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The students were invited to perform as part of the Monterey Jazz Festival’s prestigious Next Generation Jazz Festival, which annually brings more than a thousand middle-school, high-school and college big bands, combos and ensembles to “duke it out for the glory of performing at the Monterey Jazz Festival in September,” according to the festival’s website.

Natalie Merchant is used to it by now—the startled gasp from the audience when she emerges on stage.

The reaction says more about our celebrity-crazed culture than it does about Merchant, embraced by fans in the 1980s as the hip vocalist and literate lyricist/songwriter for the alt-folk-rock band 10,000 Maniacs.

Following the brutal ethnic cleansing that ravaged Kosovo in the late 1990s, Liz Shropshire wanted to find a way to help the tens of thousands of children living in refugee camps.