Jasmine

Young Scholar Jasmine has played music for fourteen out of her seventeen years. She began studying the violin at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music when she was three. Her mother began teaching her to play the piano when she was five, and she soon transferred to Blair to continue her studies. Jasmine enjoys her classical studies, but her musical background has recently led her in a new direction: songwriting.
 

“I found out I could sing in the fifth grade,” says Jasmine, “and since then, I’ve never stopped.” In her spare time, Jasmine would flip through her collections of Broadway songs or her Carole King anthology, singing and playing the piano until it was time for bed. It wasn’t until the tenth grade that she began writing her own material. “I started writing songs at the end of sophomore year…I’m afraid they weren’t very good,” says Jasmine. By her own admission, she wrote her first “good” song in the fall of her junior year, entitled “Invisible Man.”
 

I found out I could sing in the fifth grade and since then, I've never stopped.

Since that time, Jasmine has written fourteen more songs, some of which she hopes to record soon. She’s just begun to explore the music scene in Nashville, scoring her first gig through an agency that found her on Myspace.
Jasmine’s style is eclectic, and she is often at a loss as to how to describe it. “It’s not pop, rock, soul, or jazz,” she says, although she admits that elements of each can be found in her music. “It’s me, a piano, and my thoughts. It’s adding emotion in music to the emotion in words, like a puzzle. So much of today’s popular music is blatantly formulaic. If there’s one thing classical music has taught me, it’s that music can never be formulaic. The stuff on the page…that’s nothing. Music is meant to be alive.”
 

Jasmine gives much of the credit for her musical ability to the support of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation (and the rest of it to her parents). Through JKCF, she has been able to study the violin at the Aspen Music Festival and Boston University's Tanglewood Institute. Also through JKCF, she was able to pursue writing in a year-long mentorship program. The portfolio she produced won a Davidson Fellowship, as well as inspiring a few of her songs. However, the most memorable moment the Foundation has given her was at the 2008 Scholars Weekend Talent Share. “When I finished playing my second song, “Color Me”, there was this sort of silence. And then there was a roar. It was the most incredible feeling. And then afterwards, there were these people coming up to me, people I barely knew, and they were crying. That was when I decided that songwriting was something I should pursue.”