye, and ear, view of jazz, and of life, too. The reminder of the centrality of creativity, musical or visual, of its necessity to our lives was given color, shape and form in their works. Encore, please!