The world renowned trombonist Dave Taylor, one of the stars of Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, flew into Innsbruck, but not to perform at the city's Alten Music Festival or the Tiroler Festspiele. Taylor was headed a few miles down the river Inn to Schwaz, a small (pop. 12,400) town with a reputation for music festivals that is beginning to rival Innsbruck and Vienna.

Taylor was one of the featured musicians at one of several music fests in Schwaz, the Outreach Festival, a unique combination of public concerts and private tutorials that brought together some of the most respected players from New York and Austria and gave a chance for up-and-coming Austrian musicians to collaborate with seasoned professionals. Outreach is arranged as a series of tutorials, master classes and public concerts running through all of August.

Outreach is the brainchild of one of Austria's greatest musicians, trumpeter/composer Franz Hackl. The public festival aspect of Outreach is only in its second year, but the tutorial program has been going for 11 years and has produced dramatic results.

"The traditional goal of the Austrian music education system was to train musicians for careers playing with the various European classical orchestras," said Thomas Juen, Dean of Austria's Laudes Konservatorium Tirol at Innsbruck. "But in recent years there are fewer and fewer orchestras and much less opportunity for a young player to build a career playing classical music in one of these institutions. Outreach provides those young musicians with many other alternatives for a career in music."

Juen is in a unique position to make this assessment. He was one of the first students in the Outreach program.

Hackl's approach to teaching at Outreach is to expose his students to potential careers playing in smaller classical ensembles, jazz groups and even pop music. One of his students, Michi Tschuggnal, won the 2003 "Starmania" contest, Austria's version of "Star Search." Alto saxophonist Lorenz Hargassner, another Outreach product, has become a top session player who is first call for several American jazz players when they tour Europe.

Hackl's teachers are prominent figures in the classical and jazz worlds, and even some pop figures. Top jazz musicians who attended included Adam Holzman, a Miles Davis band veteran, Andy McKee, who plays with the Mingus Big Band, and Rory Stuart, all of whom also teach at the New School in New York. The best student in each year's program wins a year of free tuition for the New School's jazz program.

Other New York-based musicians who taught and played at Outreach this year included trumpeter Eddie Henderson, guitarist Dave Stryker, pianist Michael Wolff and drummer Rocky Bryant. The great Austrian trombonist and bandleader Paul Zauner, like Hackl a master of both the classical and jazz idioms, also performed, as did Austrian synthesizer virtuoso Wolfgang Mitterer. This year Andrew Ramsey, India Irae's producer, also taught in a program Hackl bills as "music and more in four weeks or less."

The festival presented a number of special concerts, including an opening show of Michael Wolff's Impure Thoughts band with Hackl as a special guest on trumpet; the debut performance of B3+, a virtuoso trio of Hackl on trumpet, Taylor on bass trombone and John Clark on French horn with Bryant backing them on drums; Zauner's adventurous band, featuring Henderson as the main soloist in a program that ranged from Eric Satie to Miles Davis; Taylor and Mitterer in a surreal but intensely emotional trombone/synthesizer duet; "Mobilbox," a concert played by Austrian guitarist Roland Heinz in a temporary installation by the acclaimed architect Peter Sandbichler; and the spectacular debut of an opera written by Hackl and Andreas Schett, "Rosemary Brown Beta Download," based on the controversial British medium who claimed to be channeling various classical musical composers from beyond the grave in her work.

Hackl delights in confounding standard expectations and stretching preconceived musical boundaries.

"If somebody is famous for one thing it doesn't mean they can't do another," he reasons. "I'm always amazed at the jazz police and the classical police, people who put somebody else down as a way of explaining what it is they do."

Hackl also believes in being brutally honest with his students.

"I always learned the most when I was either the weakest member of the group or when I was running it," he explains. "There's a conflict of interest inherent in the university educational system. As long as people have the money to pay for tuition nobody is going to tell them, 'I can almost guarantee you that you won't make it.' Everybody specializes too early. They're too focused on where you're supposed to be at 18, 20, 22 years old. They're paying their money to study for jobs that don't exist. The university system might turn out 75 to 80 trumpeters a year who are competing for two job openings."

Hackl wants Outreach to produce broadminded musicians who can play in different contexts and understand the production, distribution and promotion sides of the music business as well as the playing. He thinks the approach produces better overall musicians.

"There are no wrong or right notes in music," he states. "You have to be able to make a statement. In great music everyone leads and follows at once. You have to be able to risk everything, but because you trust the other players you still feel safe."