When Avery Wilson lifted a mic to his mouth Monday night to perform the National Anthem at Madison Square Garden, New Haven music educator Harriett Alfred already knew that he was about to leave the world slack-jawed and wide-eyed in wonder. In the half-light of the stadium, and on screens across the globe, the audience saw and heard a songbird, all wide wings and full lungs, with gold feathers that shimmered as they climbed.
He was steady, certain, the sound so rich it seemed like it could go on forever, like it was ocean-deep. Somewhere in every note, there was still that 14-year-old boy running into a high school choir classroom in New Haven, a copy of Handel’s Messiah clutched in one hand.
Wilson, a Broadway performer and alumnus of The Voice who played the Scarecrow in the 2024 adaptation of The Wiz, brought that extraordinary performance to Madison Square Garden Monday night, just before the third game of the NBA Finals. As he delivered a rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” that was part-Whitney, part-Handel, New Haven was cheering him on—because the journey to that moment started right here.
Wilson will reprise his role singing the National Anthem tonight, as the New York Knicks face the San Antonio Spurs for the fourth game of the finals. The Knicks currently lead with a two-game win; the Spurs eked out their first victory of the series Monday. The first team to get to four games wins the finals.
For the artist, a 2013 graduate of Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, it's a moment to both celebrate the arts and sing to the beauty and depth of being a Black American performing a song that was not written with his freedom in mind over 200 years ago. That was especially true Monday, in an audience that included U.S. President Donald Trump, who was loudly booed when the camera panned to him during Wilson’s virtuosic “Star-Spangled Banner.”
“That song, it’s patriotic for some, but it’s painful for others,” Wilson said in a phone call Wednesday afternoon, pointing to the verses that are rarely performed that reference chattel slavery as part of the fabric of American culture. “Like, why wouldn’t I just up the octave, because I don’t want to be [vocally] in the basement. I always want to sing what we deserve, what should be happening.”
The booing didn’t bother him because it was about something and someone else entirely, he added. “I think there’s still space for us to believe as a people that we still can rise. I’m still modulating over that, cutting through the noise … it’s all planned and purposeful for me.”
The story of that moment in the spotlight, and so many that came before it, started over two decades ago, when Wilson was just a kid growing up in Hamden. As a boy, he soaked in the melodies he heard each week in his family’s church, listening to “some of the best gospel singers” when they came through the sanctuary.
At home, he was surrounded by art: his dad, Gramen Wilson, plays the flute and is a part of New Haven’s broad cultural scene, including the Elm City Freddy Fixer Parade and the Prince Hall Masons. His uncle is the beloved poet and playwright Steve Driffin, whose 1991 work Yo Street and 2022 play Death By 1,000 Cuts: A Requiem for Black and Brown Men revolutionized what theater could look like in the city (his cousin, Kendall Driffin, is also a tour de force on the stage, and a fellow Co-Op grad).
By the time Wilson was nine, he was singing, maybe through cultural osmosis. In middle school, he sang “mostly R&B and popular music,” he remembered, feeling the most free when he was able to sing. In those years, his most reliable stage was a Hamden McDonald’s that his dad ran, he told the Washington Post in 2023.
So when Wilson had a chance to attend the nearby arts high school—Co-Op is a magnet school, meaning it takes students from beyond New Haven proper—he was excited to do it. In truth, he didn’t know exactly what awaited him until he got there. And then he met longtime teacher Harriett Alfred, who helped build Co-Op’s music program from the ground up.
“Co-Op was actually a real ground for training for me,” he said. “I got to go further and deeper [than I had before] When I got to Co-Op, it was a challenge to learn something new, to stretch, to expand,” he said.
Alfred, who retired alongside band director Pat Smith last year, was at the core of that education. She taught Wilson about stage presence, about making sure his voice and body were warmed up before he performed, about learning to use all of his registers, sometimes in a single piece of music. “I would have a big chunk of me missing as far as technique” if it wasn’t for the school, he said.
At Co-Op, educators and peers alike recognized Wilson for the star he was becoming. Read To Grow Executive Director Suzannah Holsenbeck, who was the school’s arts director at the time, remembered how brightly he shone not just on stage, but also in the school’s hallways and classrooms, singing a section of a song on the way to class or practicing a trill between periods. He dazzled in a then-nascent after school dance program, and then made time to practice music with Alfred after class. Even before his junior year, when he went on the third season of The Voice, he was a presence.
“When students get to Co-Op, everyone thinks it’s going to be like the school from FAME,” and then they are inevitably disappointed by the normalcy of so much of the school day, Holsenbeck said. But Wilson was different. He brightened the school even in its most quotidian moments. “He was that student. He was FAME … a true performer through and through. He was himself every day, and always performing.”
Alfred still remembers that moment too, when she knew she had a young star on her hands. When Wilson walked into her classroom and began to sing, she was gobsmacked. She was aware, instantly, that she had a rare talent standing in front of her—not just a standout student for the tenor section, but someone who had a fierce power and work ethic already in him. And "I am humbled to have been able to have worked with such a talent.”
“I was listening to all of the acrobatics that he was doing with his voice, all of those embellishments—those come from Baroque Music,” Alfred said. She thought about Handel’s Messiah, which the school’s choir performed every winter. She handed him the tenor solo on “Ev'ry valley shall be exalted," which is one of the most vocally challenging sections of the piece.
“That boy worked hard,” she said in a phone call Tuesday afternoon. She recalled getting ready to head home one day after teaching, and hearing the rhythmic sound of footsteps down the hall, moving closer to her classroom. Alfred, who had poured everything she had into her students, was exhausted. And then Wilson popped his head into the classroom.
“And he said, ‘Miss! Miss! You can’t leave! You gave me this hard song, and we gotta practice!’” she remembered with a laugh. She protested, and he pushed back. “He wanted to get it right and tight, and that’s what he did. He gave it his all and performed tremendously well.”
In 2011, two years before Wilson graduated, he brought that energy to Broken Chains: A Gospel Hip-Hopera, described at the time as “a hip-hop rendition of the life of St. Peter” (a video from the musical is above). Holsenbeck, who helped teacher and director Christi Sargent with the show, remembered watching Wilson nail a solo, and then do a flip over the stage, his body rotating through the air before it came back down.
Already, he had that triple threat energy radiating off of him: he had literally propelled the play forward, and it seemed like nothing. So it seemed natural for him, if also a little extraordinary, when he tried out for The Voice the following year, advancing in the series even as he returned to school for his senior year.
“That was an incredible moment, because everybody was watching the show, and he would get up and the room would just fall silent,” Holsenbeck recalled. That was and is a feat, she added: high school students aren’t easily quieted. “He was always so well respected.”
Before Wilson graduated from Co-Op in 2013, Alfred gave him one more challenge. Earlier in the year, her mother, Sandra Alfred, had passed away, leaving Alfred totally bereft. Before the final concert of the year, she asked Wilson to perform Donny Hathaway’s “A Song For You.” When he did, “I needed a towel to wipe my face,” Alfred remembered. She still does when she hears Wilson cover the song, which has since become part of his repertoire.
“It was a really tough time in my life, and I needed that for my spirit,” she said. She took a beat, reflecting on what a thrill it has been to watch him soar artistically since graduating, including seeing him in The Wiz with Co-Op students who performed the play that same year.
“It’s just wonderful. I was tickled pink in 2024 when we went to see The Wiz on Broadway … I was like, ‘Okay, that’s it, I can retire now. I have reached every teacher’s dream.’ You want to see your kids succeed and just be the best that they can be. I’m just so happy that in my career, I can humbly say that I was part of his journey.”
When Wilson graduated from Co-Op, he didn't specifically envision himself in musical theater, he said. For years, he grew his footprint as a performing artist, with a steady output of music that showcases that ear-catching, wide and smooth range that educators nourished during his time in New Haven. In 2024, he received both praise and several Tony Award nominations for his performance of the Scarecrow, lauded as both playful and wildly talented, with a take on the song “You Can’t Win” that is almost impossible not to dance to.
No wonder, then, that Wilson created a specific kind of magic in Madison Square Garden Monday night—a magic that he’s conjured before, as an ostensible good luck charm for the New York Knicks who has performed for them over half a dozen times this season. In a video from the night, Wilson looks out across Madison Square Garden, stationed between the two teams. His Knicks gear, fitted and neat as a pin, glows blue and orange in the light.
At first, the song is everything that a listener might expect, carried on the rich, honeyed beams of his voice. By the second line, though, notes are weaving up and down, a rich tapestry of sound that deepens as he pushes forward.
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, he sings, and the camera pans to the president for just a moment. There’s a cacophony of booing, an angry wave of sound that Wilson sings straight through, or rather, over. Where this moment might throw a different musician off their game, it seems to give Wilson fuel: his voice soars towards the word ramparts, round and resonant as it wraps around it. By the time he gets to the hook, that voice is everywhere, with a little bit of Whitney Houston in it as it reaches the rafters.
And then, when a listener doesn’t think it can get more sonically interesting, it does. By the words Was still there, his voice dips and crests, dancing around itself as it winds heavenward. It feels like Broadway, sure, but also Baroque, and the best of pop music history, and a little bit angelic all at once. By the last lines of the song, the notes are moving in and out of each other so fast, still crisp and clean, that all a person can do is let the sound envelop them entirely.
“He blew the socks off of it,” Alfred said. And he did.
“It’s interesting to be the inspiration,” he said, when asked how it feels knowing that there are young artists just like him, some of them choir students working toward that next concert, who are watching every game and clocking every note, and rehearsing just as hard in their homes and classrooms. “It’s just crazy to know that there’s somebody that’s in the same shoes as you were.”
“The one thing you can’t do is really stop or give up,” he added. “I’m just trying to do what makes my heart happy.”