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Asbury Park youth who participated in a week long summer jazz camp will perform Friday, Aug. 29 at 3 p.m. in the Asbury Park High School auditorium.

This is the fourth year The Jazz Arts Project, a Red-Bank based nonprofit organization, has conducted their Asbury Park Summer Music Camp for beginning instrumental music students at the middle school level.

“The performance on Friday is a spectacular thing to see, considering many of these children picked up an instrument for the first time, just four days earlier,” Jaclyn Boruch, spokesperson for the Jazz Arts Program, said in an email.

The program, initiated in the summer of 2012, is designed as a head-start type of strategy to reach very young students with the gift of learning to make music, according to a release from the Jazz Arts Project.

Students who participate in this free program are able to continue their musical development as they enter the regular school year with a sound foundation in instrumental music and a bit more knowledge and experience, the release stated.

Students are provided with an instrument to use during the week long camp, and each child receives specialized and personal attention and is offered the opportunity to try out different instruments in addition to their chosen one.

Curriculum has been developed and course materials, sheet music and supplies and a nutritious lunch are all provided.

Students get private lessons each day as well as group lessons, music theory, keyboard instruction and group band rehearsals.

Long-term goals for the program include extension into an ongoing multi-week summer music camp that runs in several different communities and attracts music students from all over the region, the release stated.

[Photo at top of students participating in a previous year’s summer music camp provided by The Jazz Project’s Peter Laurance.]

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