Guests from Washington, D.C.
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Davey Yarborough
In Helsinki, Davey Yarborough found himself opened to a “whole culture with emphasis on education and the facilitation of education.” Says Yarborough, “In Finland, music education is facilitated, all the way from elementary school to college. Here the mandate of having instrumental music programs in the elementary level and secondary level was relaxed quite a few years ago. We’ve been trying to recover ever since.” Seeing what he calls ‘an example of what the possibilities are when things are right,” Yarborough, despite budget cuts, finds himself newly inspired as a driving force for the move back toward that kind of level of music accessibility for all students.
Building potential international experiences for his Duke Ellington students is an ongoing priority—Yarborough has taken groups to France and The Netherlands in the past—and one he’d like to see blossom through his Finland friendships. “I’ve seen firsthand the impact of relationships built globally, young people seeing peers in another place do what they’re doing. There’s validation that this is a worldwide thing, not just something happening on my block or in my school.” Yarborough would like to take a group of music students from Duke Ellington to Finland where students explore jazz together through joint concerts, sitting in on classes, or in joint concerts. Yarborough’s dream was experienced in small part in May 2009 with the MYHelsinki Kennedy Center Millennium Stage performance where a small Duke Ellington ensemble played before the Helsinki group. “I look at the week I was in Helsinki and I know I just scratched the surface, and I want my students to get a little bit of that.”
In May Yarborough performed with his Finnish host Jari Perkiömäki, head of the Sibelius Academy of Music, and their wives at the Embassy of Finland, in a program including Ellington student Bruno George from Germany . The event, presented for an audience including former Duke Ellington students, colleagues, and friends provided Yarborough with the perfect inter-cultural platform. “The similarities, the synergy in what we were presenting in just bringing the two cultural groups together. There’s the spark of huge possibility.”