Local high school students take to the stage at Newport Folk Fest

Met School students enrolled in the Newport Festivals Music Lab will play two sets on the Foundation Stage this weekend, with one band playing Friday and the other Saturday

Photos by Dave Hansen

It was a Tuesday morning in early June, and the sounds of a jam session drifted from Newport’s Firehouse Theater, audible to any passerby. Some may have been surprised to learn the band behind the drumbeats was comprised of high school students, some of whom had only picked up their instruments at the start of the school year.

Inside, on the stage of a no-frills black box theater, a half dozen teenagers were gathered, some sitting on amps or perched on stools as they played bass guitar or violin, sang vocals, or hit the keys and drums. They were working through a song, figuring out who comes in where and at what tempo.

A calm energy and sense of camaraderie filled the theater; feet were tapping, heads were nodding. The music sounded good despite the starts and stops. No one would guess the group had only been playing together for nine months. Or that the jam session wasn’t just for fun; it was band practice doubling as an academic internship.

“What’s the tempo?” asks instructor Chris Vaillancourt. “Can someone snap?”

Margot on the drums sets the tempo as Vaillancourt sing-songs a ta ta ta and the group experiments with the pace. “It doesn’t sound as clean as it could be,” he says. No one disagrees, and the riffing continues

“How does one do a B major?” asks Vaillancourt.

Abel responds by playing the chord on the keyboard, and the music continues.

“It’s like you’re going up the mountain, and down the mountain,” says Chase Ceglie, another instructor who, like Vaillancourt, is seated in the circle.

Someone suggests slowing the tempo even more, prompting Margot, on drums, to ask: “Slower than that?”

Ceglie nods. “Subdivide in your head,” he offers. More experimental jamming follows.

“Alright, let’s try it all together, that original part,” Vaillancourt says, and drums, keys, bass guitar and violin resume blending.

“I think we’re ready to try it in the context of the song,” he says after a few moments, adding: “Faster doesn’t mean louder.”

The students run through the song again, this time with vocals. A few minutes go by and everyone is immersed.

“That sounds so much cleaner,” says Vaillancourt, his tone encouraging as he suggests mixing and matching the endings.

“I got a little lost in the sauce,” says Max, who’s perched on a stool, deep purple bass guitar in hands.

“Let it cook,” Vaillancourt says.

“Let the sauce simmer,” suggests Ceglie.

After a few more run-throughs, the group breaks for lunch.

A collaborative endeavor

Formally known as the Newport Festivals Music Lab, the program is provided by the Newport Festivals Foundation with support from 11th Hour Racing. The foundation oversees the Newport Folk Festival, to be held July 25-27, and the Newport Jazz Festival, slated for Aug. 1-3. Both events are at Fort Adams State Park.

The young musicians playing at the Music Lab attend the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, better known as “the Met.” Some are students at the East Bay campus located in Newport’s North End, and others at the Providence campus. They started making music together in September, and their culminating school project will be performing at the Newport Folk Festival this July.

The Music Lab officially launched in September 2023 and ran throughout the 2023-2024 school year, with the inaugural group performing on the Folk Festival’s Foundation Stage last summer. It returned in September 2024 in an expanded capacity, providing continued instruction to the inaugural group of students and adding a new group of young musicians to the program.

Two local musicians serve as instructors. Ceglie, a saxophonist and pop recording artist, graduated from Rogers High School and Berklee College of Music. Vaillancourt, a guitarist, graduated from the East Bay Met school in 2010. The two host the NEE Jam Session — a community gathering with a backing band that welcomes people of all musical abilities to play or to listen — on the very same stage where the teens are gathered on the first and third Mondays of each month.

Together, they’ve structured the lab around the needs of the students. The result, says Ceglie, is something “new, experimental, and very modern — it’s a real-world music application.”

Students learn music theory and how to jive as artists who must listen to and be in conversation with one another. They are exposed to elements of the music industry, with field trips to a recording studio, music venues, and last December, a performance of Shakey Graves — a favorite at the Newport Folk Fest — in Providence.

“We’re teaching music from every angle,” explains Ceglie.

“The whole point of the class is collaboration,” he adds.

“When we come together, we’re a band.”

From the classroom to the stage — and beyond

As part of the Music Lab, students are required to take ten private music lessons. (Newport Festivals Foundation has another program that provides free private music lessons for Rhode Island students ages 9-18. Locally, lessons take place at Newport Music on Bellevue Avenue, just down from Pasta Beach.) Any student who does not own an instrument at the start of the school year is eligible to receive one, for free, upon completing ten music lessons.

The Music Lab is open for classes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. This year’s Wednesday group included two high school sophomores and six graduating seniors. One of them, Sasha, has been awarded a full scholarship to Salve Regina University to study music. That opportunity came about, in part, when a music professor at Salve saw Sasha perform last summer at the Jazz Fest Gala.

None of the students in the Tuesday group has ever been to the folk festival, where 10,000 people pass through Fort Adams each day of the three-day event to see musicians perform on three main stages and two side stages. “Newport Festivals Music Lab” is in the lineup of 2025 Pop-Up Artists scheduled to perform a 25-minute set of four to five songs on the Foundation Stage.

“Our band is on the same poster as Cameron Winters,” said Margot, a bit bemused, as she scrolled through the lineup during a recent rehearsal. She and her bandmates were enthused to see Alex G, Remi Wolf, and Public Enemy among the acts scheduled to perform at the sold-out festival.

Learning the music language

“That solo is so hard, I was sweatin’ up there,” says Chyzel, who’d been perched on an amp with her teal bass guitar until the group broke for lunch. A junior who attends the Met’s Providence campus, she learned to play bass this year and earned her guitar through the program. “It’s my baby,” she says.

Margot, another junior from the Providence campus, has played drums for six years. Through the program, she earned her own drum set — her first. Dan Swain, director of development and programs at the Newport Festivals Foundation, proudly delivered it to her during rehearsal, to great fanfare from
her teachers and peers.

“I’ve been singing since before I could talk,” says vocalist Nyrsalee, another junior from the Met’s Providence campus. She believes being in a band requires a lot of listening: “You listen, do it. Listen, do it,” she explains.

“You have to listen to the whole band,” agrees Max, a junior at the Newport campus. He’s played guitar for two years and composed the song the band was rehearsing and trying to perfect that afternoon in early June.

Sedra, also a junior at the Newport campus, has played the violin since she was nine. “I’ve always been interested in music,” she says.

Abel is another student at the Newport campus (“Newport, born and raised,” he says with pride) and the only freshman in the group. He has played piano since middle school and is the band’s keyboardist. Performing in a band requires “a lot of improvisation,” he says.

There will be more rehearsals before the folk festival performance at Fort Adams. Nyrsalee says she especially loves those when there is more singing and playing music than talking about singing and playing music. For her, the crux of the experience is pretty simple: “A lot of the point of us playing together is so we can be intuitive and speak the music language.”

What to know if you’re going to the festival:

One group will take to the Foundation Stage on Friday, July 25 from 12:05-12:25, and the other group will take to the same stage on Saturday, July 26 from 12:05-12:25. If you have tickets to the sold-out festival, the best way to stay up-to-date on any changes in the lineup is to download the festival app. For more details, visit www.newportfolk.org.