Any casual bystander in the vicinity of, say, Times Square this May would surely have done a double take, pausing and wondering, “What’s that sound?” A distant clamor on the breeze could be heard over the traffic, and as it got louder, people would slowly realize: Those were the voices of two dozen teenagers advancing forward en masse, closer and closer, louder and louder, singing … what? Not pep rally chants, not camp songs, but a full score composed in 1952 by jazz great Gerry Mulligan.
“Bweebida Bobbida!” sang the teens, their rollicking voices echoing through the city as they walked. Oblivious to any stares they drew, the group only grew more swinging, more joyous as they neared Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera House, by then having moved on to Ellington scores, each youth singing a different interlocking part, complete with counterpoint, rhythm, and harmonies. Who were these possessed adolescents? Was it some college hazing ritual?
Nope, those were just the kids from our own Central High, The High School, on their way to being named the best high school jazz band in the world.
The Doctor Is In
That head-turning movable concert was, it turned out, instigated by Dr. Ollie Liddell, Central High School’s band director, who uses such techniques to help his jazz players internalize their parts. “We do a lot of singing,” he says matter-of-factly. “We were singing every day. Because we wanted to get that connection to the music. We were singing walking from the hotel, through Times Square. We were singing in line outside, in the street. You couldn’t hear or see us, but we were singing backstage. Loud, too! I mean loud. And it was, you know, something I pushed initially, but then the kids started doing it themselves. They’d just kick us right off, ‘Uh-one and uh-two!’ and they would just sing their parts, note for note.”
“Yep, we were walking down the streets of New York, literally just singing, getting looks and everything,” recalls alto saxophone player Jackson Hankins, now a rising senior as the band begins its 2025-26 year. “It was fun.”
Seasoned trumpeter Johnny Yancey, who teaches many Central students through the Memphis Jazz Workshop, could scarcely believe it. “I went with them, and I mean, every day we walked from the hotel to the competition, almost a mile, and they sang all of their songs, harmony and all,” he marvels. “Even when they got there to register — they sang this whole Duke Ellington set!”
The students’ unbridled enthusiasm was understandable. They were in New York to compete in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 30th Annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition and Festival, long the high-water mark for such ensembles across the country, and including international high schools for the first time this year. An initial pool of 127 bands was narrowed down to the 30 invited to New York, and by May 11th, all but the top three were eliminated. The final rankings that fateful day put Osceola County School for the Arts of Kissimmee, Florida, in third place and Sant Andreu Jazz Band of Barcelona, Spain, in second, while Central High School of Memphis, Tennessee, took home the first place trophy and an award of $10,000.
And yet, though Memphis boasts plenty of raw musical genius, this win wasn’t due to talent alone, but rather the steady, systematic work put in by Liddell and his students over months and years. Nor did it boil down to simply singing their parts. Much of the pedagogical approach pursued by Liddell, who earned his Ph.D. in music education from the University of Mississippi after he’d begun teaching, is grounded not just in using your instrument or your voice, but in learning to be quiet.
All You Need Is Ears
Listening is key to both teachers’ and students’ practice, the way Liddell sees it, and it’s imbued in every level of the music program he’s built up at Central since starting there in 2012. That begins with his evaluation of each student’s growth as a player. “I teach every band kid,” he says. “So even the non-jazz folks, I’m teaching them. And there are some fundamental skills that are necessary to play jazz, which is the most advanced, the most challenging, the most sophisticated form of music there is, and you can definitely quote me on that.”
Always keeping an ear out for rapidly advancing players who might be suited to the jazz band, Liddell nonetheless ensures that there are different options for different types of talent. Under his guidance, Central has established a concert band, a symphonic band, a percussion ensemble, and a wind ensemble — and then there’s always the marching band, in which everyone plays (except pianists or guitarists).
As Liddell told DownBeat on the occasion of that venerable jazz magazine awarding him a Lifetime Achievement Award for Jazz Education in 2023, “Some band directors specialize and focus on their jazz band or their marching band. But I believe that’s cheating your students. You really need to push every aspect of every band and combo you teach and strive for excellence. It can be really difficult and a lot of work, but everything has to be stressed. That’s my philosophy.”
And one can’t accuse Liddell of giving the Central Warriors Marching Band short shrift: They are prize-winners, too, having just won USBands’ traditional show band grand national championship in Huntsville, Alabama, last November, not to mention similar national victories in 2017 and 2018.
As Liddell notes, marching bands are typically a school’s top priority. “Especially in this part of the country, most band directors are hyper-focused on marching band. People call this the Bible Belt. I call it the Football Belt. This is the South, we are football crazy, so therefore marching band is where they spend most of the energy. Marching band is the most visible portion of your group. We call it the front door of your band. When most people think of band, they think of the marching band. They don’t think of the wind ensemble, the chamber ensembles, the jazz band, or anything like that, right?”
It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing
The same could have been said for Liddell himself as he came up through the school music programs in his youth. Though he single-mindedly drills Central’s jazz band and other ensembles into forces to be reckoned with today, that wasn’t his focus when he was a high school student.
“My dad was a band director for 40 years,” Liddell explains. “First as a high school band director, then at several colleges, but he spent the majority of his career as director of bands at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. So I’ve been around band my whole life.”
With his family moving frequently in his youth, Liddell played trombone “in some really great band programs and some really bad turkeys. I know what it looks like to be in a top band program; I know what it looks like to be in a trash band program, because I was in it. And we had jazz bands in high school, but it wasn’t serious. It was something to do. I then went to college at Jackson State, and that’s when a friend of mine handed me this J.J. Johnson mixtape, and that was when I lost my mind, man! I listened to it over and over and I got hooked on jazz — you know, learning to swing.”
He had caught the bug, and though he had majored in chemistry as a bankable career move, he was so smitten with music that after graduating he joined a series of bands on the Chitlin’ Circuit for the next 10 years. Finally, he pivoted to teaching at East High School in 2008, and moved to Central from there, never losing his love of jazz in a world dominated by football.
On that point, Liddell’s eager to share his thoughts. “Let me speak on this,” he says. “In the grand scheme of music education, jazz is like the red-headed stepchild, right? It’s the black sheep of the family. It’s not embraced as universally as marching band. There are many schools that don’t offer jazz band as a class throughout the school day. We’re blessed to in Central but there are many schools that don’t. Even colleges, they may have a jazz band, but is it something they really take seriously? Do they invest in faculty? Do they invest in time and resources, like scholarships? It’s not the case in most schools in the South.”
The Champions of Sir Duke
Schools like Central are changing that, with considerable help from a very music-friendly local scene, especially the Memphis Jazz Workshop, which teaches all of Central’s jazz players in sessions outside of school hours. But larger institutions, like Jazz at Lincoln Center, are also helping to flip the marching band bias on its head. As Todd Stoll, the organization’s vice president of education, says, Essentially Ellington is more than just a performance contest. “When Wynton Marsalis founded this program, it was, ‘Let’s just put great music, great art, the works of our greatest American artistic figures, in front of young people to study,’” says Stolls. “The idea was to just improve the quality of the literature, and then, almost as a secondary benefit, make it a competition. When you have a competition, America pays attention. We’re a competitive country. And look, it’s a friendly competition. We do our best to try and make it more about the festival aspect than the competition aspect. But when you have a competition, that hones and sharpens everyone’s focus.”
Indeed, the five-day event in New York this spring was only the tip of the iceberg. As a statement from Jazz at Lincoln Center notes, long before any competition ensues, the organization supplies “free transcriptions of original Duke Ellington recordings — accompanied by rehearsal guides, original recordings, professional instruction, and more — to thousands of schools and community bands in 58 countries. To date, more than 7,100 high school bands have benefited from free charts and resources.”
Furthermore, these aren’t just your average jazz charts. “Our transcriptions are actually based on what Duke Ellington left behind in his archives,” Stoll says. “I always say it’s more like Indiana Jones. It’s an archeological experiment because we go to [the Duke Ellington Collection at] the Smithsonian and we pull all the copies of things. A lot of the original charts are still there, and we reassemble them from recordings, so it’s a little bit of everything, and it’s something we’re committed to and we love doing. Our institution was founded with the surviving members of the Duke Ellington Orchestra almost 40 years ago, and Duke Ellington is still kind of a touchstone — the center of what we believe is important about the music.”
Scores by other jazz luminaries, like Gerry Mulligan’s “Bweebida Bobbida” or works by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, or even Memphis’ legendary Jimmie Lunceford (who led the Manassas High School band to national stardom nearly a century ago) are also made available, but it’s ultimately up to every band to pick scores that will show them in their best light. Again, that’s where Liddell falls back on his default approach: listening.
“The music we played this year, the kids picked it,” he says. “Now, obviously I screened some of it because some of the stuff they wanted was like, ‘Nah, that’s not gonna work for us.’ Like, if you have a strong, strong trumpet section, you want songs that feature the trumpet section — to play up your strengths and downplay your weaknesses. You have to pick one from the current year’s list, and you have to pick one, regardless of the year, that’s by Duke Ellington. And then from there, we just picked what works, you know?”
Soul Deep
Liddell is wise to run with scores that caught the students’ attention, resulting in the band’s players being deeply invested in the music. And as they internalize every subtlety of the greats, they are also listening. “We do a lot of listening,” Liddell says of his students. “That’s the most important thing to mastering this music. You’ve got to listen to the greats. Listen to Duke Ellington play over and over, over and over and over and over, to every little nuance and detail of his playing. It’s like you’ve got to put yourself in that person’s body. So the lead alto saxophone [in Ellington recordings] is Johnny Hodges. ‘You’ve got to become Johnny Hodges,’ I joke with Jackson.”
Hankins couldn’t agree more. “I think it’s of the highest necessity,” the budding alto saxophonist says of the deep listening Liddell promotes. “With this music especially, but frankly any music. I mean, not doing it is equivalent to wanting to be an artist, but you’ve never seen a painting before. Like, you have no reference on how to do the thing. So listening and really internalizing the sound, the spirit, the harmonic devices, the way these people sing through their instruments, it’s so important because through them, I think you find yourself.”
Hearing him play on videos from the New York performances or live at the band’s triumphant homecoming show at the New Daisy Theatre after their win, Hankins did convey startling amounts of both gravitas and playfulness in his solos, expressively nuanced to a degree that made listeners’ jaws drop (especially on “Isfahan” by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn). Indeed, all of the band members played — and Liddell conducted — with an infectious swing that revealed how much fun they were having.
As Liddell says, that must always be part of internalizing the greatest jazz players. “I’ll say, ‘Man, you’ve got to be Johnny Hodges.’ Get his style and swing, but then comes the next-to-the-last step: You’ve got to sound like you as well. Develop yourself. How would you play this? And then comes the last step: Forget all that, and just have fun.”
To be sure, fun was had by all this May. As Stoll says of the final Essentially Ellington show, “The single most obvious thing with Central was how much joy was on stage when they were playing. Just absolute, unbridled, complete joy. And there was a spontaneous clapping, dancing, and moving in the audience that we’ve never really seen at Essentially Ellington before. If you look at the video, you can see it: All of a sudden, the audience is rocking.”
That was also reflected in the other awards Central scored at Essentially Ellington, including Outstanding Rhythm Section, Outstanding Trumpet Section, and Outstanding Trombone Section, not to mention the Outstanding Soloist prizes given to Hankins (alto sax), Marqese Cobb (trombone), and Kingston Grandberry (trumpet).
The experience has made Hankins all the more eager to get the new school year rocking. Thinking back on Central’s win in May, he says, “It was hard work, and I plan to work 100 times harder this time around. I think we’re already off to a good start, though.”
He’s optimistic, despite seeing some key band members graduate after their win. “Since last year, we’ve lost our lead trumpet player, lead trombone player, our baritone saxophone player — a lot of people. But I think we have all the tools to recover. It’s always a rebuilding process to some degree. I mean, the leaders of the band, we’re already stepping up, and we’re taking it upon ourselves to be teaching people, to just keep our eyes on the prize, and keep our heads to the grindstone.”
In the end, working through another year may not be too different from those long walks through New York every day during the competition, singing parts, which, for Hankins, expressed more profound qualities than simply rehearsing. “I really think it was all about our spirit as a group together,” he says. “We were all great friends. Everyone knew everyone. It was not like someone was excluded. I mean, yeah, we did use it as a device to practice the music and make sure that we’re hearing it properly. But also, I think it was like the ultimate expression of us having fun and loving one another.”
And once they hit the stage, such mutual support only fanned the flames of joy higher. “It was absolutely exhilarating,” Hankins says of playing Lincoln Center. “Everyone in the room, all my peers, dancing and cheering to the music we were playing … I just pray for a moment like that to happen again in my life.”