The YVCC Latin Music Fes­ti­val — Tak­ing it to the peo­ple
By Pat Muir
Yakima Herald-Republic

The con­cert you’ll see Sat­ur­day night at The Sea­sons Per­for­mance Hall is not just the cul­mi­na­tion of the inten­sive four-day YVCC Latin Music Fes­ti­val; it’s another in a line of musi­cal cel­e­bra­tions born of a years-long inter­na­tional collaboration.

David Blink, Yakima Val­ley Com­mu­nity Col­lege direc­tor of instru­men­tal music and jazz stud­ies, orga­nized the event, now in its sixth year. And, as usual, he’s enlisted s stel­lar lineup of fes­ti­val fac­ulty includ­ing per­cus­sion­ist Memo Acevedo out of New York; sax­o­phone player Juan Alzate from Yakima’s sis­ter city, More­lia, Mex­ico; and Seattle-based vocal­ist Car­los Cas­cante. Start­ing Wednes­day and con­tin­u­ing through Fri­day, the musi­cians have been vis­it­ing local schools and con­duct­ing work­shops as well as putting on pub­lic demonstrations.

“We’re tak­ing it to the peo­ple,” Blink says. “We want it to be hands-on. We’re prob­a­bly going to reach over 4,000 peo­ple. We’re work­ing these guest artists 9 to 5. They don’t do that at most music fes­ti­vals. For the amount of work they’re doing, we’re totally underpaying.”

The thing is, the musi­cians don’t mind it a bit. They’ve all worked with Blink before, some as recently as last month when he took the YVCC Salsa Band to fes­ti­vals and work­shops in More­lia and Puerto Rico. The rela­tion­ships Blink made dur­ing those trips as a musi­cal ambas­sador for Yakima make it pos­si­ble to put on a fes­ti­val like this.

“When I see some­one with the pas­sion of David Blink, I want to be a part of that,” Acevedo said in a phone inter­view before leav­ing New York ear­lier this week. “I saw the pas­sion that he had for the young peo­ple, and I have the same thing. I want to pass it on to the next generation.”

Acevedo, a Colombian-born musi­cian who has played with Tito Puente and taught at New York Uni­ver­sity, has been part of the Latin Music Fes­ti­val since its begin­ning. Like Blink, he believes in the power of music to cross cul­tural and lin­guis­tic bound­aries in com­mu­ni­ties like Yakima that are often divided along those lines.

“Music removes all social sta­tuses and finan­cial sit­u­a­tions — the rich, the poor, they all enjoy music,” Acevedo says. “The arts in gen­eral have the abil­ity to change people’s lives.”

Blink has seen that hap­pen time and again, most recently when his YVCC Salsa Band (about half stu­dents and half com­mu­nity mem­bers) accepted Acevedo’s invi­ta­tion to play at a jazz fes­ti­val in Puerto Rico.

“This was one of those next steps for the band,” Blink says. “Can we hang in Puerto Rico, which is one of the birth­places (of Latin Jazz)? It was a test in my mind.”

The band, which will play along­side the fes­ti­val fac­ulty at that grand finale con­cert at The Sea­sons on Sat­ur­day, played its own orig­i­nal music, too. That took a lot of guts, Blink says, although he says it using a dif­fer­ent anatom­i­cal term. And it worked.

“We had the audi­ence more than any of the peo­ple play­ing that night,” he says. “They got floored.”

Acevedo was there for that per­for­mance and mar­veled at “see­ing the guys under the tute­lage of David change and grow and get their self-confidence.” It’s the sort of thing he and the other fac­ulty mem­bers are hop­ing to inspire in the stu­dents they see this week.

The way Blink looks at it, a stu­dent at a local ele­men­tary school or high school may take inspi­ra­tion from one of the festival’s in-school work­shops. Whether that stu­dent ulti­mately goes into music or not is beside the point. The key mes­sage is that such a thing is pos­si­ble. Six years ago, YVCC didn’t have a salsa band; now its salsa band is wow­ing audi­ences in Puerto Rico.

“That’s what I want to share with peo­ple around here,” he says.

And, by the time that con­cert rolls around on Sat­ur­day, much of that work will be done already. Then it will be time to cel­e­brate. The show will include ele­ments from all of the fac­ulty mem­bers and many of the stu­dents, even if they don’t know yet them­selves exactly what that will look like on stage.

“It’s going to be a sur­prise for every­one,” Acevedo says. “I know the end result will be good. And being able to share that with every­one, to make the whole com­mu­nity, the audi­ence, the band, the dancers become one — to inte­grate those cul­tures — it only makes Yakima richer.”

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