The Greene County High School Music Department was a recent host of a state music event.

The Iowa High School Music Association State Jazz Festival was last Saturday and Band Director Wes Anderson believes it was the first time in his tenure that Greene County was a host site. The high schools that performed in the auditorium included two jazz bands from Fort Dodge and Denison, along with Southeast Valley and Fort Dodge St. Edmond. Anderson comments on how the day went.

“I love jazz and I love jazz bands. It was awesome to get to hear all the judges’ different comments about how bands could improve. Also just the chance to see some of my band director colleagues and hear their bands. I’m already going to buy a couple of tunes that I heard that I think would just work really well with our jazz bands.” 

Anderson believes the new auditorium was impressive to the other schools that attended.

“They were just flabbergasted by how impressive the space is, how awesome it is acoustically. I don’t think there were any issues the whole night like you (would) have microphone feedback or different things like that. But our auditorium is built specifically to avoid a lot of those things because of the acoustic engineering of the place. Everybody who performed there was incredibly pleased.”    

Because it was a festival, schools didn’t compete against each other, but received critiques and comments from the judges. Anderson says the festival was the first performance for his jazz ensemble, after only rehearsing for two weeks prior to last Saturday. He adds the group will play again at a new event on February 19th called Java and Jazz.