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Jammin' At The Symphony

http://ipraudio.interlochen.org/JacksonArts.mp3

By Jennifer Guerra

Like a lot of Michigan cities, Jackson is hurting. The economy is in the tank, the unemployment rate is high, and stores continue to close...including the few places in town where teenagers could go hear live music. That's left those who live there with not much to do on a Friday night.

"People go to Meijer, I guess. On a Friday night, you're bored, so you go to Meijer. Ooh, this is fun. You get a Where's Waldo book and you go to the food section and play cards," Wes Schwarz says.

He and a couple other college students are trying to make the local symphony orchestra the place to be on the weekends. He's managed to convince the symphony to host regular indie rock concerts.

Picture This
It's 6pm on a Friday and the under 21 set is filing into the Jackson Symphony Orchestra. They're not here to listen to Bach or Beethoven. They're here to see bands like Jolly Roger Walrus and Cardboard Cathedral. It's part of a new concert series called Jammin' at the JSO.

Before the first band has even finished doing sound check, there are already about 80 kids in the audience.

"I think it's cool! I mean, I wish there was more stuff like this in Jackson," says 17-year-old Spencer McKenna.

McKenna says she usually has to drive over an hour and a half away to Pontiac to see a good indie rock show.  Aaron Wilson found himself running up against the same problem.

An Unlikely Partnership
In bigger towns, there's a variety of local music shows and venues to go to. But in Jackson there's only a few. Over the last years they all shut down," he says.

So the 20-year old, who plays trumpet in a Jackson band called "If I Were the Sun" teamed up with his band mate Wes Schwartz to look for venues. They looked all over Jackson for a new place to play shows. Garages were out - too small. The only venues left were a heavy metal club and an arts complex called the Armory Arts project. Schwarz says the metal club wasn't a good fit for the genre, and the arts complex charged way too much to play there.

So in a last ditch attempt, Aaron Wilson knocked on the door at the Jackson Symphony Orchestra.

"People don't know what to do with a group of kids that want to hear alternative rock," says Development Director Mary Spring, with the JSO. "They think of all different kinds of scenarios in their minds: what am I going to do with these kids. How am I going to control them? Everybody likes to talk about youth, but when it comes right down to it what do you do with these kids?

Spring admits that when Wilson first approached her about hosting an indie rock concert for teenagers at the JSO she was skeptical. But she came around to the idea and offered Wilson and his friends the symphony orchestra hall one Friday a month for free. A four-dollar cover charge pays the bands.

Spring says the first Jammin' at the JSO show in June was a huge success.

"And I'd like to say to other orchestras or whatever, the kids are so pleased to have an environment to go in," she says. "You just can't believe how well behaved and receptive they are to the music they're hearing."

The Future For Jackson, And The JSO
And these kids could one day turn into ticket-holding audience members at an actual JSO performance. So it's good PR, too.

As for 20-year-old Wes Schwarz, he just hopes the concerts are enough to keep people his age in Jackson.

"You know I've wanted to get out of this town for a really long time, but I recently started to reconsider, I mean why don't people stay here? It's because we have nothing for people to stay for. You know?" he says.

Schwarz himself will be a test case. After attending the local community college for a couple years, he just got accepted to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. If the concert series is a big success, he says it might be enough to get him to move back to Jackson once he graduates.