Aspen Music Festival and School

My guest today is Kebra Sayon-Charles, an American double bassist, composer, and multiple award winner who goes by the pronouns they and them.

kebra has been lauded as a virtuoso and composer of concerti ballets and pop ballads kebra has soloed with numerous orchestras including the new world symphony indianapolis symphony and wilmington symphony and was the featured soloist on a national tour with the sphinx virtuosi Other notable performances include Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Kagoshima Jazz Festival, that's a new one on me, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Library of Congress.

And Kebra was part of the Emmy Award-winning Broadway production of Hadestown and has collaborated with John Batiste at Carnegie Hall.

How about all of that? And in the middle or thereabouts, Cabra and I are going to do what I call a song fest.

I began working with Miss DeLay in 1978.

I started out going to Juilliard Pre-College, and then the Aspen Music Festival was an enormously important place for me in my formative years.

And then a few years later, in 1981, I became her student at Juilliard College.

And I studied with her.

In 2024, Aspenites voted by an almost two-to-one margin to back Pitkin County's control over the airport, which allowed it to expand the runway.

Alan Fletcher, who ran the Aspen Music Festival in school for over two decades, says much of the angst around the runway makeover centers around the NetJets set.

Once that renovation is complete, the airport's wingspan limit will expand and bigger private planes could land at the airport.

When private planes are coming, the tower has to let them land, despite the commercial scheduling, and it messes people up, says Fletcher, wearing a dapper suit.

sort of a mixture of things you know dad was a jazz guy primarily so it sort of leaned into that um that sort of milieu but we did play some like pop fusion stuff like stuff from jeff lorber he likes some of the like the 80s fusion tune 88 from jeff lorber group that was one of our big hits um I wasn't into the fiddling at the time, but I had this improvising kind of thing and not being just on the page.

I went out to Aspen Music Festival to then study with my soon-to-be teacher when I was beginning college, Paul Cantor, who I was going to study with at UM.

And but while I was out there, I met these this group of street performers that are full time street performers that they moved from Key West to Aspen every year in a 35 foot RV and just performing.

And he was a balloon clown during the day.

Okay.

I went, "W- what are you doing this summer?" She says, "I'm going to Aspen." I went, "What's Aspen?" Says, "Aspen School of Music, run by Julliard." I'm like, ding, ding, ding, ding.

I'm gonna audition, and maybe I'll get in and she'll be there, you know?

Right.

Mm-hmm.

So I'm leaving school, and I went, "Ah, man, I forgot my mail." I drive back, you know, I was only five minutes away from school, and I, it looks like a check.

And I'm like, "Wow, who owes me money?" "You've been accepted, accepted to the Aspen School of Music, and you have to be there in two weeks." I think I was an alternate, because when I got there-

So what? You're there.

Interesting.

So I'm working on a new opera right now, uh, with a British composer, Angela Elizabeth Slater, and she and I were invited to write first a scene to be performed with the Aspen Music Festival last summer.

So we picked a scene from a very vague, at the time, sort of general idea of how the story was gonna go, and we picked a scene that we thought would have a lot of drama.

Mm-hmm.

And I kind of set up a couple different things for myself.

So I went to the Aspen Music Festival in the summer, which is another particularly like...

I feel like if you're in a certain recording or educational path, everyone kind of goes through the same sorts of things.

People go to Banff, they go to Tanglewood, they go to Aspen, they do these music festivals.

The last time I've performed this was quite a while ago.

It was back in June at the Aspen Music Festival in And I'm happy to bring it to Lincoln, Nebraska, and share it with the wonderful audience there.

So I'll be performing for the first half of the concert, Granados, Maiden and the Nightingale, which is part of a very beautiful suite from the Goyeskas.

After that, I'll perform Liszt's Piano Sonata in B minor, one of my favorite works.