Matt Wilson photo by Jimmy Katz

For many years the most prestigious youth jazz gatherings of the Northwest and Southwest have been in Idaho, at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival with its enormous college and high-school jazz component, and at a similar confab in Reno, Nevada.

Cornish College of the Arts and other western Washington organizations want to change that by establishing a Seattle event that will be just as attractive to school and college bands.

They inaugural staging of their entrant into those stakes, the Seattle Jazz Experience, takes place March 14 and 15 at Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center.

That’s the old Intiman Theater, now managed by Cornish as a multi-performing arts venue. It’s a setting that would seem to stand a good chance of fulfilling the SJE’s plans.

Sixteen college and high-school ensembles are set to attend the event, the inaugural Seattle youth jazz festival that debuts this March 14 and 15, 2014 at the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center.

Rudresh Mahanthappa photo by Daniel Sheehan

The highlights of the event include mainstage performances at Cornish Playhouse by top-flight national acts: drummer and composer Matt Wilson’s Arts & Crafts quartet; the Seattle-based Cuong Vu Trio; Grammy Award-winning composer and National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Bill Holman; acclaimed alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa; Grammy-nominated trombonist and bandleader Alan Ferber; the noted Brazilian composer, pianist, and flutist Jovino Santos Neto; and composer and pianist Ellen Rowe.

The mainstage concerts are intended for both festival participants and area jazz fans; organizers are setting aside 100 seats at each of the evening events for public purchase.

Another key feature of the first Seattle Jazz Experience is a series of clinics taught by jazz instructors of renown. A coup for organizers is their succeeding in bringing 80-something Jazz Master Bill Holman to the event. Although a big-band icon whose arrangements are known to any director, he has maintained a low personal profile.

The 16 bands accepted to the event won their places by demonstrating superior skill in performing Holman arrangements, as judged by guest curator Clay Jenkins, a professor of jazz studies and contemporary media at the University of Rochester’s renowned Eastman School of Music. He conferred with the festival’s director, Kent Devereaux, a professor of composition and chair of the music department at Cornish, who issued invitations. Among those accepted are, in the college-ensembles category are Collin College (Texas), Cornish College of the Arts, Pacific Lutheran University, University of Oregon, and University of the Pacific (California). High-school division participants include Bothell High School, Chief Sealth International High School (Seattle), Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy (Idaho), Edmonds-Woodway High School, Ferris High School, Garfield High School, Glacier Peak High School, Lakeside School, Mead High School, and Seattle JazzED.

The Cuong Vu Trio: Stomu Takieshi, Cuong Vu, and Ted Poor

The last of those invitees, JazzEd, is a big-band program set up by three of the Seattle area’s all-time great influences on emerging jazzers: Clarence Acox, who directed Garfield High to national prominence; Robert Knatt, a fabled educator who made Washington Middle School a pipeline for aspiring young players headed for Garfield and other high school programs and Wayne Horvitz, the dean of the Seattle out-jazz scene who since moving here two decades ago has more than any other figure galvanized jazz experimentalism in Seattle.

The name of the event is apt, because organizers believe youth jazz musicians will be eager to come to an event in a city where they can actually experience a vital jazz scene, whether as audience members or as participants in area shows and jams. The immediate enthusiastic response of college and school jazz programs “only confirms our premonition that the time was right for Seattle to stake its claim as the center of jazz in the Pacific Northwest,” said Devereaux.

Cornish is producing the inaugural event in association with Seattle JazzED (seattlejazzed.org), whose programs serve over 200 students annually from 75 different schools with 40 percent of students receiving financial aid.

To augment the donations of some corporate sponsors, organizers will kick off a crowd-sourced funding campaign on March 1 with a goal of raising $6,000 in 14 days, which would be matched by ArtsFund/Power2Give.

Tickets for the mainstage events, headlined by Matt Wilson Arts & Crafts and Cuong Vu Trio, are on sale. For festival details, schedule, and background information on guest artists, see the festival website, seattlejazzexperience.org.