At 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 26, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center will celebrate International Jazz Day (April 30) with a free musical celebration in the Victoria Theater, featuring more than 100 young local musicians performing together.
The musicians will come from the NJPAC TD Jazz for Teens Moody Jazz Orchestra and George Wein Scholars Ensemble; Montclair’s Jazz House Kids; the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx; and the Valley Jazz Orchestra in Annville, PA. There will also be a special performance by the Lance Bryant Big Band featuring vibraphonist Stefon Harris.
One of the celebration participants will be 16-year bassist Lukas Wormack of Plainfield, NJ, a member of the George Wein Scholars Ensemble. A junior at Koinonia Academy in Plainfield, Wormack has been playing electric bass for years. “I was playing funk and R&B, and church music.” But when he initially enrolled in the Jazz for Teens program in spring if 2025, he was introduced to the upright bass by Teaching Assistant Dominic Carneval. “He began to let me play his upright bass,” Wormack said, “but I was just experimenting with it.”
That experimentation became a more permanent part of Wormack’s musical life last summer when he attended Jazz House Kids’ Summer Workshop. “I started off on electric bass,” Wormack recalled, “and then one of the TAs, Miss Laura Simone, took a particular liking to me, and, at the end of the camp, she gave me her upright bass. That’s when jazz started to make sense; that’s when it all clicked.”
Bassist Laura Simone-Martin has been featured in Jersey Jazz twice — in June 2022 when she was invited to join the Carnegie Hall National Youth Orchestra Jazz Ensemble and, in June 2023, when she was selected for NYO again. A graduate of Lawrenceville High School, Simone-Martin is currently a Jazz Studies major at Michigan State University’s College of Music, and she was greatly impressed by Wormack’s ability and enthusiasm. “I remember the glow he had while playing,” she said. “He was incredibly hungry and eager to learn and also an extremely quick learner. Whenever I showed him something new to practice, he was able to understand it almost instantly and pick it up with ease.”
Simone-Martin described Wormack as, “a very special and rare musician, someone who truly enjoys the journey of discovering and developing his love for music and the bass. When he told me he didn’t have access to an upright at all, I felt it in my spirit that I should give my first bass a new home. That bass is very special to me, as it marked the beginning of my own musical journey. I’ve been blessed to have artists and musicians look out for me along the way. I’ve even been gifted a bass myself, and I recognized this as an opportunity to do the same and pay it forward to someone truly deserving.”
Although he remembers listening to Miles Davis’ All Blues album when he was younger, Wormack “never actually got deep into jazz until I got into the Jazz for Teens program. I remember feeling really amazed by the whole environment they create and by the big band. In the beginning, I always liked to watch the George Wein Scholars play and rehearse. That was a big motivating factor.”
Growing up, though, there was always music around his household. “I started off on piano from an Eastern European piano teacher, Miss Olga. She taught me the fundamentals of piano and the fundamentals of theory. My mother, though, was my real teacher. She’s a singer, and she allowed me to kind of chart my own path. She played music around the house all the time. From a young age, I got a really broad diaspora of music — baby music, hip-hop, gospel. I also really liked Afro-Cuban music. I liked how when the Africans came over forcefully from Africa to the Americas, they brought their culture with them, and it still survives. They took the native culture that was already there, added European culture, and their culture; and they made so much good music. It’s just awesome.”
Looking ahead, Wormack said he “would love to do jazz in college, maybe be in a jazz ensemble or big band and do gigs. I may minor in music studies or jazz. I’m thinking of a future that does not have me touring every single week out of town. More realistically I’d like to do session gigs close by or touring for a couple of weeks.”
Laura Simone-Martin, though, believes Wormack “has the potential to become one of the greatest bass players in history, if he chooses to pursue it.”-SJ
Although the International Jazz Day in Newark is free, registration is required. To register, log here.