Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
It’s Mother’s Day, and all that jazz
Ona day of celebratory brunches and family dinners, one group of South Florida moms will be worshiped from afar. They wouldn’t have it any other way.
Mother’s Day is also the final day of the Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition& Festival, a prestigious annual gathering put on by Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City to determine the best high school ensemble in the nation. For the fourth-straight year, the Dillard Center for the Arts in Fort Lauderdale has one of the 15 bands from across the United States and Canada invited to the three-day
finals of Essentially Ellington, where they hope to bring home a third-consecutive national title. (The finals will be streamed live at JALC.org.)
That the final competition this year will keep her son more than 1,200 miles away from her on Mother’s Day is bittersweet for Minerva Howell, of Deerfield Beach.
Her “baby,” Markus, is a senior and he will be the last of eight brothers and sisters to leave Howell’s home when he heads for Michigan State University (to study under Rodney Whitaker, a Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra member).
Today is also when mother and son should be celebrating another big milestone: his 18th birthday.
For more than a decade, Howell has listened to Markus’ music, beginning with the “squeaking” noise he made with his new saxophone around the house and, later, at Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church in Deerfield Beach.
As part of the DCA program, his sound matured while mimicking heroes such as John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins alone in his room.(Markuswas “a blessing,” Howell says, 14 years younger than his closest sibling.)
“Thank God we have neighbors who love to hear it. It would be time to go to bed, after he was done with his school work, and he’d start practicing,” Howell says.
“He’d put me to sleep with his practice… I am going to miss him so very much. I get teary-eyed. It’s hard to talk about it.”
Howell plans to watch Essentially Ellington on the live stream, and says the birthday cake and dinner with family and friends will be held until he gets home fromNewYork.
She wishes his next stop would be a college closer to home, but she’s made peace with that.
“I’m happy for him that he’s happy,” says Howell, a secretary with the Broward County School District.
“He wants to become a jazz professor, teaching jazz. I amproud because he has a goal set for himself and he’s going for it.”
Sydney Henry discovered percussion in fourth grade. Itwas not pretty.
“She drove me crazy banging on everything, the coffee table, books, the counter. It didn’t sound so great. I didn’t knowitwould lead to where it has,” says her mom, Kalena Armstrong Henry, of Pembroke Pines.
Sydney was one of three freshmen to make the national championship band last year.
This year she is one of two female band members, and Armstrong Henry, also the band’s treasurer, is a chaperone.
“I’ve got nothing planned [forMother’sDay]. Ifwe are in the top three again on Sunday evening, I’ll just sit and listen to jazz. I’m not complaining,” says ArmstrongHenry, anaccounting professor at Broward College and the University of Phoenix, and mother to University of Florida student Synclair. Her husband, CurtisHenry, is a U.S. Army colonel stationed in California.
The years of driving her daughter to after-school gigs and camps, writing checks for lessons and shifting her day-job duties to nights to accommodate all that jazz has beenworth it.
Sydney is an honors student, but Armstrong Henry says her daughter’s discipline and determination aren’t limited to her studies.
A typical performance will begin with Sydney transporting six to eight drums and all the hardware into a venue.
“It’s a big deal to get the drums from the car. It usually takes a couple of trips,” Armstrong Henry says. “When she comes in with all this stuff, membersof the bandwant to help, but she’ll say, ‘No, I can do it myself.’ The guys are being gentlemen, but she doesn’t want any special treatment. She definitely holds her own.”
Kashima Floyd will watch her son, Christian Dorsey, on the live stream, “posting like crazy” on Facebook, backed by a “cheering squad” at her church, New Jerusalem First Missionary Baptist Church inHollywood.
While she says a win would be “an awesome Mother’s Day gift,” Floyd tends to see a bigger picture, one that includes more than just her son, the 11th-grade lead trumpet, who is also the son of her ex-husband, DCA bandleader Christopher Dorsey.
“What I’m really most proud of is that Christian and all these children who come through the [ jazz] program are really good kids.
“They are good people. Honestly, the performing and the winning is just icing on the cake,” says Floyd, a Miramar letter carrier who has also put two daughters through the program: tenor sax player Kashima Christina Dorsey andNadiri Dorsey, a clarinetist now focused on recording and producing.
The jazz band “takes a lot of personal time. The family as a whole has to invest in it, but it is absolutely a worthy investment,” Floyd says.
The payoff comes in the life lessons in self-discipline, intellectual curiosity and the ability to form new relationships that will take them far in life, she says.
Floyd gives her ex-husband a lot of credit: “Even though we’re divorced, as their mother, I am extremely proud of him. In some cases he’s taught children who were hardly able to read to gain a love of music and use that to move their lives in a positive way. These are years we will always cherish.”