This coming weekend brings some overdue recognition to one of the city’s true jazz giants, Donald Brown. The pianist was born in Mississippi but raised in Memphis before going on to study at Memphis State (now the University of Memphis), where he was one of the “Memphis Three,” the trio of genius-level ivory-ticklers who emerged in the 1970s that also included James Williams and Mulgrew Miller. Of the three, Brown was arguably the most eclectic, ranging from classic straight-ahead jazz piano to more funk-influenced recordings over the course of 18 studio albums, plus appearances on records by the likes of Donald Byrd and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Through most of that time, he was a much-loved educator at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville from 1988-2020.
This Friday, September 6th, at 7 p.m., he’ll receive a Beale Street Brass Note and a tribute to his life in music at the Museum of Science & History (MoSH), complete with a concert by the Memphis Jazz Workshop (led by Steve Lee, one of Brown’s former students). And Saturday, September 7th, at 6 p.m., the Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center will host a reading by Valeria Z. Nollan from her upcoming biography of Brown. It’s a pair of events befitting a career as distinguished as Brown’s, and yet the cruel irony is that he won’t be playing at any of them.
That’s due in part to his aging. “I’ve been having problems with my hands, so I haven’t really performed for the last seven years, so it’s been kinda rough,” he says with some resignation. Yet, at 70, his mind is as sharp as ever, which bodes well for Nollan’s biography, slated for release in 2025.
Brown’s life since college has been single-mindedly focused on his mastery of the piano, but it wasn’t always thus. “I came to jazz kind of late,” he says. “Originally, I was a drummer, and then I played tuba in the marching band, baritone horn in the concert band, and trumpet in the ROTC band. Through high school [at South Side High School], even though I was playing trumpet and drums, I still knew enough about piano and harmony that I was arranging for my high school marching band. Playing trumpet probably influenced my writing more than my improvising, but playing drums definitely influenced me more as a pianist.”
And then there were the keyboardists who showed him the way, influences that came pouring out once Brown took to the piano as his main instrument when starting college. “All the great players that were in Memphis at the time just made me want to play the instrument. Booker T. [Jones] was a big influence. Marvell Thomas, Sidney Kirk, and other guys that were contemporaries of mine.” Like most Stax-affiliated players, these were virtuosos who were equally at home in jazz or pop settings. And that was true of Brown, too, as he progressed through college and began working more steadily.
“I played in a lot of top 40 bands and a lot of studio work,” Brown explains, “so I was influenced by the music of Motown and Philadelphia International, players like Bernie Worrell with Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, Prince. I was really into the group Yes and Rick Wakeman. So it was a very diverse amount of keyboard players and pianists that influenced me.”
A grounding in funk is reflected in some of Brown’s greatest jazz work, where strong left-handed bass figures can be key, as in two of his tributes to civil rights leaders, “A Poem for Martin” and “Theme for Malcolm.” Yet even those reveal Brown’s subtle mastery of classic jazz piano as well, which comes to the fore in his piece “Phineas,” a tribute to the greatest of all Memphis pianists, Phineas Newborn Jr.
Looking back on his storied life in jazz, Brown himself can hardly believe it. “I was blessed to have worked with so many other legends, like Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Donald Byrd, Toots Thielemans, and Johnny Griffin. But still, the highlight for me was playing with Art Blakey. I still have to pinch myself when I see recordings or videos and see that it actually happened. Even though I haven’t been there walking the streets with Bird and Bud Powell, I tell my students that that’s about as close as you can get to the source.”
Though you may have read about Steve Lee in the Memphis Flyer before, none of those articles have really been about him. That’s the paradox of being an educator who devotes so much time to public service, as Lee has done since founding the Memphis Jazz Workshop (MJW), one of the city’s premier institutions in music education, in 2017. The scope and impact of that nonprofit have been so great that it’s easy to forget about Stephen M. Lee, the virtuoso jazz pianist and recording artist. He’s getting in two lifetimes’ worth of existence for the price of one.
A clue to the mystery of how Lee manages to accomplish so much in both worlds can be found in the title of his new album, In the Moment. That’s clearly where he lives, as one listen to his deft improvisations will tell you. Composing in the moment, on the spot, is at the heart of jazz, and jazz is at the heart of Steve Lee. But beyond the album itself, one senses that it’s been his ability to improvise as the director of MJW that’s led to its impressive staying power. “We’ve been at about seven locations in the last seven years,” he says. Yet the MJW not only survived the onset of Covid; it has thrived ever since. “We’ve averaged from 50 to 70 students for each session since 2020,” he adds, and those numbers are only half the story.
While those individual and group lessons, taught to teens during spring, summer, and fall sessions every year, are at the core of what Lee’s nonprofit has accomplished, perhaps the greater indicator of MJW’s success has been the degree to which its students have been performing for live audiences. Case in point, this Friday, July 13th, the MJW students will command the stage at the The Grove at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC), featuring “the area’s most talented young jazz musicians in a variety of combos, ensembles, and even a big band,” as the GPAC site notes.
“This will be our third year [at The Grove],” Lee says. “It’s a great location, and they pretty much donate the space to us. Paul [Chandler] and his staff are great — the only thing we have to do is show up. It’s a great opportunity for the organization.” Moreover, MJW players can be seen on the third Saturday of every month as the featured attraction at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (the next event being August 3rd, noon to 2 p.m.).
And this is where the two lives of Steve Lee begin to meet, as some MJW students distinguish themselves enough to finally play on the bill with the maestro himself. That too will be apparent this Sunday, the day after the GPAC show, when Steve Lee will headline at the Sunset Jazz Series at Court Square.
“A few students will be playing on July 14th with me,” he says with a hint of pride. “The drummer, Kurtis Gray, is just 18. He just graduated from high school.” Flyer readers will know his name from our story on the Jazz Ensemble of Memphis, produced by David Less in emulation of the classic 1959 album, Young Men from Memphis: Down Home Reunion. “And the bass player’s also one of my former students, the drummer’s brother, Kem Gray Jr.,” Lee adds. “And then the sax player, Michael Price, just graduated from UT-Knoxville. He’s about to go to [grad school] at Rutgers.”
When Price was just a junior at UT, he shared some thoughts with the MJW Instagram page that may stand as the greatest endorsement of the program to date, saying, “The life skills that I gained from the Memphis Jazz Workshop were discipline, communication, honesty, support, love, mentorship, and community. … Understanding the intricacy of these different skills and their relationship to music is vital and you need to have all of these qualities in order to seriously pursue music, and I’d go as far as to say to succeed in life.”
In a way, it harks back to the glory days of Manassas High School, which trained generations of jazz greats here, starting in 1927 with educator Jimmie Lunceford, who polished his school band into a nationally recognized recording group, the Chickasaw Syncopators. “I think [MJW] is a continuation of what he was doing,” Lee told me in 2018, speaking of Lunceford. “But Memphis never had a jazz workshop like the workshops we have now. They always had jazz in the schools.” Today, Lee is forging that culture of excellence on his own, outside of any infrastructure, finding venues to hold classes anywhere he can, albeit now much more recognized by funding institutions, and always recruiting his faculty from among the city’s best jazz players.
He benefited from local greatness himself, when he studied under the great Memphis pianist Donald Brown (on the faculty at UT-Knoxville for many years), which in turn led to Lee’s years in New York City, prior to his return to Memphis. All that may explain the dedication and determination with which he’s thrown himself into leading the MJW. And the organization’s success has reflected well on both Lee and the city, a fact that was commemorated this past April when Lee received the Memphis Symphony Orchestra’s (MSO) Eddy Award, recognizing him as community leader in music.
“As chair of the Eddy Award selection committee, we agreed that Steve Lee embodies the award’s meaning as his incredible career has brought young people from all backgrounds, races, and life experiences together through the power of jazz music,” said Jocie Wurzburg in a statement on behalf of the MSO. Now, this weekend will show off both the MJW and Lee in their best light.
And, as he explains, his two skills feed each other, though balancing them has been demanding. “I have to be the teacher, the principal, the janitor, all of it,” he laughs. “I’m not one of those executive directors who just lets other people do it. Because, you know, it helps me. I don’t really have a lot of time to practice. So showing information to these students, that’s a part of practicing because I still have to sit at the piano and show them what I want them play. So it helps. That’s why I enjoy doing it. Because it is a form of practice, and you know, the students motivate me.”
A small choir shuffled through a throng of guests to take the “stage,” a corner in an office, performing for its grand opening. They honed in on their director Demetrius Robinson and launched into a gospel song. I don’t remember the song, but I remember the silence that fell over the crowd as these young people sent their voices to the heavens within the genre of gospel. The word “transcendent” comes to mind.
A recent article may have suggested that jazz and its incorporation in classroom instruction is a key marker of quality in high school music programs. Though I’m a lifelong student of jazz music, I still believe the following statement to be true: An educator’s lack of background in jazz should never be considered a hindrance to realizing the dreams of students or predicting student success in music.
Memphis undoubtedly left its mark on jazz history, but honing in on jazz as the sole predictor of teacher and student efficacy ignores the multitude of educators with no background in jazz who have helped students realize their dreams. The best educators of Memphis come from a variety of backgrounds, as diverse as the musical legacy of the city in which we live and treasure.
I’ve seen popular music, music production, and show-style marching band programs grow and expand in high schools. Are we in the educational field really committed to saying that jazz is the only way and any lack of it is a detriment to the level of quality a music program can reach? I firmly cannot nor will not. My jazz background is invaluable, but so are my experiences playing the blues, classical music, and with rock bands.
In high school I joined the Ridgeway High School choir. There I felt connected to music in a way I’d never felt. Literally resonating with classmates as we sang together was a revelation — a turning point that further convinced me music would be my path.
My choral teacher Jeff Brewer never professed to be a jazz musician, yet he is one of the finest educators to ever lead young people to musical excellence. Jazz is not the only path to success and to suggest otherwise discredits the efforts of music educators and students who choose a different path. So what indicates potential future success? A fierce commitment to young people and the pursuit of musical excellence regardless of genre. — Victor Sawyer
I am an advocate for music education and the teaching of improvisation in our school systems. I wanted to make sure that my statements were clear, as I am a product of school band programs. I truly enjoyed all of my junior high and high school band experiences. Additionally, I played in marching bands, orchestras, jazz bands, and wind ensembles throughout my collegiate career.
Improvisation and understanding music in relation to history and culture are skills that are one of the first tenets recommended by the National Standards for Music Education and were developed by the National Association for Music Education. With that said, Memphis is widely regarded as one of the most culturally rich cities in the world, and its music legacy has been verified by gospel, blues, jazz, rock-and-roll, R&B, and hip hop legends.
Memphis’ legendary musical status is connected with American Root Music, and it is a language worth continuing in our schools today. I am a fan of the current band directors/music teachers in the greater Memphis area because a lot of them are friends of mine and they have an incredibly difficult job.
Locally, there are several professional jazz bands that provide opportunities to play America’s original art form. There are even two New Orleans-style brass bands that use improvisation to extend their arrangements.
There are music support programs in Memphis like the Stax Music Academy (where I teach), which is an after school music program that offers classes to middle and high school students on how to improvise and play Memphis’ legacy music of both R&B and jazz. Additionally, Stephen Lee is founder/executive director of the Memphis Jazz Workshop and has one of the best youth jazz programs in the country.
Learning about improvisation through jazz offers the opportunity to deepen your musicianship in the area of self-expression. You have the chance to be spontaneous and create new ideas in the moment. Jazz encourages musicians to work together, and I have found that there is great joy that comes with emotional musical expression.
In conclusion, it is imperative that we support our music and fine arts programs, and it is my sincere hope that we continue teaching Memphis’ legacy music to all of our students of music. — Paul McKinney
Victor Sawyer is a trombonist who works with Stax Music Academy and oversees music educators for the Memphis Music Initiative; Paul McKinney is a trumpet player and director of student success/alumni relations at the Stax Music Academy.
Paul McKinney, director of student success/alumni relations at the Stax Music Academy (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
The young student knew how far the guidance of a good music teacher could take him. “It was assumed that you would play jazz,” he wrote many years later. “Memphis’s young musicians were to unwaveringly follow the footsteps of Frank Strozier or Charles Lloyd or Joe Dukes in dedicating their lives to the pursuit of excellence.” The young man had a jazz combo with his friend Maurice. “Because he cosigned the loan for the drums, loaned us his car, and believed in us, Maurice and I were both deeply indebted to Mr. Walter Martin, the band director. You could hear a reverence in his voice when he spoke Maurice’s name.”
Yet he gained more than material assistance from his high school education. “I took music theory classes after school. Professor Pender was the choral director at Booker T. Washington, and like the generous band directors, Mr. Pender made an invaluable contribution to my musical understanding.” Pondering his lessons on counterpoint, the student thought, “What if the contrapuntal rules applied to a twelve-bar blues pattern? What if the bottom bass note went up while the top note of the triad went down, like in the Bach fugues and cantatas?” And so, sitting at his mother’s piano, he wrote a song.
He had only just graduated when the piece he composed came in handy. Though it was written on piano, he suddenly found himself, to his amazement, in a recording studio, playing a Hammond M-3 organ. He thought he’d try his contrapuntal blues on this somewhat unfamiliar instrument. Why not?
That’s when the magic went down on tape, and ultimately on vinyl. It was an unassuming B-side titled “Green Onions.” To this day, the jazz/blues/classical hybrid that sprung from a teenager’s mind remains a cornerstone of the Memphis sound. The teenager, of course, was Booker T. Jones, co-founder of Booker T. and the MGs. As he reveals in his autobiography, Time is Tight: My Life, Note by Note, his friend, so revered by the band director at Booker T. Washington High School, was Maurice White, future founder of Earth, Wind & Fire. Their lives — and ours — were forever changed by their high school music teachers.
It’s a story worth remembering in these times, when the arts in our schools are endangered species. And yet, while you don’t often hear of band directors cosigning loans or handing out car keys anymore, they remain the unsung heroes of this city’s musical ecosystem. The next Booker T. is already out there, waiting to take center stage, if we can only keep our eyes on the prize.
Mighty Manassas The big bang that caused the Memphis school music universe to spring into being is easy to pinpoint: Manassas High School. That was where, in the mid-1920s, a football coach and English teacher fresh out of college founded the city’s first school band, and, right out of the gate, set the bar incredibly high. The group, called the Chickasaw Syncopators, was known for their distinctive Memphis “bounce.” By 1930, they’d recorded sides for the Victor label, and soon they took the name of their band director: the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra. They released many hit records until Lunceford’s untimely death in 1947.
Paul McKinney (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Nearly a century later, Paul McKinney, a trumpet player and director of student success/alumni relations at the Stax Music Academy (SMA), takes inspiration from Lunceford. “He founded his high school band and took them on the road, with one of the more competitive jazz bands in the world, right there with Count Basie and Duke Ellington. And I’ve tried to play that stuff, as a trumpet player, and it’s really, really hard! And then one of the best band directors in Memphis’ history, after Jimmie Lunceford, was Emerson Able, also at Manassas.”
Under Able and other band directors, the school unleashed another wave of talent in the ’50s and ’60s, a series of virtuosos whose names still dominate jazz. One of them was Charles Lloyd, who says, “I went to Manassas High School where Matthew Garrett was our bandleader. Talk about being in the right place at the right time! We had a band, the Rhythm Bombers, with Mickey Gregory, Gilmore Daniels, Frank Strozier, Harold Mabern, Booker Little, and myself. Booker and I were best friends, we went to the library and studied Bartok scores together. He was a genius. We all looked up to George Coleman, who was a few years older than us — he made sure we practiced.”
Meanwhile, other talents were emerging across town at Booker T. Washington High School, which spawned such legends as Phineas Newborn Jr. and Herman Green. It’s no surprise that these players from the ’40s and ’50s inspired the next generation, like Booker T. Jones, Maurice White, or, back at Manassas, young Isaac Hayes, yet it wasn’t the stars themselves who taught them, but their music instructors. Although they didn’t hew to the jazz path, they formed the backbone of the Memphis soul sound that still resounds today. As today’s music educators see it, these examples are more than historical curiosities: They offer a blueprint for taking Memphis youth into the future.
Paul McKinney with his father Kurl, a retired music teacher, and his brother Alvin, a saxophonist (Photo: Yuki Maguire)
Making the Scene And yet the fact that such giants still walk among us doesn’t do much to make the glory days of the ’30s through the ’60s within reach today. For Paul McKinney, whose father Kurl was a music teacher in the Memphis school system from 1961 to 2002, it might as well be Camelot. And he feels there’s a crucial ingredient missing today: working jazz players. “All the great musicians that came out of Memphis in the ’50s and ’60s were a direct result of the fact that their teachers were so heavily into jazz. The teachers were jazz musicians, too. We teach what we know and love. So think about all those teachers coming out of college in the ’50s. The popular music of the day was jazz! And the teachers were gigging, all of the time.”
Kurl, for his part, was certainly performing even as he taught (and he still can be heard on the Peabody Hotel’s piano, Monday and Tuesday evenings). “Calvin Newborn played guitar with my and Alfred Rudd’s band for a number of years,” he recalls. “We played around Memphis and the surrounding areas.” That in turn, his son points out, brought the students closer to the world of actual gigs, and accelerated their growth. In today’s music departments, Paul says, “there are not nearly as many teachers who are jazz musicians. As a jazz trumpeter and a guy who grew up watching great jazz musicians, that’s what I see. Are there a few band directors who play it professionally? Yes. But there aren’t many.
Trombonist Victor Sawyer, who works with SMA and MMI (Photo: Victor Sawyer)
Trombonist Victor Sawyer works with SMA but also oversees music educators for the Memphis Music Initiative (MMI). Both nonprofits, not to mention the Memphis Jazz Workshop, have helped to supplement and support public music programs in their own ways — SMA by hosting after school classes grounded in local soul music, MMI by helping public school teachers with visiting fellows who can also give lessons. Sawyer tends to agree that one important quality of music departments past was that the teachers were working jazz musicians. “All these people from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and before have stories of going to Beale Street and checking out music and having the opportunity to sit in. I feel like the high schools in town today aren’t as overtly and intentionally connected to the music scene. So you’re not really seeing the pipelines that you did. When you don’t have adults who will say, ‘Come sit in with me, come see this show,’ you lose that natural connectivity. So you hear in a lot of these classes, ‘You can’t do nothing in Memphis. I’ve got to get out of Memphis when I graduate.’ That didn’t used to be the mindset because the work was here, and it still is here; it’s just not as overt if you don’t know where to look.”
Music Departments by the Numbers A sense of lost glory days can easily arise when discussing public education generally, as funding priorities have shifted away from the arts. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls the years after the 2008 recession “a punishing decade for school funding,” and Sawyer contrasts the past several decades with the priorities of a bygone time. “After World War II, there was a huge emphasis on the arts. Every city had a museum and a symphony. Then, people start taking it for granted, and suddenly you have all these symphonies and museums that are struggling. The same for schools: There’s less funding. When STEM takes over, arts funding goes down. The funding that the National Endowment of the Arts provides for schools has gone down dramatically.”
Simultaneously, the demographics of the city were shifting. “Booker T. Washington [BTW], Hamilton, Manassas, Douglass, Melrose, Carver, and Lester were the only Black high schools in the late ’50s/early ’60s. So of course people gathered there,” Sawyer says. “You’d have these very tight-knit cultures. Across time, though, things became more zoned; people became more spread out. Now things are more diffuse.”
Not only did funding dry up, enrollment numbers decreased for the most celebrated music high schools. Dru Davison, Shelby County Schools’ fine arts adviser, points out that once people leave a neighborhood, there’s not much a school principal can do. “What we’ve seen at BTW is a number of intersecting policies — local, state, and federal — that have changed the number of students in the community. And that has a big impact on the way music programs can flourish. And more recently, it’s been an incredibly difficult couple of years because of the pandemic. Our band director at Manassas, James McLeod, passed away this year. So we’re working to get that staff back up again, but the pandemic has had its toll on the programs.”
Davison further explains: “The number of the kids at the school determines the number of teachers that can work at that school. So at large schools like Whitehaven or Central, that means there are two band directors, a choir director — fully staffed. But if you go to a much smaller school, like BTW and Manassas, the number of students they have at the schools makes it difficult to support the same number of music positions. That’s a principal’s decision.”
A four-time winner of the High Stepping Nationals, Whitehaven High School’s marching band plays at a recruiting rally. (Photos: Justin Fox Burks)
The Culture of the Band Room Even if music programs are brought back, the disruption takes its toll. One secret to the success of Manassas was the through-line of teachers from Lunceford to Able to Garrett and beyond. Which highlights a little recognized facet of education, what Sawyer calls the culture of the classroom. “When you watch Ollie Liddell at Central High School or Adrian Maclin at Cordova High School, it’s like, ‘Whoa! Is this magic?’ These kids come in, they’re practicing, they know how to warm up on their own. But it’s not magic. These are master-level teachers who have worked very hard at classroom culture. The schools with the most thriving programs have veteran teachers who have been there a while, so they have built up that culture.”
In fact, according to Davison, that band room culture is one reason music education is so valuable, regardless of whether or not the students go on to be musicians. “I’m just trying to help our teachers to use the power of music to become a beacon of what it means to have social and emotional support in place. As much as our music teachers are instilling the skills it takes to perform at a really high level, they’re also creating places for kids to belong. That’s been something I’ve been really pleased to see through the pandemic, even when we went virtual.” Thus, while Davison values the “synergy” between nonprofits like SMA or MMI and public school teachers, he sees the latter as absolutely necessary. “We want principals to understand how seriously the district takes music. It’s not only to help students graduate on time but to create students who will help energize our community with creativity and vision.”
Kellen Christian, band director at Whitehaven High School (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
And make no mistake, the music programs in Memphis high schools that are thriving are world-class. By way of example, Davison introduces me to Kellen Christian, band director at Whitehaven High School, where enrollment has remained reliably large. With a marching band specializing in the flashy “show” style of marching (as opposed to the more staid “corps” style), Whitehaven has won the High Stepping Nationals competition four times. (Central has won it twice in recent years.) Hearing them play at a recruiting rally last week, I could see and hear why: The precision and power of the playing was stunning, even with the band seated. Christian sees that as a direct result of his band room culture. “Once you have a student,” he says, “you have to build them up, not making them feel that they’re being left out. So we’re not just building band members; we’re building good citizens. They learn discipline and structure in the band room. That’s one of the biggest parts of being in the band: the military orientation that the band has.”
Lured into Myriad Musics But Christian, a trumpeter, is still a musician first and foremost, and he sees the marching band as a way to lure students into deeper music. “Marching band is the draw for a lot of students,” he says. “When you see advertisements for bands from a school, you don’t see their concert band, you don’t see their jazz bands. The marching bands are the visual icons. It’s what’s always in the public eye.” But ultimately, he emphasizes, “I love jazz, and marching band is the bait. You’ve got to use what these students like to get them in and teach them to love their instrument. Then you start giving them the nourishment.”
As Sawyer points out, that deeper nourishment may not even look like jazz. “Even with rappers, you’ll find out they knew a little bit about music. 8Ball & MJG were totally in band. NLE Choppa. Drumma Boy’s dad is [retired University of Memphis professor of clarinet] James Gholson!” Even as Shelby County Schools is on the cutting edge of offering classes in “media arts” and music production, a grounding in classic musicianship can also feed into modern domains. True, there are plenty of traditional instrumentalists parlaying their high school education into music careers, like David Parks, who now plays bass for Grammy-winner Ledisi and eagerly acknowledges the training he received at Overton High School. But rap and trap artists can be just as quick to honor their roots. “Young Dolph, rest in peace, donated to Hamilton High School every year because that’s where he went,” notes Sawyer. “Anybody can do that. Find out more about your local school, and donate!”
Reminiscing about his lifetime of teaching music in Memphis public schools, Kurl McKinney laughs with his son about one student in particular. “Courtney Harris was a drummer for me at Lincoln Junior High School. He’s done very well now. Once, he said, ‘Mr. McKinney, I’ve got some tapes in my pocket. Why don’t you play ’em?’ I said, ‘What, you trying to get me fired? All that cussin’ on that tape, I can’t play that! No way! I’m gonna keep my job. You go on home and play it to your mama.’
“But I had him come down to see my class, and when he came walking in, their eyes got as big as teacups. I said, ‘Class, this is Gangsta Blac. Mr. Gangsta Blac, say something to my class.’ So he looked them over and said, ‘If it hadn’t been for Mr. McKinney, I would never have been in music.’” Even over the phone, you can hear the former band director smile.
