Top: Brenda Zecua , Abby Heredia, Zariah Dumas and Zariyah Whitehurst. Bottom: Heredia and her boyfriend, fellow senior Nehemiah Johnson-Norfleet, who she met through band. Lucy Gellman Photos.
It was just before 8:30 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day, and the band room at James Hillhouse High School was slowly waking up.
At a table by the door, Zariyah Whitehurst leaned over, fixing a dainty bow in Abby Heredia’s hair. Closer to the center of the room, Zariah Dumas unpacked her saxophone, holding a reed still between her teeth. Brenda Zecua barged through the side door, ready for her first and last Elm City Bowl of high school. Every so often, one of them caught another’s eye, and smiled.
The four, all seniors, are the young women of the 15-member Hillhouse High School marching band, a small-but-scrappy outfit that has played dozens of football games, pep rallies, student functions, Freddy Fixers, and the most recent Memorial Day Parade in Washington, D.C. On the cusp of their last game day, all four spent warmups nibbling donuts, suiting up, and reflecting on the unexpected and tight-knit friendships that have come out of playing in the band.
The football game, which pits Hillhouse against Wilbur Cross High School, is a longtime New Haven tradition in which band teachers and their young charges often make the most compelling plays of the day. Read more about that, including Cross’ dazzling band and robust tradition of losing the game, here.
Zariah Dumas: “We gotta stick together and help each other out."
“I feel kind of sad!” Heredia said as she got ready, running through the halftime performance of Tevin Campbell’s “Can We Talk” and Drake’s “Nokia” in her mind. “This is my last football game at Hillhouse. I’m just … it’s just fun. It just gets us closer together. I’m sure I’ll come back, because alumni always come back, but it’s not the same.”
Part of that begins with the band itself, which has been in a constant state of flux since Covid-19. After classes resumed in the fall of 2021, band director Josh Smith began to rebuild the group instrument by instrument. By the end of 2022, there was a healthy drumline, horn and woodwind sections, a trusty trombone, and enough sousaphone for a soulful and brassy hook.
While it was and is a rotating door—each year, seniors leave, and each year, freshmen join, just like any high school band—he’s a perennial optimist, eyes always focused on the next thing the group is doing.
“It’s part of the norm. This is what it is,” Smith said. “It’s game time. We face our rival team, and we’re just gonna get out there and play. It’s energy! It’s fun! It’s not just for us, but for the audience.”
At first, it was only her and Bernadette Karpel, a clarinetist who graduated last year, and returned Thursday morning to see how the band was doing before the game. Then, Whitehurst and Dumas arrived, in time to play enough football games for the Elm City Bowl not to feel particularly stressful. Then Zecua entered the mix last year, mourning a first Elm City Bowl that was too soggy for musicians to participate. Since, the four have become not just fellow musicians, but trusted confidants both on and off the field.
For instance, on “Spirit Day" earlier this fall, Heredia and Whitehurst dressed as Smith, with at least one exaggerated, bushy construction paper beard, Hillhouse band t-shirts, and a matching blue-and-white dad hat for Heredia. All four check in about college applications and the stress of senior year. They have a group chat that’s mostly quiet these days, as the semester reaches its busiest point before break. They’ve unexpectedly become each other’s people.
“It’s different because I haven’t had a circle of female friends [before],” said Whitehurst, who plays the alto saxophone and hopes to attend Winston-Salem State University for journalism next year. “The stuff we talk about, like personal stuff, the things that we feel—it’s a lot of things that we wouldn’t tell anybody else. There’s a lot of trust there.”
“There’s not really much of us so we gotta stick together and help each other out,” chimed in Dumas, who hopes to continue her band education at an HBCU in the fall.
As band members trickled in Thursday morning, signs of that trust sprang up everywhere, from peers’ worried calls to late band members to warmups that reverberated through the floor. As he pulled out his trumpet to play, junior Luis Baez helped William Santos shake off pre-game jitters, leaning down to pin up his pant leg so it wouldn’t drag. Santos, a junior who plays the trumpet, joined the band just a few months ago. Thursday found him feeling nervous, and not wanting to let anyone down.
“I’m eating a seafood boil today!” Baez announced glibly to no one in particular, and therefore everyone in the room. As he pinned up one pant leg, he reminisced on years spent with the seniors, many of whom have become his close friends. He inspected his handiwork, noting the green-and-black checkered pajamas still visible at Santos’ ankles. By the time he had finished, students had started an informal round robin, shouting out things they were thankful for.
When Smith opened an app that played a pitch pipe from his phone, she snapped to attention and stood up, the sound of a high C floating through the room. Conversations, of which there were half a dozen going, fell almost instantly to a hush. Slowly, band members joined in, the sound rich and layered until a person could feel it from the soles of their feet up through their arms and fingertips.
Within moments, “Can We Talk” had filled the room, drums bouncing beneath the brassy slide of a trombone and bellow of the sousaphones. It was almost go time.
“When you’re in front of a crowd, the nerves just start pinching you in the stomach,” Baez said between run-throughs. “You just gotta think, ‘There’s no one here but us. It’s just us.’”
The approach worked. By the time the group had moved to the gym to run its steps one last time, the sound was clear and strong, as though the band were two or three times its size. At the center of the room, blue-and-white clad cheerleaders spread out into five rows, and ran a series of lifts that had bodies dancing in midair. Every so often, their braids and ponytails swished to an inaudible beat, and matching blue-and-white bows flashed brightly across the room.
Baez, waiting to play with his trumpet in one hand, worked to steady his nerves with the chorus of SIX’s “All You Wanna Do,” which he saw with a few peers when it came to the Shubert Theatre earlier this year. Heredia joined in, dropping bars from Hamilton’s “When The World Was Wide Enough” that turned it into a full-fledged celebration of Broadway. Whitehurst, stepping closer, suggested that Epic: The Musical might have a seat at the table. Their laughter, certain but polite, bubbled up through the room.
For Smith, a Hillhouse alum who is still baby-faced at 37, that’s part of the point. As a member of the drumline, he saw firsthand how playing an instrument taught discipline, close listening, sharp focus and coordinated movement. Now, he pays it forward, teaching students to navigate space, keep time, nail blocking, and learn to listen to each other—even if they’re spread out across the 50-yard line.
Alumni Bernadette Karpel and Jaquan Blount.
When he was part of the drumline, “we were family,” he said before loading up a wagon with handwarmers and chocolate bars for musicians. Now, he works to make the band room a place that is free of distraction but still warm and friendly, focused on the mechanics and rigor of learning while giving students new skills to build relationships.
That doesn't mean it's not hard: at any given time, there’s a list of two dozen songs on the whiteboard he expects musicians to know, from Tru’s “Hoody Hooo” and Montel Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It” to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and Big Tymers’ “Still Fly.”
Back in the band classroom, Hillhouse alum Anisha Santiago echoed Smith's enthusiasm, adding that she’s found the same kind of deep and lasting friendships through music. As a student at North Carolina A&T State University, Santiago is studying music education, with plans to teach after she graduates (she’s currently taking time off to care for her mom). While she played the sousaphone at Hillhouse, she now plays the euphonium, or “eupho,” in band.
“This is my life right here,” she said, gesturing around the room. A few feet away, a sugary, chattering cloud had formed where she’d placed boxes of glazed and frosted donuts. “I’ve seen band not only save my life, but save my friends’ lives. This was our outlet. This was our second home. It taught me compassion, it taught me discipline, it taught me to put my best foot forward.”
“It was my dream, and I made it happen,” she said of continuing in the band. Coming back to help the band is a way of showing students “that they can too.”