PHOTOGRAPH BY GILBERTO TADDAY / JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER
The 30th Annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition and Festival. The first-place winner in the competition, Memphis Central High School Jazz Band, performs at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater on Saturday, May 10, 2025.
After leading the Central High School Jazz Band to its first-place victory in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s international Essentially Ellington competition this May, you might expect band director Dr. Ollie Liddell to rest on his laurels for a beat. After all, by the time I catch up with him, the school year has finished, the seniors in his band have graduated, and all the world of education is enjoying summer break. When he answers the phone, though, he’s busy.
“Hold on, I’m about to leave the band room,” he explains. “I’m fixing a couple of horns. I’ve been fixing horns the whole time since we got out of school, but I’m almost done.”
It turns out the title Director of Bands also includes Fixer of Instruments among its duties. “Once upon a time, Shelby County Schools had a functioning repair shop with seven repair techs and two drivers to pick up instruments and everything,” Liddell explains. “When Shelby County Schools and Memphis City Schools merged, they eliminated techs till they were down to one. Long story short, they brought in about eight of us band directors over the summer and said, ‘Hey, you guys come in, we’ll train you how to fix stuff.’ And we knocked it out! The one tech guy that was still there taught us how to do it. We got everything fixed, the shop was running great … and then the guy died. So basically, it’s either I fix them or it doesn’t get done.”
photograph by justin fox burks
Dr. Ollie Liddell directs the Central High School Jazz Band at the New Daisy on May 29, 2025.
Getting it done is something Liddell is known for, albeit in his own soft-spoken, affable way. The epitome of the teacher whose work is a labor of love, he augments his official workdays with many more earnest hours of planning, repairing, and listening.
The way he sees it, listening is key to both teachers’ and students’ practice, 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.”
“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 — not the wind ensemble, the chamber ensembles, the jazz band, or anything like that.” — Dr. Ollie Liddell
Always keeping an ear out for rapidly advancing players who might be suited to the jazz band, Liddell nonetheless ensures that different options are available 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 there’s always the marching band, in which everyone plays (except the pianist).
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 showband 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,” he says. “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 — not the wind ensemble, the chamber ensembles, the jazz band, or anything like that.”
photograph by justin fox burks
Dr. Liddell accepts Memphis Mayor Paul Young’s proclamation naming May 29, 2025, as Central High School Jazz Band Day.
As a band director, Liddell has run with the popular momentum of the marching band even as he’s steadily cultivated the jazz band and other ensembles. It’s indicative of just how steeped in the jazz tradition Liddell is personally. Ironically, that wasn’t his attitude when he himself was a high school student.
“My dad was a band director for 40 years,” Liddell says. “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.”
“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?” — Dr. Ollie Liddell
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 ten 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? And it’s not the case in most schools in the South.”
photograph by justin fox burks
The band takes in the applause from the audience after their New Daisy performance.
That’s where Jazz at Lincoln Center comes in, flipping the marching band bias on its head. This year marked the 30th anniversary of their Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition and Festival, but as Todd Stoll, the organization’s vice president of education, says, it’s 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 Stoll. “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, featuring a record 127 bands, 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.”
photograph by justin fox burks
A crowd assembles outside the New Daisy in anticipation of a concert by the Central High School Jazz Band.
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 that we’re committed to and we love doing. You know, 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.”
Liddell (who earned his Ph.D. in music education from the University of Mississippi) would agree, and has been participating in Essentially Ellington for some time, placing Central High School among the finalists at the 2020 and 2021 competitions. “Ollie has been on our radar for many, many years,” says Stoll. “And we’ve always been in his corner.”
But Liddell has had some help along the way, most notably from the Memphis Jazz Workshop (MJW), a nonprofit for aspiring young musicians started by Memphis native Stephen M. Lee in 2017, when he returned home after years as a pianist in New York. The MJW’s strengths, Liddell explains, have complemented his teaching perfectly. “Steve and the other guys that teach in the workshop, these are Memphis musicians I’ve known for years and years and years. The majority of that early workshop group were Central High School jazz students. Their primary focus is improvisation. I do everything outside of requiring kids to go. I push it, push it, push it. Every one of those kids but maybe one, even if they’re not consistent attendees, they’ve all been through the workshop.”
Elijah Sembler, who started playing saxophone as a seventh-grader at Snowden Middle School, was one beneficiary of the MJW who went on to play with Central’s jazz band at Lincoln Center. “I joined the Memphis Jazz Workshop in eighth grade,” he says, “and I just kept coming back. The community was great, and the jazz just amazed me, so I’ve been playing it ever since. For me, playing music, getting into music, went hand in hand with learning and listening to jazz.”
Now graduated, Sembler has even co-founded a jazz septet, The Soul Ingredient, independent of any school. They’re currently cutting tracks at Archer Recording Studio and performing live around Memphis. “Four of us went to Central, or do go to Central, but we all met through the Memphis Jazz Workshop,” he says. “Steve Lee, the director, will put groups together and find gigs for the students.”
Next year, Sembler plans to study music at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. “I’ll be doing jazz studies and performance with saxophone player Greg Tardy,” he says. “He’s worked with a lot of people. He’s definitely underrated, but if I had to put it into two words, he’s ‘a cat.’”
photograph by justin fox burks
The standing-room-only crowd applauds the Central High School Band’s performance at the New Daisy.
Liddell, for his part, encourages his students to identify with such heavy cats, past and present. And that requires more of that magic ingredient — listening. “That’s the most important thing to mastering this music,” he says of his students. “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, Central’s alto soloist]. I said, ‘Man, you’ve got to be Johnny Hodges.’ Get his style and swing, and 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.”
Hearing him play on videos from the New York performances, or live at the band’s triumphant homecoming show at the New Daisy 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.
Fun, apparently, is the Central Jazz Band’s secret ingredient, and likely what put them over the top when the three Essentially Ellington finalists (also including Sant Andreu Jazz Band from Barcelona, Spain, who placed second, and Osceola County School for the Arts from Kissimmee, Florida, who placed third) performed at Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera House on May 11th. “That’s what we did in New York. It was just literally about ‘Have fun, swing, and play with joy,’” says Liddell. “And that’s really the last step: Just play with joy. Forget everything you know. You won’t really forget it, because it’s in you. Therefore, you just have to get in that moment.”
As Stoll observed that day, the sense of fun was palpable. “Ollie understands that, after all is said and done, it’s music. There’s a human part of what we do as musicians that is supposed to bring joy to people and bring a feeling of profundity that is greater than yourself. It touches people across gender and generation and whatever types of barriers are between us. Ollie and other great directors recognize that, and 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,” he continues. “If you look at the video, you can see it: All of a sudden, the audience is rocking. As I said at the time, they’re not going to get that out of the walls of the Met for years. Not that Italian Grand Opera doesn’t have joy in it, but it’s not the kind of joy you see in Memphis.”
Meet the Musicians — A Small Gallery
Photographer Justin Fox Burks captured candid images before, during, and after the Central Jazz Band’s performance at the New Daisy:
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