Five-Week Students 'Are the Next Entrepreneurs of the Industry'

As the Five-Week Summer Performance Program comes to an end, students are heading back home with new skills, an amplified passion for music, and a phone full of friends and contacts. Here are snapshots of five students who attended this year's program.

August 15, 2016

This summer more than 1,000 students from about 80 countries and nearly every state came to Berklee's Five-Week Summer Performance Program to up their game by immersing themselves in their art. As the program comes to an end, these students are heading back home with new skills, an amplified passion for music, and a phone full of friends and contacts. Below are snapshots of five students who attended this year's program.


Timmy Stabler

Timmy Stabler was in third grade when he started angling to get into his middle school jazz band. He got a tip that the band was lacking a clarinet player, and so Stabler, until then a classical pianist, took up the woodwind. His plan worked: by fourth grade he was the youngest member of the band in his K–8 school in San Francisco.

A couple of years later, Stabler became the band’s bassist, which allowed him to start playing rock, which he loved, while still playing jazz.

Since then, Stabler has attended a local rock school and spent summers at the Stanford Jazz Workshop and the Wooten Woods, Victor Wooten’s summer program in Tennessee. This summer is his first at Five-Week.

“I was kind of worried when I came here that it would be really competitive and vibey, and people would try to judge each other,” Stabler, 17, says. “But it seemed like there was not a single ounce of judgment being passed around….I’m just really pleased with how eager everyone is to learn from each other rather than try to prove that they are better.”

But what’s really impressed him is the level of musicianship. “I’ve seen some musicians here that are doing things I thought no kid was capable of.” Back home, he says, “that type of virtuoso is so rare.” Being around these students inspires him to work harder.

“Just how people say that the only way to get good at a language is to go to the country and speak it for a long time, the only way to get really good at music or really fluent in terminology or genres is to hang out with people that play and listen to it and talk about it,” Stabler says. Five-Week is his immersion experience.


Karlea Boswell-Edwards

Karlea Boswell-Edwards only started singing when she decided she wanted to attend Berklee. That was three years ago, right after the death of her father, and she had grown depressed. Singing, she says, gave her a purpose. “I felt like, ‘I can do this. This is something I’m good at’,” Edwards, 18, says.

 

At the urging of Carmen Griffin, the jazz band teacher at her high school in Tampa, Florida, Edwards joined the group as a singer. That year, her sophomore year, she started getting so many outside gigs that she started booking her own jobs. “I like being in control,” she says.

Two years later, she got accepted into Berklee for the fall 2016 semester. Less than two months after receiving that news, she headed to the 2016 Berklee High School Jazz Festival, where she walked away with a first place prize as a jazz vocalist and a scholarship to Berklee’s Five-Week Summer Performance Program.

“I’m really getting a Berklee education, and I haven’t even started, really,” she says of Five-Week. “We’re learning about anything from modes to melodic dictation, just things that I didn’t know we were really going to be doing. It’s more than just performance, which excites me because that’s what I need as a vocalist who wants to go from being a voice to a musician.”

More: Boswell-Edwards on Cory Henry's Five-Week clinic.


Georg Klein

While working on his degree in mechanical engineering, Georg Klein started to feel that he wasn’t fully exploring an important part of himself. 

He’s been a musician ever since he started playing accordion at age 5, learning Bavarian folk songs. His love of music deepened at age 12, when he started playing trombone and fell for jazz, and it was still with him as he studied science. He didn’t want to give up either pursuit, so he enrolled in a second university in his native Munich, Germany, to work in tandem on a degree in music.

When a friend in Germany recommended Five-Week, Klein thought it would be the perfect place to test drive the possibility to blend his two callings.

“That’s why I decided to come here for the summer and to check this out, to get a little more clear [about] where I want to go, combining engineering and music and performing,” Klein, who got his engineering degree this spring, says. Like all Five-Week students, he auditioned for acceptance to the degree program at Berklee and says he is considering transferring if he gets in.

In the meantime, he’s going to dive into performance at Five-Week. One treat that stands out for him has been Sean Jones’s morning warm-up. For three mornings in a row, Jones, chair of the Brass Department, held a 7:30 a.m. get-together in which he shared his warm-up routine.

“It feels great to be part of Berklee. It’s just for five weeks, but…I think I really got a good chance to recognize what it’s like to be at Berklee.”


Daniella Spadini

Daniella Spadini wrote out her first song 10 years ago, when she was 6, and continued dabbling in singing and songwriting until she says, “I started taking it more seriously around fifth grade.”

In the few years since, she’s performed hundreds of shows at venues that include Disneyland and the California State Fair with a Top 40 cover band. She’s also played original songs at open mics and community events around her hometown of Plumas Lake, California.

 

Spadini knows she wants to be a career musician and felt that coming to Five-Week was the right move at this point in her trajectory. “I think that being at Five-Week really has helped me envision myself in the industry and know that there are certain things I’m good at,” she says. “The people here are the next entrepreneurs of the industry and making those connections, as well as companionship and collaboration, with these incredible young artists—there’s a lot of perspective to be found in that.”

Aside from the new friends and contacts, Spadini has found inspiration at Five-Week, which she says is helping her undergo a “personal renaissance” in her songwriting. She’s especially excited about being chosen as one of the 10 students who were featured in the Songwriters Showcase. She was also among the five students who sang backup in the Singers Showcase.

Spadini says she hopes to come back next summer and then attend Berklee for college.  


Taylor Goss

Taylor Goss knew he wanted to play guitar as soon as he heard the Beatles’ “Let It Be” six years ago. When his birthday rolled around, he used the money he got as a present to go to a pawn shop and buy a cheap guitar.

Then he went online and got to work learning the basics of playing. The first song he could plunk out was “Johnny Be Good.” From there his playing took off, and this year he performed at the New Orleans Jazz Fest as a part of Young Band Nation, a group he’s been with for four years. Furthermore, last year he started playing with the Tipitinas Foundation, a group that works to support Louisiana’s musical culture.

However, he had still never had formal music instruction. He came to Five-Week to begin to fix that, thanks to a scholarship from by Lake Charles' Jazz in the Arts Foundation. 

Five-Week, he says, has not only given him the impetus to learn more, it’s introduced him to new skills, like sight-reading, and concepts, like modes, that he hadn’t practiced before.

“Coming here and seeing [modes] applied, seeing where and how people use the modes, showed me that it’s something essential to the foundation of a guitar player’s vocabulary,” Goss, 18, says. “It’s just showed me that ‘Okay, I need to get down and learn what I’m doing rather than just playing what I feel.”