Here is my tribute to Scott Joplin’s ragtime for KJSB: an arrangement of his hauntingly beautiful concert waltz Bethena, written in 1906. Scott Joplin traveled to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair) in 1893. There he shared his ragtime music with welcoming audiences and soaked in the sounds of early jazz played…

KJSB played two successful holiday gigs this semester. We were honored to be invited back to The Breakers at Edgewater Beach, and we also played the Holiday Fair at Chicago Waldorf School. Our sets this winter featured a new holiday tune — Jingle Bell Rock, as well as a hot-jazz-inspired version of The Rollings Stones’…

Middle School string students in Knights of Jazz String Band finished up their semester with a well-attended gig at The Breakers at Edgewater Beach, a senior living center on the North Side of Chicago. One of our bandmembers has a grandparent living at The Breakers, so the gig was extra special!

Knights of Jazz String Band swung hard at #IMEC2025. We got some very positive feedback on our first Demonstration Clinic, and got a sense of what IMEC is all about and all it has to offer. The audience loved our swing feel, complimented our improv skills, and we got a standing ovation following an impromptu…

I’m excited to share that I was selected to lead a Demonstration Clinic with the Knights of Jazz String Band at the Illinois Music Education Conference, taking place at the Peoria Civic Center on Friday January 31st, 2025. In our clinic Early Jazz Strings, I’ll talk about my approach to arranging for middle school string…

Taking a cue from Suzuki pedagogy, our conviction is that great string teaching flows from great repertoire. Distilling five years of work with Knights of Jazz String Band, here are five early jazz favorites, presented as Early Jazz Classics For Strings, Volume 1. Arranged in an authentic “hot jazz” style, the meticulously edited parts are…

In March 2023, four of my private cello students approached me to share that they were excited to re-establish the Knights of Jazz String Band. The band’s first iteration was formed back in April 2019, just after I first listened to Duke Ellington and fell in love. I played a couple tunes off Ellington’s OKEH…