By Bret McCabe
Peabody’s Jazz program continues to grow as faculty bring community and classroom closer together.
Three days before the Peabody Jazz Ensemble makes its first appearance at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jack Rudin Jazz Championship in New York City in January, Director Sean Jones is talking motorcycles.
He and the ensemble are holed up in Joe Byrd Hall on the Peabody campus rehearsing Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s “Isfahan” from Ellington’s 1967 album The Far East. It’s one of the most elegant in their entire songbook: roughly four minutes of levitating beauty guided by Johnny Hodges’ buttery alto saxophone. Three times during the song Hodges pauses for a dramatic rest before resuming the cascading melody. Jones and the ensemble are trying to figure out just how long those rests should be.
Jones, the Richard and Elizabeth Case Chair of Jazz Studies, encourages the students to feel the pause, not count it out. “What’s the best part about jumping a motorcycle?” he asks. A few students throw out responses before somebody says what he’s looking for.
“Being in the air!” Jones enthuses, adding that there’s this fleeting moment where it feels like you’re floating. “That’s what we want to do here,” Jones says to Thomas Schinabeck, the second-year alto saxophonist tasked with the solo part, “we want to feel that moment for as long as we can before we have to come down.”
Jones “is the master of the metaphor,” says Keller Remington, a second-year trumpet player. “He says the trumpet is the mirror of the mind, and jazz music is like that. The way you play is a reflection of your life. And working with [Jones] has made me more serious about jazz, obviously, but it’s also made me connect music more to my life.”
Remington is zeroing in on one of the broad outcomes Jones envisions for Peabody’s Jazz program. “We don’t want just great musicians—we want great musician-citizens,” Jones says. “I want to create an environment that deals with the pedagogy that’s required to learn this music in an organic way but also gives students the ability to fail forward: we’ll help you to find out who you are.”
Since arriving at Peabody in 2018, Jones and his faculty colleagues have shored up a Jazz program to do just that. The program currently houses more than 60 undergraduates and this fall launches a fellowship that covers tuition and a stipend for up to three students in master’s or graduate performance degree programs.
Peabody Jazz sustains partnerships with local clubs, such as An die Musik, the Creative Alliance at the Patterson, Keystone Korner, and West Baltimore’s Caton Castle, for performances featuring students and faculty. New faculty have arrived, most recently trombonist Javier Nero and guitarist Marvin Sewell, and a recent partnership with Keystone Korner brings touring musicians to campus for master classes.
Simply, Jones envisions Peabody Jazz to be an incubating space for creative discovery. Jazz is “the greatest representation of democracy in that it allows you to have individual freedom with respect to the group,” he says, echoing an idea explored by writers such as Stanley Crouch, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray and musicians from Ellington to trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the founder and managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
“Who are you? What are you about? What trauma have you experienced? All that stuff informs the music, so we try to encourage folks to explore who they are as individuals so they’ll be able to graduate and say, ‘This is who I am as an artist, this is what I believe, and this is how my unique individual experience is connected to the community around me.’”
“What Sean Jones and the faculty colleagues he has attracted have done for the Jazz program at Peabody in a very brief five years, that included a pandemic, is nothing short of miraculous,” says Dean Fred Bronstein. “He effectively has rebuilt a high-level program to be highly competitive nationally and, at the same time, community-based and rooted. He has truly put Jazz at Peabody on the map, and knowing Sean, the best is yet to come.”
That vision is blossoming. The Peabody Jazz Ensemble didn’t win the Jack Rudin Competition’s grand prize, though its saxophone and trumpet sections were singled out for collective recognition, as were a few individual players. Third-year student Kevin Tzanetis was named Honorable Mention Trumpet, and both Schinabeck and first-year student Ebban Dorsey were named Outstanding Alto Saxophone. Writing on Instagram, Jones noted that five years after he took “likely the biggest career risk of my life” to relaunch the Jazz program at America’s oldest conservatory, “the greatest win is the fact that we were even there.”
“He effectively has rebuilt a high-level program to be highly competitive nationally and, at the same time, community based and rooted.”
That vision is blossoming. The Peabody Jazz Ensemble didn’t win the Jack Rudin Competition’s grand prize, though its saxophone and trumpet sections were singled out for collective recognition, as were a few individual players. Third-year student Kevin Tzanetis was named Honorable Mention Trumpet, and both Schinabeck and first-year student Ebban Dorsey were named Outstanding Alto Saxophone. Writing on Instagram, Jones noted that five years after he took “likely the biggest career risk of my life” to relaunch the Jazz program at America’s oldest conservatory, “the greatest win is the fact that we were even there.”
Bolstering 'The Hang'
The 2023 Jack Rudin Jazz Championship brought nine college and university bands from around the country to New York. Marsalis personally invited Peabody, an invitation Jones notes was nearly 20 years in the making. Marsalis tapped Jones to be Jazz at Lincoln Center’s lead trumpeter from 2004 to 2010, and during that time Jones developed relationships with Marsalis and Todd Stall, the program’s vice president of education.
Last fall they asked Jones what was going on at Peabody. “And I thought it was the perfect time that we start telling the story that we’re here to stay,” Jones says of the Jazz program. “We are America’s oldest conservatory and, perhaps for the first time in its history, there is a serious move to curate the music of the Americas, leaning into what it means to be a sonic representation of American culture. They were excited about that.”
On the Sunday afternoon following the competition’s performances, Marsalis and the four other judges come onstage to talk about what they’ve heard. Drummer Jeff Hamilton, saxophonist Ted Nash, vocalist Catherine Russell, and trumpeter Bijon Watson all speak specifically to their instrumental specialties, but they also remark on what they didn’t hear during solos.
“We all need to find a way to express something that’s deeply personal in this music,” Nash says. “Expression isn’t the technical choices we make to sound expressive, it’s how naturally those things happen because of what we’re feeling and what we’re thinking. That’s what I think we need to explore more in this music: What is personal or deep with us about this music?”
An educator since 2003, Jones understands. “The pedagogical depth is probably higher than it’s ever been in the music,” Jones says of today’s jazz students, whose early training is a mix of school bands, church or community playing, private lessons, and jazz camps. “What none of them have, usually, is how the music relates to their own individual person, and how that person relates to the society that they’re in. That is our responsibility as a jazz community [to teach] and that is what we want to focus on.”
A key component to teaching jazz is what Jones likes to call “the hang,” emphasizing outside-the-classroom experiences listening to and talking and performing with other musicians, which touches on a familiar dilemma in jazz higher education. Jazz is a syncretic African American idiom forged through the struggle of Black people. Historically, jazz musicians learned on the proverbial job: at the foot of mentors, in cutting contests and jam sessions, etc. Higher music education in the U.S. by and large replicates European music and training models.
Five years in, Peabody’s “hang” has much sharper focus. The Peabody Keystone Korner Guest Artist series has this year alone brought Cuban percussionist Ignacio Berroa, saxophonist Charles McPherson, guitarist Mike Stern and his band, and pianist Rene Rosnes and her band to Baltimore and campus, with more coming up, including Chelsey Green (MM ’09, Viola). The department created the Jazz Composers Forum in 2018 as a crucible for student composition, and this year the department introduced Hittin’ With the Younguns, where faculty join student groups for those performances (vibraphonist Warren Wolf, percussionist Fran Vielma, and Jones made appearances at the March installment).
Those events are merely the Peabody-organized ones. “There’s a lot of really cool jam sessions” around Baltimore says Laurel Fink, a second-year tenor saxophonist from Berkeley, California. She names a few of the weekly nights that rebounded during 2022 at venues such as R House, Bar 1801, and Werner’s, where students mingle with local musicians and audiences.
“Those [opportunities] show a community of Baltimore musicians and I feel like Peabody’s put me on this path of being around amazing people and being able to learn from them. For me right now, I mostly want to be on other people’s projects while I figure out my own original compositions on the side. I want to learn from other leaders how to lead.”
Playing from the Heart
Ask a jazz student today about their influences and you’ll hear some expected legends—Cannonball Adderly, Kenny Garrett, Hank Mobley, Charlie Parker. You’ll also hear them mention young, up-and-coming players such as Ambrose Akinmusire, Logan Richardson, and Immanuel Wilkins, artists who are bringing R&B, hip-hop, and other ideas into their sound. First-year student Dorsey, in fact, appears on José Jones’ 2022 album On & On (Rainbow Blonde), a contemporary jazz take on the songs of Erykah Badu, and went on a short European tour with his band in March.
“Jazz music uniquely equips those that are willing to bring their total selves to it to become the Americans we need.”
And who and what today’s students are interested in will shape the jazz to come. “Jazz music uniquely equips those that are willing to bring their total selves to it to become the Americans we need,” Jones says. “The ability to work with people who have different opinions, different ideas, different ways of playing, but you meet with a common field. You work with everyone in a chamber setting to make beautiful music spontaneously. That’s what improvisation is: spontaneous composition. We want to reflect that.”
At the competition, just before the Peabody Jazz Ensemble eases into “Isfahan,” Jones introduces the song and calmly walks offstage, leaving the band in the capable hands of Schinabeck. The saxophonist played with aching finesse and found just the right amount of hang time for the rests. “It’s written so beautifully to support that melody and I was just trying to think about playing from my heart,” he said later.
Dorsey sits next to Schinabeck in the sax section. “Even when rehearsing he brought that energy that you saw” during the competition, she says. “So I knew, immediately, that it was going to be easy to accompany him because I trusted Thomas so much.”
While performing “we weren’t even worried about it being a competition,” she continues. “We were trying to reach the audience, you know? My goal when I’m playing is to heal people in the audience, and I feel like everyone did a really good job of being themselves. We heard a lot of comments from people saying that they could hear so many different personalities onstage. And I felt that in the performance—so Baltimore, so Peabody.”
