Chasen with Keyla Gordillo, Maya Martinez and Legend Dyer. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The trumpet, clean and bright as it hit the air, was the kind of thing a person could feel in their bones. The notes climbed, each so crisp it felt possible to reach out and touch them. They swooped over keys and percussion, then dipped towards the pavement-turned-stage. The instrument, almost growling, let loose a rippling cascade of sound.
As he listened, band teacher Matt Chasen looked over, head bobbing rhythmically to Antônio Jobim’s “Chega De Saudade,” and gave Maya Martinez a deep, approving nod. Then just as naturally, he passed the solo on.
Martinez, who graduated from Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School at the end of last month, is one of three Co-Op band students headed to Western Connecticut State University specifically to pursue music education, inspired largely by the lessons they’ve received in their classrooms over the past four years. On a wet, humid Monday at the end of June, she and classmates crossed the stage at the Shubert Theatre, ready for a new artistic chapter of their lives to begin.
Exactly a week before that, she and members of the school’s jazz band got into a summer groove outside the Chapel Street Record Store GRAILS, making clear that the time they’ve spent at Co-Op—and increasingly in the community—is already laying a pedagogical foundation for the work they plan to do in and after college. In addition to Martinez, WestConn-bound students include flutist Keyla Gordillo and violinist Legend Dyer.
Bassist Zakai Henderson, who performed earlier this year in the Connecticut Music Educators Association’s All-State Music Festival, will also attend WestConn for music performance. Vocalist Nadia Okwuosa, who has also talked about music education, won’t be far, either: she plans to attend the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford.
“I want to support musicians who need that same help growing up that I did,” said Martinez, a Bronx-born trumpet player and dedicated tech and musical theater kid who has also worked as a teacher in the Shubert Theatre’s summer camp. In the past four years, “I’ve come far out of my shell. Mr. Chasen asks for a lot. Mr. Chasen asks for physicality, for vulnerability in his players … from that first day, he sets a tone,” and it’s made her a stronger musician.
Were it not for Co-Op—and a string of music educators who are as precise and rigorous as they are big-hearted—it’s not clear if any of them would have made it to this point. When Martinez started the trumpet as a fifth grader at May V. Carrigan Intermediate School in West Haven, she didn’t specifically see herself staying with it—at least, not at first. Then she met band director Matt Lupoli, who became an early cheerleader of her work and her process.
Martinez only had Lupoli for a year, but it was enough to continue with the instrument at Harry M. Bailey Middle School. From Lupoli, she met Jacob Humerick, band director at the school. They clicked, she remembered: he was “a trumpet guy” himself, and saw something in her nascent skill that stuck.
But when the Covid-19 pandemic hit New Haven in March 2020, Martinez stopped playing. “I was just uninspired,” she remembered. Like many students across the state—including at Co-Op at the time—she struggled with band classes that were suddenly remote, conducted across glitchy internet connections and delays that made ensemble work impossible. She didn’t know if she’d come back to the instrument.
And then Humerick stepped in, with a kind of firm push that she now can see herself making as a teacher. When in-person classes resumed, “he was like, ‘Really Maya?’” she remembered with a smile. “Really?” At the time, it seemed like he was giving her grief. She’s since realized how much potential he saw in her.
Humerick started giving Martinez more advanced numbers, putting her alongside musicians Ash Ortiz and Zane Arcari, both horn players who are now star musical alumni of West Haven High School. When she mastered a piece, he was ready with another. It was ultimately the reason she went to Co-Op. There, she walked into the classroom that Pat Smith and Chasen shared, and the rest was history.
“When I came in, I didn’t know what was going on!” Martinez remembered with a laugh (when Smith retired last year, she added, she was thrilled to meet Christine Dominguez, from whom she has continued to learn). “From that first day, he [Chasen] sets a tone.” The rest, including a blossoming interest in tech theater, a space in the pit orchestra, and a knack for teaching her classmates, fell into place soon afterwards. “I’ve come far out of my shell.”
At some point, she realized that she wanted to do for other students what her teachers were doing for her, even and especially when it was a challenge. When she was designing her capstone earlier this year, she also thought critically about who was missing: Martinez has never had a band teacher of color. Until last year, she had never had a music teacher who wasn’t a white man. It’s what makes her want to stay in a diverse school district like New Haven.
“I’m staying here,” she said, later adding that she meant a district as diverse as New Haven. When it’s her classroom, Martinez said, she plans to keep growing the repertoire, just as Chasen has done in his deep dives on jazz musicians. “I want to stray from traditional arrangements for band and play the stuff that feeds souls.”
Chasen, who is like a second parent or cool big brother to many of his students, can already see how much her students will learn. Years ago, he remembered, Martinez was in the band room with fellow student Onix Garcia, who plays the electric bass, talking through the repertoire and practice techniques. At some point, Chasen left to make copies. When he returned, Martinez had drawn a pyramid of practice on the whiteboard. She was already on her way to running a classroom.
“To be that meticulous, with respect to the chart that she drew,” is outstanding, Chasen said. “I saw that I thought, ‘This kid is gonna do something musically.’” And she has: in addition to Martinez work in band, she has collaborated with teacher Janie Alexander to run tech for the school’s shows. Last year, she popped up among crew members at the premiere of Steve Driffin’s Be Your Own Hero at the Dixwell Community Q House. She’s a frequent and familiar face at the Shubert’s summer camp, where she’s gotten to flex her educational skills before arriving at school.
That excitement for the next chapter was contagious as Chasen handed a mic to Okwuosa, and the band slipped into Jobim’s bossa nova standard “Desafinado.” As the notes filled the air, Gordillo swayed slightly at her music stand, getting into a groove.
The lyrics—Once your kisses raised me to a fever pitch / Now the orchestration doesn't seem so rich!—floated from where Okwuosa was standing into the alley around student musicians. As they played, the smell of spun sugar wafted through the air from Arethusa Farm’s ice cream shop next door.
Gordillo later became emotional, reflecting on what it means for her to leave Co-Op and New Haven, where she’s been able to thrive in band, play in the school’s pit orchestra, and teach in ARTE, Inc.’s weekly Saturday Academy in Fair Haven. Gordillo first picked up the flute in fifth grade, when teacher José Lara was still at John S. Martinez School in Fair Haven.
Despite a nickel allergy—that means the instrument’s lip plate made her break into a rash—Gordillo loved the sound, and stuck with it even through the discomfort (she now plays with a gold-plated lip plate). By middle school, she had also picked up the piano, and was interested in the alto sax. So when she arrived at Co-Op her freshman year, she was excited to learn with Smith and Chasen.
It turned out that the feeling was mutual: both teachers saw someone who, from day one, was eager to soak up new musical knowledge, and share it with her peers. By her junior year, Chasen had gotten her a gig teaching piano at ARTE, which she loved.
Like Martinez, she thinks about the power of being an educator of color and a first-generation college student in the classroom. In addition to her nickel allergy, Gordillo has dealt with a “difficult braces process” that sometimes makes it painful to practice or perform. It helps her relate to kids going through some of the same things, she said.
“Keyla, I feel like, was born to be a teacher,” Chasen said. In and out of the classroom, he sees how nurturing she is with her peers, some of whom refer to her as a big sister or even their musical mom. Scarlett Ardon, a rising sophomore at the school who sat beside her in the pit orchestra for Chicago, is one of those students, who joked during the performance that she didn’t know what she was going to do when Gordillo graduated.
“It’s very bittersweet!” Gordillo said. “I’ve known them for like four years now and I have to get out of that comfort zone. I’m ready to start going on that path for music education but I’m not ready to leave them.”
Dyer, a violist who started on the guitar, and then moved to the viola, at Music Haven, was feeling equally bittersweet as he wrapped up the set, and prepared to head back to Co-Op’s College Street building. His freshman year, Dyer attended James Hillhouse High School, but grieved the lack of a school orchestra or a place for string musicians in the band. His sophomore year, he transferred into Co-Op as a theater student.
But theater wasn’t the right fit. Two weeks in, former Arts Director Amy Migliore scooped him up and brought him to Chasen’s room. They clicked immediately: in Dyer, Chasen met one of the most dedicated students he’s had. By the beginning of this academic year, Dyer was teaching a “small music class” at Music Haven for elementary school students, where they could learn about rhythm and note reading.
“I feel like they [educators] really taught me how to practice,” Dyer said. “How to dissect music, how to appreciate it. I really want to pass that on.” Leaving, he added, “hasn’t hit me yet.”
“Legend has always been very diligent and very meticulous,” Chasen said, praising his work both in the orchestra and AP Music Theory, which he took his junior year with Smith. “He’s very charismatic but soft-spoken, a very positive, upbeat kind of kid.”
Just minutes before, a person could see that playing out in real time, notes unspooling in the rising heat as students practiced stepping into a solo, and then ceding the floor to their fellow artists. As Okwuosa and student musicians turned their sheet music to Erroll Garner’s “Misty” (the lyrics, by Johnny Burke, may have been made most famous by Ella Fitzgerald in 1960), Okwuosa carried the tune, brass and keys winding around her voice.
For a moment, it was as though the brass instruments were a tight-knit locomotive of sound, moving forward with a kind of slow, unphased pace. On trombone, junior Rachel Collins let the instrument growl and melt all at once, the sound smooth and low-bellied as it filled up the space. Beneath trumpet, alto sax Martinez and Canon Brown came in, their woodwinds singing with the panache of brass and the smolder of a slow jam.
Then at the mention of her name—“Maya!” Chasen called out from somewhere across Sherman’s Alley—Martinez swayed in time with the music, the notes crisp as keys grew quieter, subdued beneath the sound. Then just as quickly, it was Collins' turn. “Rachel!” Chasen cried, and she stepped in and took over, her long denim skirt moving in time with the sound. It seemed, for a moment, that they could keep going for hours.
King Kenney, who opened GRAILS in October of last year, said he was more than happy to help open the nearby alleyway space to Chasen (a jazz band would not fit in his shop itself, which is on the basement level of 1020 Chapel St.) after he heard about the idea. Since September, Chasen and his colleagues in the music department—that’s Dominguez, as well as strings teacher Henry Lugo and choir director Jaminda Blackmon—have been working to get music students out into the community, with pop-up concerts that have traveled from College Street to IKEA.
For Kenney, it’s like welcoming musical family: a lot of Co-Op’s music students hang out at GRAILS when they get out of school, as do many of their peers from ACES Educational Center for the Arts. Kenney has loved getting to know them in the past year. So “when Co-Op reached out, I was like, ‘We’re gonna make this work.’” And he did: Union League, which the alleyway is next to, doesn’t open until four.
“Salute to their parents, these are some of the most respectful young people I’ve ever met,” he said. “They hang out, they do homework, they draw … they’ve embraced the space. This is, like, an extension of what they’re trying to do. It’s brought me some joy.”