"You would be walking down the main strip, and Miles Davis is taking some coffee. Gil Evans is just sitting on the side of the street reading a newspaper." Matthew Garrison ’94
The clinics began in the ’80s as a handshake agreement between founding festival director Carlo Pagnotta and artistic director Giovanni Tomasso, on one side, and Berklee's second president, Lee Berk, and longtime administrator-of-many-titles Larry Monroe on the other. Tomasso says he selected Berklee for the partnership because he had become familiar with the school's correspondence courses through a friend. "He let me read some of the mate- rial, and I fell in love," he says. "We were kind of making it up as we went along," remembers Jim Kelly, professor of guitar, who was at that first clinic and has been to some 30 total editions of the clinics. And he means that quite literally, as he composes new pieces for the Umbria Jazz classroom each year. "If I have things I can give them that are new, you know no one else is going to be doing it." "You can change the direction of a life in an hour," says Dave Limina, chair of the college’s Piano Department, when asked what these clinics can accomplish in such a short amount of time, "if they're hearing the right things from the right people, and all of our faculty are not only world-class active performers but some of the best jazz educators in the world."
Indeed, many of the lessons are of the decep- tively-simple-but-endlessly-deep variety. Drummer Ron Savage, Berklee's interim provost, explaining that "people with exceptional talent practice the most." Trumpeter Phil Grenadier, associate professor in the Ensemble Department, parsing the difference between chops and tone—"you could play the hippest stuff in the world, but if your sound's not happening, no one's gonna want to hear it." Montgomery, choir director and professor in the Ensemble Department, on the importance of balance and vocal control—"the objective of singing in a group is listening to each other." The other draw for the clinics was—and remains— to combine that world-class musical instruction with the exposure of a world-class music festival. Students study in the clinics by day, and use their included festival passes to catch shows in the evening. "The festival combined with the course makes it a really unique experience, because you have all these incredible musicians coming in and out," says UK bassist Holly Reinhardt, who returned for a second year at the clinics in 2025. "The whole experience was just life-altering," says Garrison, the only American student to attend the clinics' first year, who says it's in all those spaces between the classroom and the stage where the program shows its true worth. "You would be walking down the main strip, and Miles Davis is taking some coffee. Gil Evans is just sitting on the side of the street reading a newspaper. You'd run into Delmar Brown . . . and you could talk with him." Over the years, the clinics' reputation grew alongside the festival, and their draw expanded from Italy through Europe and around the world. "Knowing what I know about being a young musi- cian, a young music fan: everyone aspires to come here to perform or . . . to listen to the greatest jazz in the world in such a beautiful space," says Berklee President Jim Lucchese at a 40th anniversary cele- bration for the program. "And those same musicians aspire to Berklee."
Giovanni Tommaso, artistic director, Berklee at Umbria Jazz Clinics
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