Community Music
From my daughter's first music lessons to a trip to see Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra's play their sold-out debut at Carnegie Hall
It’s Sunday morning. I’m sitting in a room with two Moroccan leather couches, two Bo Diddley-style wooden-body square guitars mounted on the wall, and a round copper table stacked with kids’ introductions to Led Zeppelin, Madonna, Prince, ABBA, Dolly Parton, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and the Beatles. Nearby, there’s a coffee and tea area, a mini fridge, and a lamp that looks like it could be from Crate & Barrel. The walls feature photos of Billie Eilish, Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, and Bob Marley.
This is the setting at my daughter’s music school in Mount Kisco, New York, Green Room Music founded by one Eugene Song.1 It’s her second lesson. We knew Eugene because our daughters went to to preschool together. We wanted to support a local music school and we signed her up for Music 101 for Kids.
Watching my daughter step into this world brings back memories of my own lessons at Dale Music2 Then there were very early saxophone lessons in 5th grade at the long-shuttered Bethesda Music, where I remember seeing Pat Metheny’s photo on the wall of 1980s and 1990s rock icons, thinking he was some hair metal dude. Later on, I moved to lessons at Washington Conservatory of Music with Jim Carroll3, Andy Axelrad, Steve Ticknor, and later independently, Paul Carr. Now, seeing my daughter start her own musical journey feels incredibly special.
Her teacher, Francesco, is introducing her to everything—drums, piano, guitar, bass—using her Spotify playlist of songs she discovered through us as a guide to explore the things she’s hearing musically. She’s always been musical. In the car, she’s constantly requesting songs—music is her preferred entertainment, second only to the iPad. I think about what I grew up with—Jewish music, oldies, R&B—versus the unlimited access to music she has in 2025. She’s inevitably more sophisticated in her taste than I was at six.
I don’t know yet what instrument she’ll gravitate toward. We didn’t want to push her into formal piano lessons before she had a chance to explore. She loves to sing and has a natural sense of rhythm. That day at Green Room, she even repeated back what her teacher taught her while I fumbled through a steady beat on kick, hi-hat, and snare. It’s encouraging, but I want her to find her own way.
Two nights earlier, I had another moment of musical reflection at Carnegie Hall with Steven Bernstein and the Millennial Territory Orchestra, celebrating their 25th anniversary with a program ranging from Sly Stone to Bessie Smith to Ellington. This, mind you, was to a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Hall’s downstairs space, Zankel Hall, the home of the Shape of Jazz series programmed by Danny Melnick of Absolutely Live Entertainment, with support from the George & Joyce Wein Foundation.
Seeing so many familiar faces reminded me how much I value this community, even as it becomes rarer to experience this music at all, whether uptown or downtown. The lineup was incredible—Erik Lawrence, Ben Allison, Ben Perowsky, Matt Munisteri, Peter Apfelbaum, Doug Wieselman, Corey Wallace (now sitting for the late Curtis Fowlkes), Charlie Burnham. Seeing John Medeski, Catherine Russell, and Vernon Reid with MTO completed a broader feeling of community, built on the scene and in recording studios over the last 40 years. (These were also several of the guest musicians on the tetrology discussed below.)
The set, featuring a thrilling rendition of “STAND” with Russell, Medeski and Reid all joining in, was a reminder of a truly joyful era of music that has been largely overshadowed by streaming algorithms and Meta ads, which are the only thing left aside from word-of-mouth, and perhaps radio, to get audiences out to shows.
Bernstein’s music, introduced to me originally by my old pal
, then a publicist and radio promoter at Hyena Records, originally thrived in underground spaces and clubs like The Knitting Factory, Tonic, nublu, The Stone and The 55 Bar (I have one particularly memorably MTO gig forever etched into my brain from 55 Bar with Doug Wamble on guitar and Michael Blake on tenor sax subbing for Wieselman or Lawrence). This scene is more fragmented now. Real estate, cultural shifts, and a changing overall music landscape have made it harder to unify fans and musicians under one banner. Read this essential piece by Piotr Orlov of on this very topic.And yet, here we were, gathered for something truly unique representing a scene that has reached the ripe old age of social security benefits (though perhaps not for long). As my wife and I filed to our seats, Marty Ehrlich called out to me, critic Jim Macnie and his wife Holly spotted us. Ashley Kahn plopped down next to us in the last row about 20 minutes into the show. Before the show, I saw trumpeter
in the foyer; at the end, trombonist Mark Patterson and writer and editor Larry Blumenfeld. These are people who have been part of this ecosystem for decades. I am a relative newcomer. But we are all family.This shared energy, is what keeps a scene alive. Seeing a concert like this in such a grandiose setting reminds me that, though changed and scattered, this community still comes together for milestones.
Bernstein has a way of holding these musicians together. That’s increasingly rare: a bandleader who fosters an environment where every musician’s personality shines and keeps them together for a quarter century through thick and thin and many odd jobs in between. It made me think about Mingus, Threadgill, and Butch Morris—the way their ensembles were much more than just a collection of players. That kind of individualistic dynamic is something we see less and less today.
I called Bernstein to talk about the meaning behind his aforementioned Community Music tetralogy4 released between 2022 and 2023 via Royal Potato Family, Bernstein’s on-again off-again label and the home of many similar sonic travelers.
MEREWITZ: Why call it Community Music? You’ve been making what one could call community music your whole career.
BERNSTEIN: The idea was to record as much music as possible without burning out the musicians. It wasn’t about getting a perfect take—it was about documenting the music as it sounds. The idea of Community Music came later. It became clear: this is the music that happens when a community of musicians gets together for four days, capturing what they’ve been creating for 20 years.
MEREWITZ: Right. And the core of that community was Millennial Territory Orchestra?
BERNSTEIN: Right.
MEREWITZ: This idea of a band made up of strong personalities— Gonsalves, Hodges, Cootie Williams in Ellington’s band; Richmond, Dolphy, Jimmy Knepper in Mingus’ bands; Cherry, Barbieri, Redman and Bley in Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra—each musician standing out while still being part of something larger. That’s rare now, but MTO carries on that tradition.
BERNSTEIN: The culture has changed. We’re probably one of the last few full bands of musicians who didn’t go through a codified jazz education system. We were already professional musicians before college, already had our personalities developed. I feel like a lot of modern composed “jazz music” comes from a school of thought where it's a lot more like classical music, the way it's played. If you're playing in a symphonic situation, a Broadway show, studio music, which we all also do, there’s a certain kind of playing that is required to get what the composer-arranger wants. And that is often when we don't hear the individual voice. That's how that music works. That’s what the desire often is now – to create 17 musicians that sound like one.
MEREWITZ: Right.
BERNSTEIN: It’s just a different philosophy of what you want the outcome to be, right? I don't want a very unified sound where you don't hear the individuals. The way you do that is you make all the musicians have a unified attack. Unified release. No vibrato. That's another thing that we do. People don't play with vibrato anymore. Every one in my band has a unique sound. That is a lost art. So I'll tell you something. When Joel Dorn heard our band 20 years ago, he came running back to me. He said, “I never thought I'd hear this sound again in my life!”
Of course are times when I want things to be tight, but sometimes we'll do something that has a few different phrasings at once and I’ll say, ‘Yeah, that's fine. I want it like that.’ Most people now, would be like, ‘Oh no, everyone needs to sound like this.’
MEREWITZ: You studied with Don Cherry and Karl Berger at the Creative Music Studio. That kind of apprenticeship from originators is becoming a lost art. Seeing musicians in their 60s still creating with openness and energy is a reminder of how vital this tradition is. Where else do you see this? I personally think there are glimpses of it, perhaps in Mary Halvorson’s groups, in Arturo O’Farrill's ensembles, We've seen it for years in the Mingus Big Band and to some extent in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra's earlier editions with Wessell ‘Warmdaddy’ Anderson and Wycliffe Gordon and Walter Blanding. But those seem to be distant memories. Those folks were big personalities. But so much of the individual is being sublimated to a more tamed sameness. So what do you say to that?
BERNSTEIN: Yes. I would also add that part of my training, why I am here, is that my teachers, at least my trumpet teachers, were from the big band era. That really is something you can't forget. My teachers were Jimmy Maxwell and John Coppola. So I have this whole history of teachers who sat next to Cootie Williams and Ben Webster and were there with the Condoli Brothers and Conrad Gozzo and Shelley Manne, when they were in their early 20s and late teens. And Bud Shank and Art Pepper and Teddy Wilson.
Jimmy Maxwell came up with Teddy Wilson. Jimmy Maxwell was there the day Charlie Christian showed up. John Coppola was in there the day Maynard Ferguson showed up. These people taught me about how those people thought about jazz music. Not many people of my generation had the opportunity to study with those musicians.
MEREWITZ: Mhm.
BERNSTEIN: So my teacher was the guy who could tell me stories about going out to eat after the gigs with Ben Webster and Count Basie and Mildred Bailey. He's telling me these stories and he's also teaching me to play with a vibrato with a very, very large sound and how to play the beat right.
People don't play a beat like that anymore, That's what the beat was; dance music. He was teaching me to phrase jazz as dance music. So I always had both. Once I told Roswell Rudd, “I said, yeah man, I'm just trying to find the fine line between Jimmy Maxwell and Don Cherry…and Roswell said, ‘that's one hell of a line’.”
The idea of, being a swing jazz musician, but also being willing to to play and accept any sound; any sound that comes out. That's what Don Cherry would teach you. You accept that sound. You don't fight that sound. Jimmy was saying, you practice to be able to perform or produce this specific thing, with consistency. This is how we play music. And then Don was like: ‘a sound comes, you accept the sound and you build from it.’
MEREWITZ: After I asked that last question, I thought about Carla Bley’s bands, obviously.
BERNSTEIN: Absolutely. Absolutely.
MEREWITZ: Are there any people you feel that warrant mention who are still around who attempt to do this?
BERNSTEIN: I don't know how much he's doing it anymore, but, 8 Bold Souls, Edward Wilkerson. That band was incredible. And I met him ten years ago in Chicago. We both had a commission and got to meet. I don't know what they do anymore. Also any Threadgill band. It tends to be more what people unfortunately call “avant-garde.” Any Zorn ensemble. You know, that's John's whole thing. Each person has a very strong personality.
And I'm sure there's a lot in the so-called improvisers scene, which, I'm not so much a part of because, people make this artificial dichotomy between improvisers who don't use song form or dance rhythms and someone like me.
MEREWITZ: Or who don't use chord changes, perhaps.
BERNSTEIN: Yeah, right. But you know, but I'm sure once you get into that, there's probably a whole bunch.
MEREWITZ: I just thought of an ensemble where, the individual is not sublimated. The Nels Cline Singers. Everybody gets to let their freak flag fly in that band, you know? Also The Microscopic Septet and The Jazz Passengers and of course, your old band, The Lounge Lizards.
BERNSTEIN: Yes. This was all in the East Village. That was the only way to be. Any Frisell large ensemble. Any of the Joe Lovano nonets.
MEREWITZ: And The Cookers. They all bring their own shit to bear. I don't know how common it used to be.
BERNSTEIN: Everyone played like that because that was the only way!!! That was the ethos of jazz music. Play your own sound. Unless you were playing in the Stan Kenton band, or the Buddy Rich band, those kind of bands required a very uniform phrasing and sound.
MEREWITZ: So basically the message is that the institutionalization of jazz education changed the direction of this whole field, and made it less about the individual and more about the ensemble and also discouraged being different.
BERNSTEIN: The ensemble does not seem to be encouraged, but rather the virtuoso soloist, working within a specific set of harmonic choices and less attention paid to sound, rhythm and magic. That's what I want to get. I went and heard a good band recently, And I heard the saxophone player; very great. And I just thought to myself, “Where is the weirdness?” Like, where is anything at all surprising?
All the East Village music [of the 1980s and 1990s] that was inspired by The Art Ensemble [of Chicago] and Cecil Taylor. When we went to concerts as young people, that's who we'd see - the Art Ensemble and Cecil Taylor. So those were our immediate forbears.
But we're not them. How do we take this music and filter it through who we are as human beings, through our culture? Everyone plays true to their culture. And so if your culture is about like having a more inside way of playing, then that’s going to be your truth. My culture is my truth. And I come from growing up in the 1960s; understanding the whole idea of opening the doors of perception. That's what I want. I want history, and I want the unknown.
Some people say, ‘I don't want the unknown. I want the known. I want perfection. I want clarity. I want something that sounds like something they already heard.’ And it sounds like that. And that's what they want. That's who they are. They're playing to their personal truth.
Amen.
In a time when so much music feels homogenous, I left the concert thinking about how important it is to celebrate strong musical personalities. New York, despite its challenges, is still the center of the jazz world. Other cities—Los Angeles, London—have growing scenes, but you can’t replace the history, mentorship, and deeply embedded jazz culture of New York.
From my daughter’s first music lessons to an unforgettable night at Carnegie Hall, I’m thinking a lot about how we experience music—how we come into it, how we pass it on, and how we keep these traditions alive.
Surely Olivia’s exposure to pop iconoclasts via Spotify will do more for her than jazz school or any formal education. But I do wonder—does the overwhelming sameness of today’s landscape encourage originality?
I want both my daughter and the musicians I go hear to have some swagger, some sass. I want them to stand out.
Eugene launched Green Room Music in September 2024 on Main Street in Mount Kisco, offering individual and group music lessons. The school has five soundproofed rooms and reflects Song’s lifelong passion for music, which began with piano at age six before transitioning to guitar. A Brown University music major, Song played in bands and worked in music publishing and engineering before earning an MBA at NYU and spending 14 years in tech, including at The New York Times as a product manager. The reason we signed up our daughter is that unlike some of her friends, who have been enrolled in formal piano lessons and doing competitions since age 3, Green Room emphasizes musical fundamentals and fun (!), fostering a sense of community and camaraderie. I read that their students who run from 3-years-old to high school age, have already performed at Mount Kisco’s Septemberfest, a local coffeehouse, and the Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival. These are the experiences I hope to give our daughter. Song, whom I hope to interview for a future edition of this newsletter, hopes to expand his adult programming and recreate the spirit of a musician’s green room—a welcoming, collaborative space.
At Dale Music, I studied with a clarinet and sax player named Robbie Robinson, who had been a session musician in New York, before ending up teaching in the backroom of this legendary sheet music store in Silver Spring, Md. Interestingly, on my mom’s side there was a somewhat distant cousin who was also a very active working woodwind doubler from the 1950s to the 1990s in NYC named Phil Bodner (b. June 13, 1919, d. Feb 28, 2008). Check out Phil’s minblowing recording credits from 1955-1962). In the course of our clarinet lessons at Dale Music, Robbie told me he had spent many afternoons walking the streets of Manhattan with Phil, who shared a lot of wisdom with him as a young musician. I tried to meet Phil as I came of age (though my mom says I had met him at my great uncle’s funeral when I was 10 years old) and I finally got to consciously him around 2004 in Florida when visiting family. At that time, he was already 85 years old and strugging mentally, and not playing anymore. What I would have done to inherit those horns and record collection!
Jim introduced me both to Aebersolds (which blew my young mind) and the International Saxophone Symposium, an annual gathering at George Mason University where a bunch of early-internet-era sax professionals, students and nerds would convene under the auspices of the U.S. Navy Band and geek out to displays of horns, mouthpieces, reeds, method books, and a series of clinics, masterclasses and an annual evening concert usually featuring a guest artist from New York. Over the years I remember seeing Walt Weiskopf, Jim Snidero, Bob Mintzer, Andy Snitzer and maybe Dick Oatts. It was a very particular scene). Perhaps not so ironically, Jim later became Director of Jazz Studies at George Mason, a gig which I believe he may be more known for than his impressive work with the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra or the Woody Herman band in the early 1980s (he appears on World Class (Concord Jazz) recorded live in Japan with guests including Al Cohn, Flip Phillips, and Sal Nistico on saxophones. Notably other sidemen on the album include John Fedchock, Mike Brignola and Frank Tiberi, a highly underrated tenor saxophonist and bassoonist who was chief saxophone soloist, arranger and led the Herman band from the time of Woody’s death until they stopped playing some time in the 1990s. Tiberi also taught at Berklee for 30+ years.
That’s like a trilogy, but with four parts, for you wordsmiths out there.
This is such a great piece! In addition to all his deep musical knowledge, relentless creativity and overall mastery, I think Steve’s most powerful quality might be his positive energy. He has harnessed a spirit that any artist working in any medium would do well to capture in his/her/ their self to bring maximum life to works, and thereby to the audience. Steve has done it—a contemporary master indeed!
Great take, Matt. Sums up a lot of how I feel about the local scene these days, even though my feelings about it are mostly very positive. Leave it to a Berkeley High School grad to have it figured out.