Mid-Summer 2024 Issue

SINCE 1972, THE Summer Jazz Workshop (SJW) has schooled more than 15,000 middle and high school-age students in the art of playing jazz, a music Duke Ellington once described as “freedom of expression.” Saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Kelly Dean, who teaches music at Houston’s Emery/Weiner School, has been an SJW faculty member since 1994, and his commitment to the workshop — co-founded by the late great drummer and educator Bubbha Thomas and Thomas’ mentor Conrad O. Johnson — remains strong.