Lonnie Plaxico on bass, Joy F. Brown on vocals and Jesse Hameen II on drums. Lucy Gellman Photos.
“Just Friends? In C?” ventured jazz vocalist Joy Brown, and it was all she needed to say. Beneath her voice, cymbals whispered their entrance, swelling as drums purred beneath them. Keys crept forward, a ginger tinkling until they were suddenly a carpet of sound. The bass wrapped around them, chasing something like it was dancing. Brown’s voice, which had moments before counted musicians in, slipped into the lyrics, buttery and deep.
Just friends, lo-o-vers no more! Just friends, but not like before! she crooned, and the audience responded with a collective murmur of delight. To think of what we've been / and not to kiss again! Seems like pre-ten-ding — it isn't the ending—yeah!
A night of soul-stirring jazz came to Audubon Street last Wednesday, as Neighborhood Music School (NMS) celebrated 30 years of its Summer Jazz Program beneath twinkling lights and a cool, low-hanging gray sky. A party decades in the making, it fêted the generations of musicians that have come through the program and through NMS, including the talented Sands brothers and Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere, whose first language may have been the double bass.
The Summer Jazz Program, now a week-long intensive for students ages 12 and up, was founded in 1995. But Wednesday, the night belonged to Jesse “Cheese” Hameen II, a son of New Haven who has helped build, shape and direct the program since 1998. Along the way, he has mentored hundreds of students, many of whom are now jazz educators themselves.
Around 150 people attended, with a standing-room-only crowd by the end of the evening.
“I used to be the young guy on the block,” said Hameen, a living legend of New Haven’s jazz scene who has been recognized as the oldest jazz drummer in the state. Now, “there’s only about six of us that’s still left, of the jazz musicians that were here, the legends from the 1960s. They live in me. They’re all through my blood. I’m hittin’ the drums, and I feel them, you know?”
That started in New Haven when Hameen was just a kid, he said in an interview after the concert. Even as a toddler, Hameen loved music, surrounded by it in the Dixwell neighborhood home where he grew up. At home, his parents nurtured that talent, so that he had a sense of rhythm and the drums’ versatility early on. “My mother and father would buy me drums for as long as I can remember,” he said.
He played wherever he could, including in his music classes at the old Winchester School where he thrived as a young percussionist. By the time he was 10 or 11, he had started a band that made the hyper-local circuit, gracing community centers and school (Hameen said he remembers it being called Jesse Hameen II and Friends; a 2023 New Haven Independent article said the first iteration was called Cuban Nights). In the years that followed, he doubled down on the craft, practicing at home and performing wherever he could.
Back then, jazz was thriving in New Haven, and a young Hameen soaked it up. On Dixwell Avenue, performer Rufus Greenlee had opened the now-storied Monterey Jazz Club in 1934, less than a decade before Hameen was born. Other clubs followed, including the Golden Gate and the Democratic Club. By the early 1960s there was the Playback Club, which the late Willie Ruff ran on Winchester Avenue.
As he grew into adolescence, Hameen hung around with “the top musicians,” including Dickey Myers and Houston Person, the second of whom is still living and making music. With a bashful smile, he remembered telling them if he practiced dutifully for a year, maybe he would be ready to play with them professionally. They cracked up “and they cursed me out,” he recalled, eyes twinkling. He later realized that their incredulity was an expression of love.
“They said, ‘When we get through with you, you can go anywhere,’” he remembered.
It was true. Hameen, interested in the wider jazz world and drawn by the allure of New York City, hit the road to tour in 1963, the same year that Greenlee passed away and the Monterey went to his daughters. New Haven jazz was still going strong, but Hameen wanted to see what else was out there, particularly in a robust jazz corridor that ran from New York to Boston.
He thrived, thanks largely to the tutelage of the musicians who had taken him under their wings.
“From what I learned in New Haven, I was floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, like Mohammad Ali, and hittin’ hard, knocking ‘em out like Mike Tyson,” he said. “You know? I didn’t have my father’s name to go on. I didn’t have nobody’s name to go on. I didn’t have [anything] … except, I’m from New Haven. And they knew New Haven could groove. We were known for that.”
Jesse Hameen II with José Lara and Will Cleary.
In the decades he was in New York, life also happened fully and beautifully. Hameen met and married the artist Iman Uqdah Hameen, herself a brilliant filmmaker and educator, in the 1970s. He started building another generation of artists, including his daughter Hanan Hameen. In 1976, he founded Jesse Hameen II & Elevation, a version of which still plays in and around New Haven today. He bloomed as a musician, holding onto his Elm City roots. He could groove like it was nobody’s business; he still can.
Then in 1995, Hameen returned to New Haven to care for his ailing parents. The plan was never to stay—at least not at first, he said. The jazz scene that had been so robust during his adolescence had all but dried up: even newcomers like Dinky’s Jazz Club, on Goffe and Sherman, hadn’t made it through the 1980s without closing. He looked around and didn’t see the same kind of mentorship he had as a kid.
“I realized that I could make a difference here,” he said. In New York, there were “100 Jesse Hameens,” jazz drummers from whom young, aspiring musicians could learn (there is, this reporter maintains, only one Jesse Hameen, and New Haven is so lucky he is ours). In New Haven, he started helping revive the jazz scene one standard and eager student at a time.
By 1998, he was directing the summer program at NMS, and leading master classes and after-school programs in the New Haven Public Schools and at a then-nascent ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA). While he’s worn many other hats, including a board member for Jazz Haven and co-organizer of its now-defunct jazz festival, Summer Jazz may be his longest-running and most sustained footprint. Its impact goes far beyond New Haven.
Or as he said Wednesday, “the future is good and New Haven is going to have some dynamic musicians.” Around him, a band of those musicians—all instructors in the summer program—stood ready to play. They included veteran educator Joe McWilliams on piano, José Lara on trombone, Will Cleary and Wes Lewis on alto sax, Ryan Sands on drums, and Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere on double bass. Many, they said later, owe their careers to him.
In those early years, Hameen set a precedent for mentorship, sometimes with students who were smaller than the instruments they played. Some of them were already jazz-curious; others didn’t know they had the music in them until he teased it out. That was partly true for Sands, who started with Hameen when he was just four years old.
“Cheese, that’s what we call him, to me he’s a superhero,” Sands said at intermission, remembering how larger-than-life Hameen seemed when he was just a young kid, and Hameen accepted him as a student. “What that man was able to do, who he is, his whole aura … who he is as a person comes out every time.”
Sands, who grew up in Orange, didn’t become serious about the drums until middle school, he said. By then, he’d studied with Hameen for a few years, and realized that he wanted to be a professional musician. After a year at the ECA, he finished high school in the Manhattan School of Music’s pre-college division. Years later, he’s played in some of the same circles, awestruck that Hameen thinks of him as a peer in the field.
“It’s beautiful now to know that he trusts me and the work and the work that I’m doing,” Sands said. He smiled, and it was the same smile he’d had moments before, while playing the drums. “The reverence will still be there, though.”
At every step along the way, Hameen has cheered him on. Sands, who is 31, has taken that mentorship as a sign to pay it forward: he now teaches in the program, and performs across Connecticut and across the country, often on the road in the same way Hameen himself once was decades ago. The two have also connected on a spiritual level, he said: they attend the Abdul-Majid Karim Hasan Islamic Center together on Dixwell Avenue.
Lara, who met Hameen around 2001, shared that love for his teacher. Over 20 years ago, he was just a kid at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (now Betsy Ross Academy of Arts & Design, or BRADA), before it made the move to Kimberly Avenue. Hameen, who had by then begun teaching, met him through an after-school arts program there.
Lara, who had grown up listening to salsa and Latin jazz, was still fairly new to the trombone, and newer still to the depth and breadth of jazz music. But almost immediately, Hameen saw something in him. He brought Lara to NMS, then figured out a payment model that allowed him to attend the summer program. Lara went on to study music education, and then teach in the New Haven Public Schools and at NMS (he now teaches in the Norwalk Schools).
“It shaped me as an educator,” he said. As a graduate of NMS and Wilbur Cross High School, he knows firsthand what it’s like to grow up in New Haven (the city’s Hill neighborhood was his first home) and stay on to nurture its young people. He’s now working to build up the big band and Latin jazz ensembles at NMS, to “keep the legacy going” three decades after Hameen built it from the ground up.
As the afternoon cooled into evening, he was one of the NMS Jazz All-Stars, all teachers in the program, who took the stage to pay homage to a master. For some of them, Hameen is a sort of musical father: Bell le Pere joked that “I was born here” when Hameen asked him how many years he’d been in the program. Sands started with him when a standard drum kit was still taller than he was. For others, he’s a close friend and colleague: Williams has known him for over two decades.
As the group filled the stage, they represented decades of experience, and hundreds of stories about the man who helped them get there. Around them, NMS had turned its backyard into an outdoor stage meets jazz club, with low-strung white lights, a cash bar, empanada and ice cream sandwich sales and seating that had filled up by the main act. On the stage, a simple red rug made the space complete, transforming the school into a concert venue for the night.
As they kicked off their set, Lara’s trombone came out of the woodwork, with a brassy, full growl that wrapped the other instruments in its sound, but never stepped on their toes. Beneath it, Williams laid down lush, layered piano, saxophone swirling above it. Drums hit in the background, with a touch on the cymbals that was soft, ginger, but still had teeth. When Cleary emerged with the first solo, his whole body leaning into the instrument, it seemed that the whole audience sat forward at once to listen.
A fast, sharp ribbon of sound burst from the sax, as if it had just hit the dance floor and was figuring out exactly what rug to cut, and how quickly to do it. Cleary looped over the hook, letting the sound fall in drops, then a deluge that never mushed together, the notes sparkling. Lewis, listening intently beside him, scowled—not because something was wrong, but as if he was experiencing breath all over again for the first time, and was bowled over by the whole thing.
When Lara came back in with a solo, the audience still cheering for Cleary, it felt like the night had officially begun. The trombone got in a groove; it swooped and then soared, as interested in its coarse, brassy edge as the smooth, deep sound it is capable of. Then it was Lewis’ turn, the sound gliding over the audience as he cycled through notes quickly enough that it seemed impossible one person was playing. When he yielded to Williams and Bell le Pere, the two were ready to fall into a conversation.
Dee Marshall, who supports NMS because of the way it nurtured her daughter, Nia.
The six jammed like that, pausing only to introduce the next number and then the next, until dusk was beginning to fall across the wide sky above them. Sands, like Lewis, is particularly fun to watch: he has this way of sticking his lower lip out and cocking his head a little when he’s thinking, which is always. When band members called intermission, it took a moment for the spell to break, and the audience to rise from their seats.
Inside NMS, Lewis and Sands traded notes, taking a break before heading back out to the courtyard-turned-theater to watch their mentor play. Six years ago, Lewis moved to New Haven for grad school at Yale, where he’s studying computational biology. Outside of school, he’s the founder of the New Haven Composers Spotlight and leads the eponymously named Wes Lewis Quartet.
His path first intersected with Hameen’s three years ago, after he met Sands and Bell le Pere at jazz jam sessions in 2022. Hameen started calling him for performances. The rest was history.
“It’s such a good place for the kids in the city,” said Dee Marshall, whose daughter Nia studied piano at the school as a child (she is now in her 30s), back outside. “And this—” she looked around. “It puts you in a jazzy mood.”
Marshall, a staunch advocate for students who teaches at Hill Central Music Academy, added that jazz holds a special place in her heart as a uniquely Black American art form. Often, she thinks about its roots in West Africa, and the complex, painful history that brought it to the U.S.
“That was our internet,” she said of the drums centuries ago, pointing to them as a potent form of connection. “The music always lifts your spirit.”
That carried through the main act, as Hameen took the stage with a group of longtime friends and colleagues, including Brown on vocals, Rodney Jones on guitar, Zaccai Curtis on piano and Lonnie Plaxico on bass. Before beginning with John Klenner and Sam M. Lewis’ “Just Friends,” he returned to the mic, as if he was about to give a disclaimer.
“We didn’t rehearse,” he said with a sort of knowing and bashful smile. “What you gonna hear, you gonna hear our life. Our life is a rehearsal. We’re showing you how we lived.”
Within seconds of the announcement, there was an explosion of sound, and musicians were finding that New Haven groove once more. From her perch, Brown nestled into the lyrics, letting them take their time as she spun them into being. To her right, Jones took a solo on guitar, allowing the notes to linger as they rose into the night. When Curtis took over, Brown seemed so deeply immersed in the sound that levitation seemed fully possible.
Meanwhile, percussion carried it forward, just as Hameen has for decades in New Haven and beyond the city too. From where he sat, the drums became a whole monologue, his mouth half-open as his hands soared through the air. They crested, undulating as they traveled skyward, and seemed to speak right to Brown as she paused to listen. They rumbled, and he barely broke a sweat. Beside him, Plaxico laid down a luscious bass riff with.
“I like singing this song now, because it reminds me of my ex,” Brown ad-libbed, and laughter wove through the audience, bubbly and mellifluous. “I wanted to choke him when we were together. But we get along real good now that we’re not together. Ooo-ooo-h! The story ends!”
Beneath her, the drums were steady as a heartbeat, with just a shimmering, tinkling suggestion of momentum at the outer edges. “Just the other day he emailed me to see if I was okay!” More laughter, now rising from the seats tucked into the Audubon Arts Park. Brown rounded a corner, heading towards the end of the song.
“Bi-tt-er Earth! Bi-tt-er Earth” called out Iman Hameen, referencing the jazz composition that Dinah Washington made famous in 1960. “You are bringing it home sis!” Brown burst into a smile. Perhaps, she said, Hameen knew that she couldn’t get through a set without performing something heavy.
“I would like to do some Duke,” she said, fanning herself with a yellow fabric fan that was the same deep shade as the sun. “Is it okay with the band if we do some Duke?”
The audience applauded, as if you say Yes! Please! And she waded right into “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” making the piece her own as it unspooled on the stage.
That enthusiasm remained for the rest of the night, from a heart-splitting take on Duke Ellington to “No Greater Love” (“in F,” said Brown, more of a statement than a question) to a bubbly version of Maria Grever’s “What A Difference A Day Makes” (“A bossa that isn’t really a bossa”).
She was, she admitted, so entranced with Jones’ playing on that piece that she had missed an entrance, and had Jones give her a longer runway to begin the song a second time. “Oh my god, he played so good that I was looking at him and forgot where my intro was!” she exclaimed. In the audience, no one seemed to mind hearing the opening twice.
Indeed by the time the band had reached Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me To The Moon,” some attendees had started dancing along in their seats. Jones slipped back into a sultry, sparkling groove one last time. Brown lapped up the sound, her eyes fluttering for a moment before they opened, wide and bright. To bass and piano, Hameen offered up a rolling, steady solo that bloomed into a final, divine offering to the musical powers that be.
Brown, for her part, seemed as though she could keep the song going clear through midnight—which may have happened were it not for a parking garage that closed at 10 p.m. When she’d reached the final verse, she started dreaming up ways to reach the moon—”A spaceship! A blimp! A canoe!”—in real time. As she walked out into the front rows, the audience erupted into applause. She still had a full two minutes to go before the song ended.
“Jesse Hameen, I bow before you sir,” she said.