Vail, Colorado… Center of the Jazz Universe?

When it comes to jazz history, Vail is a mighty long way from New Orleans or Harlem. But thanks to a self-described wannabe musician with a passion to share, the mountain town is now an important stop on jazz lovers’ intercontinental quest for creativity, as well as a haven for music education.

The Vail Jazz Festival takes its inspiration from what founder Howard Stone calls a “jazz party” that Denver businessman and concert promoter Dick Gibson threw in a hotel in Denver or another Colorado locale for decades.

“Musician friends played a lot of music and a good time was had by all,” says Stone, a Southern California lawyer who has had a second home in Vail for 35 years. “I was privileged enough to attend some of those.”

After Gibson passed away, Stone didn’t want to see this Colorado tradition pass into history. So 11 Labor Day weekends ago, he put on a jazz festival of his own.

“It was one of those serendipitous things where you finish the first one and everyone’s feeling high from the music and everyone says, ‘Gee, what more can we do?’ Then we became much more serious about it.”

Working backwards in the calendar from Labor Day, Stone and an expanding circle of supporters began dotting the Vail summer with more performances. It was culture clash at its best: Many of the performers they brought in were Southerners who learned their musical ways in Baptist churches.

The Colorado Council on the Arts began supporting the group, now named the Vail Jazz Foundation, after it satisfied a requirement to operate independently for a few years. With the Council on board, the jazz group turned its attention to schools.

“Obviously the performances are a lot of fun and very inspiring; the rewarding part is working with the students,” says Christine B. Carlson, the jazz foundation’s executive director.

Each summer a dozen of North America’s leading high school musicians are invited to Vail on full-freight scholarships. Living with host families, they take classes 12 hours a day for 10 days, learning from and performing with musicians in town for the festival.

“Some of the students have returned and performed as professionals in the festival,” says Stone. “If one of your goals is to nurture the art form, and a young kid comes back and is playing professionally, I think that’s been the most rewarding thing.”

One success story is drummer Obed Calvaire, a Haitian-American from New York who boarded with Stone and his wife. Calvaire recently was invited to play on the Jazz Cruise, an annual Caribbean voyage that sails out of Florida, with John Clayton, a bassist who was Calvaire’s teacher in Vail.

“So here’s the student being nurtured by the teacher, and now standing side by side with the teacher,” says Stone.

“Obed’s one of 50 of these kind of stories. Because the jazz community is so small, it’s really like an extended family, and there’s a great feeling of wanting to help each other and support each other.”

Of course, that intimacy can also be a sore spot with jazz lovers, who bemoan the difficulty that their art form has attracting new fans. While classic performers like Fitzgerald or Ellington are accessible to people hearing them for the first time, Stone admits modern jazz causes more head-scratching than toe-tapping.

“Unfortunately what’s happened to jazz, and probably most mature art forms, as people become more proficient, they take the art form to a higher and higher level in terms of technique or depth,” he says. “The problem is that it can leave the audience behind, and one of the great challenges for the music is to bring in the next generation of audience.”

The Vail Jazz Foundation is working on that too, with its Jazz Goes to School program. Headed by Wolcott-based pianist/vocalist Tony Gulizia, Jazz Goes to School is a four-unit curriculum reaching every fourth and fifth grader in Eagle County -- about 1,100 kids a year.

In the first unit, called “What is this thing called jazz?” Gulizia and his brother Joe, a percussionist, sneakily work in geography as they let the students try the djembe and talking drum, African instruments considered precursors to jazz drumming. A later lesson introduces some covert English composition as students write their own 12-bar blues.

The final unit is a performance in Beaver Creek’s Vilar Center by the Gulizias and the rest of their quintet, which is called the Jazz Goes to School Quintet during this gig and the Headliners when they play elsewhere.

“We try to make it very educational as well as making it a lot of fun. I think they leave there not realizing how much they’ve learned,” Tony Gulizia says. In addition to playing historic jazz selections in the final concert, the group puts some of the students’ blues compositions to music. “They come up with some pretty amazing stories,” Gulizia says.

So. Vail. Jazz. They actually do go together.

“There’s a lot of cowboys in Eagle County, but it’s pretty amazing,” Gulizia says. “We’ve got some jazz cowboys now.”