Tahj Robinson. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Second grader Tahj Robinson plunked out three notes on a piano, the keys singing beneath his fingertips. At first, all he heard was the even, familiar hum of an A, the sound hanging low in the room. Then there was a D, round and resonant, like it had just been waiting for the right fingers. Tahj beamed, and went back to A, then jumped to C. On the other side of the keyboard, teacher Vicki Kirkland nodded approvingly.
“What does that sound like?” Kirkland asked. “It’s keeping a pattern, like a beat.”
These scenes are common at Dixwell’s newest youth piano club, a mellifluous two-month collaboration between Neighborhood Music School and the Stetson Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library. As it comes to a neighborhood steeped in jazz history, it marks a new chapter of community growth for NMS, which is working to get beyond its Audubon Street home and meet young musicians literally where they are.
The club, which takes place in a makeshift keyboard lab on the second floor of the library, runs Saturday afternoons through June 14 at 197 Dixwell Ave. in New Haven. There are two sessions each Saturday: a 2:30 to 3:15 p.m. block for second and third graders, and a 3:45 to 4:30 block for seventh and eighth graders. All lessons are free.
Victoria "Vicki" Kirkland.
“We really want to be in these third spaces where people already feel safe,” said Jenny Nelson, senior director of programs at NMS, in a phone call Monday. “We hope that we can foster relationships with folks in these safe, brave spaces, and that they feel like they can come to NMS.”
The story of the club begins last winter, when Stetson Branch Manager Diane Brown started asking about music lessons in the community. Around her, she saw a specific need: kids often had the option of band or chorus in school, but didn’t have a space to learn piano. Individual lessons, meanwhile, were prohibitively expensive for most parents and families (a 30-minute lesson at NMS, for instance, is $48.50; NMS also offers a wide range of free programming, scholarships and financial aid to more than 500 students per year). And Brown, who for years has turned Stetson into a de facto community center for the neighborhood, thought that there must be a solution.
Initially, she connected with Caitlin Daly-Gonzales, director of education at the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO). Daly-Gonzales, it turned out, had also been thinking about piano lessons in the Dixwell neighborhood, after a request from Helen Hagan’s grand-nieces that followed a 2023 New Haven Symphony concert at Southern Connecticut State University.
Hagan, a nineteenth-century composer who was born in New Hampshire, was a pianist and choir director at Dixwell Avenue United Church of Christ. In 1912, she became the first Black woman to graduate from the Yale School of Music.
Jenna Rivera, a second grader at Highville Charter School
But the NHSO as an organization doesn’t give individualized lessons; its educational work looks more like young people’s and family concerts. So Daly-Gonzales connected Brown with NMS Executive Director Noah Bloom, who jumped at the idea of a connection with the New Haven Free Public Library and brought her onto NMS’s board. Bloom also looped in Nelson, who at the time was relatively new to her position. The temporary lab, a second-floor classroom that teachers set up with six keyboards each week, was born.
In addition to Kirkland, who works as a piano accompanist and Audubon Arts instructor at NMS, the classes’ lead teacher is pianist Will Orzo, a longtime music educator who also plays the French horn and has done years of contemporary dance. After joining NMS’ staff in 2023, Orzo said, this is his first group class out in the community.
“I think there is always outreach happening and it has become all the more urgent” in the present moment, he said. Since Nelson started roughly a year ago, NMS has also launched after-school classes at the Boys & Girls Club of Greater New Haven, in an attempt to bring NMS to the community.
Saturday, that was fully in action, as students trickled in for the first piano lesson of the afternoon. As the first to arrive, Tahj bounded into the room, making a beeline for a keyboard on the left side. Greeting Kirkland, he plopped down on a piano seat and began to futz with the keys, a smile spreading across his face when he discovered the demo button. A stream of prerecorded music came pouring out.
For a few minutes, it might as well have been a private lesson. Orzo slid into his piano bench and offered up a few measures of ragtime, the day’s first chance for close listening. Tahj, who had been squirmy when he came in, stilled and let the notes wrap him in their sound. Orzo, who had spent the morning playing for a ballet class, finished with a little flourish.
“What does it sound like?” he asked.
“A ballet song!” offered Tahj.
Orzo nodded, thinking. “And what kind of move would you make to that?”
“Spinning around!” Tahj responded. Across the room, the door opened, and students Jenna Rivera and Elham Ebrahimi made their way inside, not even pausing to shed their winter coats. Before long, the space was filled with the sound of six small hands, all of them searching for middle E.
Kirkland came to the other side of Elham’s keyboard, and watched her fingers gently stroke the keys. “Okay, if this is C,” she started, and Elham played a C “—and this is E, what’s this one?” She motioned to the gleaming, white key snuggled between them.
“This is D!” Elham cried with the same delight one might expect from a new puppy. On a built-in music stand, her book was already open to “The Pecking Rooster” and “The Pecking Hen,” both one-handed songs meant to familiarize young people with the feel and sound of a keyboard beneath their hands.
“Yes!” Kirkland replied with the same enthusiasm as Orzo made his way around the room, watching how students put their hands on the keys (“We keep them round like mountains, not flat like—what’s flat?—valleys,” he said at one point). “We’re gonna practice our finger alphabet and then we’re gonna go over some of our songs.”
Around her, the room hummed with energy, students running their hands up and down the keys until they had perfected their scales. Every so often, the sound of jazz drifted through the door, from a spin on Anansi The Spider that had taken over the library’s second floor. When it was time for “The Pecking Rooster,” all eyes swiveled toward Orzo as each student extended a single finger, and prepared to peck accordingly.
Jenna, who is in the second grade at Highville Charter School, grinned as she played, rocking a pink sweatshirt with a raised fabric rainbow. As a baby, she said, she became interested in the piano while listening to her uncle play. Now, she’s excited to get the chance to learn too. With an extended second finger, she tap-tap-tapped a range of keys, the sound crisp and bright in the room.
“I like it! The sound reminded me of how he played,” she said. “What I like is that they teach us.”
As she assisted, buzzing between keyboards, Kirkland could see bits of her younger self in all of the students. In Tahj, for instance, she can identify with the ability to focus better while playing music, because she was that kid in church, where she first learned music, for years. Elham, a third grader at Helen Street School, has a sticktoitiveness and intuition that’s not unlike Kirkland’s own. Jenna seems easygoing; she doesn’t let the hard parts of a lesson get to her.
Elham Ebrahimi.
For Kirkland, who learned to play by ear long before she learned to read music, teaching feels like second nature. Born and raised in New Haven, she picked up the piano—and the drums, and the clarinet—in church, studying under the generous tutelage of her grandmother, early childhood educator Dr. Earnestine Kirkland. From the time she was about seven, she was behind a keyboard, learning the instrument.
Now, she’s excited to pass that on. Students bring a different energy and skill level to the class, she and Orzo said: that’s part of the joy, and also part of the challenge. Because attendance changes a little bit every week—kids sign up, but sometimes they can’t make it—Kirkland and Orzo have learned how to be flexible, changing plans up at the last minute if a student has a new need or interest. Of the six keyboards open Saturday, half were filled.
“That’s the challenge,” Orzo said. “To be there and not have it sound good every time.
The door opened once more: class was over. As Tahj ran over to his mom, Natasha McKalla, to fill her in, she praised the initiative. Each week, McKalla said, she’s happy to make the trek to Stetson for free lessons. She’s noticed that Tahj, who is a bouncy, excitable kid, concentrates better when he’s making music. Things like piano lessons improve his focus.
“I think it’s great!” she said. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for those who don’t have the funds to pay for them outright. It’s awesome. I want to help him [Tahj] with his goals,” and this is part of the way to get there.
For questions about the music lessons, contact Stetson Branch Manager Diane Brown at 203.946.8119 or dbrown@nhfpl.org or Jenny Nelson, senior director of programs at NMS, at jnelson@nmsnewhaven.org