OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK – The hills are alive with the sounds of jazz near Lake Crescent this week.
Jazz tunes waft through the air as one approaches Camp David Jr., on the western side of Lake Crescent, where about 60 middle school and high school students from all over the world are practicing traditional and big band jazz with internationally famous teachers during a week-long Camp Heebie Jeebies.
“I have learned so much more than I have anywhere else,” said Elijah Ward, 13, on Tuesday.
“It has been a great experience.”
Hosting the camp is a first for the North Olympic Peninsula.
The camp – named after the Louis Armstrong hit, “Heebie Jeebies,” which sold 40,000 copies and popularized scat singing, an improvisational style that substitutes random syllables for lyrics – had been held in Seeley Lake, Mont. since it started in 1995 until last year, when a scheduling conflict knocked Camp Heebie Jeebies off the map.
Bud Critchfield of Sequim, youth program director for the Jazz in the Olympics Society, decided to find a way to revive it.
He looked for a place in Washington state and found “an ideal spot” 30 miles west of Port Angeles at Camp David Jr.
Originally built as a health spa in the early 1900s, it is the oldest Clallam County park, but one of the best-equipped in terms of facilities, according to the Clallam County Parks Web site.
Camp Heebie Jeebies co-founder Karla West, who lives in Whitefish, Mont., said that she looked at other places, but decided to go with Critchfield’s recommendation, both because of the assistance Critchfield and the Jazz in the Olympics Society were offering and the fact that so many former camp attendees came from the North Olympic Peninsula.
This year, 24 students are from the North Olympic Peninsula, hailing from Port Angeles, Sequim and Chimacum-Hadlock area.
Usually, the Jazz in the Olympics Society sponsors 15 students for the camp, but this year the group sponsored more.
“We saw that this was an important thing to continue,” Critchfield said.
“We gathered up the money we needed to pay for the $500 a kid, but we knew it was something that was important and the community was very supportive.”
The teachers, said Critchfield, are “world class”
