Performances + Events
In June, four members of New England Conservatory’s Class of 2025 traveled to New Orleans to work with students at the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music. Over the course of four days, trombonist Aiden Coleman ’25, vocalist Aviana Gedler ’25, bassist Nick Isherwood ’25 MM, and saxophonist Lenka Molčányiová ’25 MM, all alumni of NEC’s Jazz Studies Department, gained teaching experience at the nonprofit in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward.
The Center provides the heartbeat for Musicians’s Village, which was built to provide low-income housing for the city’s musicians after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. The Center’s mission, Executive Director Lisa Dabney said, is to generate employment opportunities for the area’s musicians and offer a music-education and academic-enrichment program for the neighborhood’s young people.
The Center “delivers a broad range of services to underserved children, youth, adults, and musicians, many of whom are from neighborhoods battling poverty and social injustice” and “(offers) world-class arts programming to any child who wants to learn — regardless of ability to pay,” its website explains. The NEC alumni worked with students ranging in age from 8 to 18 during one week of the Center’s summer session.
“I was working with the bass students,” Isherwood said — “a really wide age range and skill-level range.”
“Some of them had just started playing bass the week before,” he said, adding that one of the more advanced students was improvising for the first time and couldn’t quite believe it.
“I learned a ton,” Isherwood said. “It was really good for me to quickly assess where a student was and come up with a lesson plan on the spot.”
Many students at the EMCM “seemed to have more of an innate understanding of what jazz is” than what might be expected elsewhere” in the country, Isherwood said. “I was really excited to see that.”
“They were sort of blown away by that cultural knowledge,” said NEC faculty saxophonist Anna Webber, who joined the NEC grads in New Orleans for a few days. “There’s some stuff that you need to experience” and “connecting those dots was important for them.”
Isherwood, who teaches students privately and through the Instrumental Music School of Concord and Carlisle, outside Boston, hadn’t been to New Orleans, where he said “there’s music everywhere” and “the energy is really amazing.”
Initiated and supported by Rumiko Adamowicz, who sits on the President’s Council at NEC, the residency at the EMCM was designed to give the Conservatory’s alumni “real-world teaching experience in a real jazz city,” Webber said, while providing a service.
Dabney welcomed the chance for students at EMCM to work with musicians from different backgrounds and to experience different styles of teaching, and she appreciated the “extra hands in the classroom.”
Isherwood was paired with educator Carl Lacoste in a classroom of 15 students. “I learned so much watching how he taught,” Isherwood said. “This was like a weeklong master class.”
During the four days they were in New Orleans the NEC grads visited such iconic cultural landmarks as Preservation Hall and the New Orleans Jazz Museum, and they heard a performance by local jazz luminary Kermit Ruffins. They also met celebrated jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who serves as artistic director of the EMCM, which he co-founded with Harry Connick Jr. and Ann Marie Wilkins. The Center was named after, Branford’s father, Ellis Marsalis Jr., who shares a surname that’s virtually synonymous with New Orleans jazz.
“He was really gracious and appreciative of us being there,” Isherwood said of Branford. “He seemed to be very invested in this place.”
On the last morning they were in New Orleans, the NEC grads performed several of their own tunes and arrangements and offered insights into their music and individual backgrounds.
“In a lot of ways it helped add a human element” to their work at the EMCM and was “a great capstone for the week that they were here,” Dabney said.
“Through lessons, workshops, and a culminating educational performance, graduates and students at the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music made joyful connections, and the NEC graduates gained valuable teaching experience, all within the context of a city with a rich jazz history,” said Tanya Maggi, NEC’s dean of Community Engagement and Professional Studies, through which Coleman and Gedler each completed a Teaching Artistry and Music Education Concentration. The CEPS department includes NEC’s Community Performances and Partnerships program, in which Coleman, Gedler, Isherwood, and Molčányiová participated as students at the Conservatory. “We look forward to exploring future collaborations with the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music,” Maggi said.
“Everyone is very interested in seeing it continue,” Dabney agreed.
Adamowicz, who put the residency in motion after her friend Takao Ogawa, a respected Japanese writer and musician, connected her with Branford, also agreed, eager to help foster a “joy of teaching” in a city where it’s impossible not to “feel this vibe” that defines a place, an art form, and an attitude.
