The student bands honor the big band tradition. We always welcome the best of these student orchestras to our festival; their quality is really high, as is their dedication. They play with so much enthusiasm. Many jazz artists started their careers in student big bands (for instance: Roy Hargrove and Wynton Marsalis). The Mass Ave Project is a band made up of Young Russian and American musicians who are studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. The band's name is a reference to the Boston Performance Centre situated on Massachusetts Avenue. The band members are: Nikolay Moiseenko (alto sax), Iakov Kremenskiy (guitar), Evgeny Lebedey (keyboards), DJ Ginyard (bass) and Jeffrey Villanueva (drums). Although the individual musicians also lead their own bands, their love for funk-related music brought them together in the Mass Ave Project. Nikolay Moiseenko, who plays a leading role with his intense alto sax sound, won the All Russian Young Jazz Performance Competition in 2003.
