Student Musician Spotlight

Enrique Fuentes, Editor

Whitney M. Young Magnet High School  students are known to excel at many activities. From playing basketball, tennis, and golf to putting on plays, concerts and television broadcasts, our sports team, clubs, and groups are nationally known and succeed at anything they put their hearts into.  If you’ve ever been to one of our school’s Jazz on the Bridge events or a concert you’ll know how talented our student musicians actually are.

A few of our Jazz Band students got the opportunity to apply, and be accepted into a program offered by Ravinia, known as Ravinia Jazz Mentors.  Ravinia is one of America’s oldest outdoor music festivals and one of the most popular. What a lot of people don’t know is that Ravinia also sponsors free music programs to Chicago public school students. A few of our own Whitney Young Students are a part of these music programs including Seniors, Leo Pei, Sofia Rabiela, and Jack Fahey.  These are students who can also be seen performing in multiple concerts throughout the school year.

According to Leo Pei ‘18, the Ravinia Jazz Mentors is “very prestigious and an opportunity to work with world renown musicians twice a week.”  As a first year participant in this program, playing the baritone Saxophone, Leo claims his experiences was very stressful. “Most of the kids there are your typical music prodigies, natural talent, and kids that have been playing jazz for a while,” Leo said when asked about his experience. “I auditioned just to audition. I didn’t see how it could hurt so I gave it a try,” he added.

When asked if he plans on continuing this in the future Leo confirmed he plans on auditioning again because this was his first year and even though it may have been stressful, it was still fun. Leo is hoping that by continuing in this program for a second year he is able to find his voice in his solos.  In his first year Leo felt like he was “more focused on not getting singled out at every rehearsal that I didn’t spend time on developing my own voice as a soloist.” As time goes by we expect to hear great things from Leo in our concerts.