This feature article on New York Jazz Academy appeared in the February 2011 issue of DownBeat Magazine.

New York Jazz Academy Expands Its Mission

Saxophonist Javier Arau had a social agenda in mind when he established a youth saxophone workshop in 2009: to fill the void created by a sharp decline in public funding for school music programs.

“I felt that they were underserved,” Arau said. “There are kids trying to work through jazz on their instruments, but are not having any chance to play with other kids and work with mentors. The schools have cut so many programs.”

Ar leased a classroom at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Midtown Manhattan, and spent heavily to advertise the weeklong program. But when the first day of the workshop arrived that July, Arau had just six students. Things workout out, though.

“They all showed [and] we had a blast,” Arau said. “We were in this hot, little room with no windows. For them it was just this remarkable intensive. I don’t think any of these kids knew there was this much to playing saxophone.”

Although Arau lost roughly $400, he deemed the venture a success. “You know, I had to stop looking at any of this the way a musician looks at a gig,” he said. “I was a businessman, and that was like a trial-by-fire because you have to change your mindset.”

Indeed, Arau altered a subsequent business plan for a year-round program after rate overwhelming response came from adults. “I’d say nine out of 10 times,” he recalled, “it was an adult calling, saying, ‘What about me?’”

As a result Arau’s summer youth workshop grew into the New York Jazz Academy, a mostly adult program with an enrollment of roughly 200. It has also recently added introductory music courses for small children. The school opened in October 2009 at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on the Upper West Side. A year later, it expanded to several other locations around Manhattan, in addition to Prospect Heights, Brooklyn and Mineola, Long Island. It has also launched the website nyjazzacademy.com. Its programs are affordable; typically $30 for a two-hour class.

Arau, now 35 grew up in Sacrament, Calif., and earned degrees in jazz composition at Lawrence University in Wisconsin and New England Conservatory of Music. He moved to Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood in September 2001, and then to Jackson Heights, Queens. Arau, a member of the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop, leads an 18-piece orchestra, serves as house saxophonist at St Bartholomew’s Church and has worked with Charli Persip’s Super Band. His credits as a composer include scores for the indie film Easy Listening and The Gold Wutahkee, an Off Off Broadway musical.

The New York Jazz Academy includes combos and big bands, and weekly classes devoted to harmony, improvisation, guitar and voice. The faculty includes guitarist Brad Shepik, saxophonist Wayne Escoffery and singer Carolyn Leonhart. However, the students run the gamut: from a doctor and a minister to an assortment of college students and instructors, tradesmen and retirees. Many of the students studied music during their formative years and see the school as an opportunity to pick up their instruments again.

Trumpet player Michael Thuroff said he was first chair in New York’s all-state band in 1963, and later played in a U.S. Army band and with the rock band Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. He quite after developing embouchure problems, but began playing again in 2009. He now spends roughly eight hours a week at Arau’s academy. “I only wish I was 25 again,” said Thuroff, 65, a computer consultant. “[As a young musician] I played, I played, I played; I just never learned.”

Dr. Jennifer Provataris, who works in the emergency department at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y. played alto saxophone in a high school stage band before her focus shifted to college and then medical school. Armed with the same Bundy saxophone she played in high school, she attends on of the academy’s improvisation workshops. “It was kind of killing me that I wasn’t doing it anymore,” Provataris, 36, said. “I wish I would have done something like this sooner.”

For his part Arau is pleased with the school’s steady growth and the opportunity to refine his personal method for teaching jazz. But Arau’s mission remains incomplete.

“We’re seeing such positive results from both the teaching methods and the business model,” he said. “The next step is taking this beyond New York. This whole [program] could really benefit neighborhoods everywhere, whether it’s in the tri-state area, the Midwest or even abroad.”

—Eric Fine