{"id":11532,"date":"2015-08-05T15:09:19","date_gmt":"2015-08-05T19:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=11532"},"modified":"2015-08-05T15:09:19","modified_gmt":"2015-08-05T19:09:19","slug":"blues-and-cruise-to-help-breathe-new-life-into-old-musical-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/blues-and-cruise-to-help-breathe-new-life-into-old-musical-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Blues and Cruise to help breathe new life into old musical friends"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Giving young and emerging musicians a venue and an all-important audience has been a long-time mandate of the Aurora Winter Blues Festival, but this summer organizers are focusing on being with these young musicians from the ground floor.<\/p>\n

As the Aurora Winter Blues Festival (AWBF) takes on the summer with this September\u2019s inaugural Blues and Cruise, the Festival is joining forces with the Optimist Club of Aurora and The Arts music store in collecting used musical instruments for local students who can only dream of holding a musical instrument of their own. <\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of music programs don\u2019t exist in grade schools anymore,\u201d says Jamie Macdonald, co-founder of the AWBF. \u201cIn high school, students basically have to bring their own musical instruments if they want to participate in the band programs and that was a bit of an eye-opener for us. Our son was heavily involved in the music program at Aurora High School and we started doing various fundraisers to help offset the cost not only of the trips, but to purchase some of the instruments as well. They are fairly expensive and through The Arts and other music shops, they have rentals, but anyone who has a financial hardship, it is a tough decision for a family to make.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enter the Optimists.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s Blues and Cruise will include a donation drive where any and all attendees will be able to drop off their old musical instruments, regardless of condition, to pay it forward. Kimberley Kerr, president of the Aurora Optimists, contacted the AWBF and said they wanted to put an additional focus on music complimenting their existing youth programs. <\/p>\n

The seeds were planted this past winter and AWBF organizers saw a perfect fit.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have had a long-standing relationship with Patty Keele, owner of The Arts, and she has wanted to make greater inroads to local schools as well,\u201d says Mr. Macdonald. \u201cIt is a joint collaboration bringing in Patty and The Arts, and Kimberley Kerr. Jointly, we\u2019re going to be putting more focus on how we can help local schools and one effort is our drive here. We can put these musical instruments back into schools. To augment our existing Youth in Music programs with instruments is great.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Arts does repairs and we\u2019re looking at instruments that might need some light refurbishing that Patty would help out with as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blues and Cruise takes over Aurora\u2019s Town Park on September 2. Headlining the event will be award-winning blues guitarist Jack de Keyzer. The Cruise will be handled by the Aurora Car Club, who will be filling the park\u2019s ball diamond with their collective fleet of classic cars. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe are extremely excited about this,\u201d said Mr. Macdonald. \u201cJack is probably one of the foremost award-winning blues artists in Canada and just a real road warrior. He does about 200+ gigs a year and we\u2019re quite excited to have him come in. Our mandate is to showcase local youth bands, so we have Graham Young leading us in on that night and during the intermission The Arts will have a younger band coming in, so we\u2019re quite excited about that as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a little bit of everything for everybody that night.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Giving young and emerging musicians a venue and an all-important audience has been a long-time mandate of the Aurora Winter Blues Festival, but this summer organizers are focusing on being with these young musicians from the ground floor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":11502,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/2015-08-06-03.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-300","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-12 00:50:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}