Culture & Community | Education & Youth | Music | Arts & Culture | New Haven Public Schools | Wilbur Cross High School
Lucy Gellman Photos.
As Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” swirled around the stage, Dontae James took a beat, and listened for the entrance he knew was coming. Beside him, Julio Hernandez and Theo North had started a conversation between the guitar and the keyboard, the notes ping-pongging back and forth as Akshay Dalal crept in on bass. Behind him, Santiago Hernandez turned the drum and cymbals into a whirring heartbeat.
On the vibraphone, Julian Theodore entered, the sound rounded at the edges. Euphonium sashayed in, smooth and growling as Angel Corichi Corona lifted the huge horn beneath the light. James, dressed in dazzling red-and-black blazer that sparkled from the stage, hopped back in, with a brassy cascade that made the stage glow.
Tuesday night, members of the jazz band at Wilbur Cross High School gave a master class in listening as they took the stage, opened their ears, and kicked off the school’s annual winter concert a week before their holiday break. A group of seven juniors and seniors at the school, the ensemble has become a tight-knit musical family, in which the ability to hear and respond to each other never stops when they leave the band classroom.
By the end of the night, it seemed to have rubbed off on their classmates, from modern, symphonic and concert bands to members of the school’s choir.
“Using your ear and having to listen for something, trying to listen for something specific, it helps you enjoy the music more,” said James, a senior at Wilbur Cross who also studies music at ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) and Neighborhood Music School (NMS). “This concert, I’m feeling really good.”
That was evident as they took the stage, with a four-song set that included numbers from North (he is a student of the jazz pianist Noah Baerman, whose compositions are often as thought-provoking as they are transcendent) and band director Eric Teichman as well as staples like Ellington and Ray Noble. As they got situated, a kind of nervous energy buzzed from the stage, stilling as they looked out onto the house, and then back at each other. In the audience, parents and siblings looked up, ready for whatever the group had in store.
If it was spiritual sustenance they were after, they were in luck. Around a stage trimmed with evergreen garlands and twinkling lights, Cross suddenly felt not like a high school at all, but a half-lit jazz club, where the music was as laid back and natural as it was all-encompassing. By 30 seconds in, the group had hit a tight groove, the sound soaring in a way that would have made the city’s living jazz legends proud.
The group was just getting started. Not even a minute later, James jumped into his first solo of the night, the instruments turning it down a notch as he leaned into the saxophone, and let the music take over. As piano, drums and vibraphone laid out a gentle on ramp, he released a dozen notes all at once, a ribbon of rising sound that somehow remained crisp and clean as the notes jumped atop each other. The sax bellowed and then shrieked, so alive that the sound carried through the half-filled house, and out to the hallway.
No sooner had he finished, the audience applauding, than North stepped in, fingers dancing over the keys until someone from the audience yelled “Aight!” At the vibraphone, Theodore leaned in, nodding his head as he listened, and responded with swift, chiming strokes. Drums roiled and rolled beneath the surface, cresting when it was Hernandez’ moment in the spotlight.
The band before playing. From left to right, members include Julio Hernandez, Theo North, Julian Theodore, Dontae James, Santiago Hernandez, Akshay Dalal, and Angel Corichi Corona.
When the band came back together, it changed the tempo, slowing the tune down until it was stretched out like musical saltwater taffy, twice as delicious on the ears. On the drums, Hernandez turned the cymbal into something that was almost bell-like, as if the sound alone could drive the band ever forward.
“I love you Dontae!” a classmate bellowed from the back of the auditorium before the group had finished, and applause nearly engulfed the final bars of the song. Even as the group flowed into Noble’s 1938 “Cherokee,” they still seemed to be floating on the first number.
“As someone learning jazz, if you don’t listen to music, you can’t play it,” North had said before playing, as musicians stood backstage for their last winter concert together. And he was right: the band communicated almost entirely in a language of tucked chins, approving, discreet nods, tapping feet and a few that-was-so-good-it-made-me-grimace kind of grimaces.
James, at the helm, became both the frontman and the hype man, adjusting the mic for Corichi Corona in one moment, helping ease the transition when North and Dalal switched at the bass guitar and piano, and giving a delighted scowl to Hernandez for his work on the drums the next.
In turn, North’s words still felt alive as the band slowed it down, and launched into an untitled Blues piece that Baerman encouraged his student to write earlier this year. As young musicians eased into the composition, Dalal at the keyboard and North on the bass guitar, it was silky-smooth, with a just-noticeable bite that came out of decades of music history.
Under the direction of longtime Wilbur Cross educator Kendall Alderman, the modern band performed pieces including the Beach Boys' "Sail On, Sailor" and Chaka Khan and Stevie Wonder's "Tell Me Something Good."
At the lip of the stage, James and Corichi Corona started in on a whole, short dialogue, the low, brassy hum of the euphonium dancing with the call of the sax. As the two ceded the floor to their fellow bandmates, an unhurried, methodical carpet of piano and drums beneath them, Theodore took over, working his way through a solo that melted right into the euphonium when it came back in.
Throughout, the group made time for personal victories, playing a kind of musical inside baseball that the audience didn’t need to be in on. Theodore, a senior who picked up the vibraphone earlier this year (he’s played percussion in concert band for several years), shook off a jumble of pre-show nerves to deliver a crisp, clear performance that let the instrument shine. Backstage before the performance, he’d noted how different the experience was from concert band, where consistency—rather than in-the-moment improvisation—is the goal.
North, whose composition skills are taking flight, also flexed a new muscle, beaming as his Blues helped usher in a night of joyful music-making that had audience members dancing by 8 p.m. Santiago Hernandez, who also emceed the evening with student Manxi Han, pulled out drum solos and percussive flourishes that hung in the air long after he had left the stage. And James, who years ago interviewed jazz musician Wayne Escoffrey in these very pages, emerged as a quiet, patient leader who is as humble as he is laser-focused and serious about his craft.
Teichman, who conducts the ensemble (and in May was named Connecticut PTA's Outstanding High School Educator of the Year), said that he’s been buoyed by the success of the band this year. When he started at Cross in 2019, he couldn’t have known that the next six years would include a global pandemic, herculean efforts to teach online and then rebuild in person, and a winning streak that extends from his music classroom to new collabs onstage to the football field. And yet, he’s stayed the course.
“Last year was magic,” he said as he headed backstage to check on the jazz ensemble.
Students Ashley Acosta Bravo and Camila Corte, who are both freshmen, before the concert.
Elsewhere in the school, it seemed that the lessons from the jazz band had rubbed off on fellow students even before the show, from the classrooms where warmups blossomed into pre-performance pep talks to the stage itself. As he prepared for his debut on the keys, sophomore Christopher Guartan said that he’s learned to listen more closely, and shake off assumptions about what he is and isn’t capable of.
“It’s taught me that everyone can learn something new, even when it’s difficult,” he said.
Freshman Ashley Acosta Bravo, who started playing the piano four years ago, said that band is as much about “the people I get to meet” as it is about the music itself. In the fifth grade, she taught herself how to play the keyboard while attending Dunbar Hill School in Hamden. When she got to Cross, she was excited to study it more rigorously.
“Music is my comfort zone,” she said.