Tucked away in Coral Gables, several miles southwest of the city it’s named for, the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami (www.frost.miami.edu) is the linchpin of all South Florida musical institutions of higher learning. Renamed for arts patrons Phillip and Patricia Frost in 2003, its program actually goes back 95 years.
Saxophonist Paul Chafin (1930-2008) earned a scholarship to the University of Miami School of Music before performing with the likes of Lena Horne, Frankie Laine, and Patti Page, and opening his landmark retail instrument and sheet music store, Chafin MusiCenter, in Lake Worth Beach.
Since then, the school’s scroll of former students includes vocalist/keyboardist Bruce Hornsby, singers Carmen Lundy and Jon Secada, saxophonist Bobby Watson, guitarists Pat Metheny, Randy Bernsen and Jonathan Kreisberg, bassists Jaco Pastorius (1951-1987) and Javier Carrion, and drummers Danny Gottlieb, Jonathan Joseph and Vince Verderame.
Pianist, trumpeter and upright bassist Bill Lee (1929-2011), father of CBS Orchestra and Late Show With David Letterman electric bassist Will Lee, was UM’s music dean from 1964-1982. Metheny and Pastorius both became faculty members there because of their prodigious techniques and teaching abilities. And seminal fusion band the Dixie Dregs recorded its independent debut album, The Great Spectacular, there as students in 1975 before being signed to Capricorn Records.
“Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” is a saying rendered even more preposterous at Frost, where 14-year-tenured dean Shelly Berg (also an acclaimed touring pianist and piano instructor) continues a tradition of working musicians as faculty members — not to mention students as working musicians, who bond with peers and professors while learning on stage and in the moment.
The school’s faculty jazz sextet of saxophonist Marcus Strickland (whose credits include Roy Haynes and Christian McBride); trumpeters Brian Lynch (Art Blakey, Eddie Palmieri) and Etienne Charles (Marcus Miller, Roberta Flack); pianist Martin Bejerano (Haynes, Kreisberg); bassist Chuck Bergeron (Buddy Rich, Kevin Mahogany); and drummer Dafnis Prieto (Roy Hargrove, Arturo O’Farrill) will present a six-week series of Frost student and faculty concerts on Tuesdays beginning tonight through March 8 — including chamber music and jazz — at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach.
Other notable Frost instructors encouraging young musicians to find their own styles and paths include Gonzalo Rubalcaba, John Daversa, Steve Rucker, Don Coffman, Nicole Yarling, John Yarling, and Mitchell Farber.
“There are a vast number of possibilities when we approach music,” said Prieto, who joined the Frost faculty in 2015 after teaching jazz studies at NYU from 2005-2014, on his Frost web page. “Therefore, I always give the students the freedom to choose, but with personalized guidance and a body of knowledge that will support each particular intention.”
A native of Santa Clara, Cuba, Prieto is a MacArthur Fellow; a 2019 Grammy winner, and author of an acclaimed instructional book, A World of Rhythmic Possibilities: Drumming Lessons and Reflections on Rhythms (Dafnison Music). And after arriving in New York in 1999, he certainly learned about musical freedom while recording with the likes of free jazz saxophonists John Zorn and Henry Threadgill.
“Dafnis is an all-around amazing drummer, composer and musician,” says Bejerano, a 10-year Frost professor of jazz piano. “I just had the pleasure of recording on his next album. His playing challenges and pushes me to new heights, which I absolutely love.”
“I’m currently in Europe,” Prieto said in mid-November, exemplifying the playing faculty ideal while touring France and Spain with his own band. “It’s a different kind of dynamic [at Frost]. There’s a sense of community. and my goal is for my students to not play like me.”
That last statement is telling, and an indicator of Frost’s open-minded mantra of creating working musicians regardless of style or genre. Hornsby, for example, is a pop star, yet infuses his compositions with elements of jazz, classical, bluegrass, gospel, R&B, and jam band nuances. Kreisberg, Carrion and Verderame were all members of the progressive rock band Wyscan, not to mention Kreisberg’s subsequent self-titled fusion trio, before all three graduated in the mid-1990s. The guitarist has since relocated to Brooklyn and become a clean-toned traditional jazz guitar star, particularly in Europe. And Joseph’s drumming has backed artists from pop singer Joss Stone to iconic fusion guitarist Jeff Beck.
That diversity is furthered within the school’s Henry Mancini Institute and its Henry Mancini Orchestra. Once a summer institute, it ceased operations after 10 years at UCLA at the end of 2006, but relocated to UM in 2009. It purposely mixes jazz and classical students within its ensembles, and is directed by multi-Grammy-winning pianist, composer, big band leader and arranger Maria Schneider. She succeeded film composer James Newton Howard, and trumpeter Terence Blanchard, in the director’s chair, with all helping Berg to realize the audio equivalent of a multimedia vision.
“As the dean, I felt that the school should be doing what the Mancini Institute was doing as a summer institute in L.A.,” Berg says. “I thought it should be embedded in what the school does year-round. One of the reasons I became dean here was that, whether or not we got the Mancini Institute, I intended to implement what it stood for.”
“The people who ran the institute saw that musicians were being trained in conservatories for a very narrow slice of the music world. And they felt that it was important to take some of the best people from conservatories and give them an experience where they worked with film composers, and world and jazz musicians, and looked at things like improvisation and enterpreneurship.”
The Flagler Museum series starts out tonight (Feb. 1) with the Frost Faculty String Trio of violinist Bettina Mussemeli, violist Jodi Levitz, and cellist Ross Harbaugh in a program of music by Beethoven and Dohnanyi. On Feb. 8, it’s the Khaos Wind Quintet, with flutist Vanessa Floura, oboist Jessica Myers, clarinetist Claire Grellier, bassoonist Melanie Ferrabone, and French hornist Caiti Beth McKinney.
On Feb. 15, it’s the Brian Lynch Artist Ensemble, led by its multi-Grammy-winning namesake faculty trumpeter and his handpicked collection of student players. On Feb. 22, it’s the Deco Saxophone Quartet, with Benjamin Morris on soprano, Shengbo Lin on alto, Jacob Bernat on tenor, and Noah Brisson on baritone. On March 1, it’s the Frost Septet, with vocalist Katie Oberholtzer, saxophonist Jason Arkins, trumpeter Joey Curreri, guitarist Tim Watson, pianist Conner Rohrer, bassist Joe Marino, and drummer Nathan Bjoin.
And the closing act on March 8 is the Frost Department of Studio Music and Jazz (MSJ) Faculty Sextet, which will cut a wide stylistic swath via original compositions and arrangements by the Cuban Prieto, Trinidadian Charles, and Americans Bejerano (a Miami native of Cuban ancestry), Strickland (a Gainesville native), Lynch (a Midwesterner who specializes in Latin jazz styles) and Bergeron (who studied at UM and plays both acoustic upright and electric basses).
Bejerano looks forward to performing with his other fellow faculty members as well, some of whom he has deep-seeded history and chemistry with (like Strickland, with whom he’s played in the quartet led by Haynes, the drumming icon who’s now 96 years old).
“Chuck is not just a great bass player, but an amazing all-around musician,” Bejerano says. “Etienne plays with a lot of joy, energy and groove. Great composer and arranger as well. I’ve known Marcus since we were teenagers. He’s one of my favorite saxophonists, and always brings passion, fire and honesty to the music. And Brian is a fantastic trumpet player and composer who also possesses a wealth of knowledge about jazz and jazz history.”
Lynch is the musical director for the show, and suitably teaches marketing as well as trumpet at Frost, where students are taught how to survive as well as perform in the ever-changing modern music business.
“We were the first school in the country to have music business as a degree,” Berg says, “and the first to have music engineering and recording as a degree. We’ve always had one of the top jazz programs, as well as a strong classical performance program.
“But the pools of opportunity for musicians are shrinking, and being replaced by puddles of opportunity,” he said. “At the Frost School, we train musicians more broadly in technology, styles of music, and entrepeneurship to allow them to find their niche.”
If You Go
Flagler Museum is located at 1 Whitehall Way, Palm Beach.
Hours: 7 p.m. every Tuesday from Feb. 1-March 8 (with 6:30 p.m. receptions in the grand hall).
Tickets: $70; $350 for the six-concert series.
Info: 561-655-2833, ext. 10, www.flaglermuseum.us.