We’re in the heart of summertime, with all it conjures up about vacations and rejuvenating time off. But while faculty at the Frost School of Music aren’t teaching on campus, they are busy performing, touring, teaching at special events, and more. Here’s a look at what some of our esteemed music educators have been up to.
Jazz program professor and composer Etienne Charles continued projects featuring his distinctive Afro-Caribbean jazz fusion and collaborations with other artists in other forms. In early June, Charles presented “Folklore LIVE Vol. 2” in The Appel Room as part of the 2026 spring season of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. The immersive show fused big band jazz with dance, masquerade, and spoken word from cultures in the African diaspora.
Charles, who has collaborated multiple times with dance artists, has expanded into theater with the calypso score for “Blooming in Dry Season,” a new play by Eljon Wardally about a family in Grenada. Presented by New York’s New Federal Theater and the North Carolina Black Repertory Company (which premiered it in 2024) from May 28 to June 28, “Blooming” received a host of positive reviews. (Charles featured Wardally’s work in “San Juan Hill: A New York Story,” his monumental jazz-classical-multimedia work for Lincoln Center, performed by the Frost Symphony Orchestra and Charles’ group Creole Soul in October 2025.)
Professor John Daversa, the three-time GRAMMY-winning trumpet-player, composer, and bandleader who is the Chair of the Studio Music and Jazz department, spent most of the summer on an international tour that has taken him to China and continues across Europe through the end of July. Daversa also led the Frost Jazz Orchestra in a July residency at the Siena Jazz festival, and taught a masterclass there entitled “Freedom & Structure: Composing from the Heart and the Mind.”
Another globe-trotting jazz faculty member was famed Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, who performed at two major Italian jazz festivals, Pisa Jazz Rebirth and the Umbria Jazz Festival with the First Meeting quartet, joining tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, double bass player Larry Grenadier, and drummer Eric Harland.
Associate professor Guillermo Page, the assistant director of the Frost School’s award-winning Music Industry program, took time in June to foster the next generation of students as a teacher at the annual Grammy Camp Miami, a five-day immersive camp that gives high school students an intensive introduction to the music industry. The camp was held at Art House Studios, a recording and creative studio headed by multi-GRAMMY and Latin GRAMMY-winning alumnus Julio Reyes Copello.
Also teaching this summer was professor Aaron Tindall, whose tuba and euphonium studio has produced a host of successful graduates. Tindall was a master teacher and featured artist at the International Euphonium Tuba Festival in Atlanta, Georgia, in June.
The music of acclaimed GRAMMY and Latin GRAMMY-nominated jazz pianist and professor Martin Bejerano was featured in a special event from the Miami-based Dranoff 2 Piano Fusion, where Bejerano is music director and which presents culture and genre-crossing concerts, commissions, and educational programs. Those commissions include Bejerano’s piece “Fantasia de Tres Mundos,” which was performed by the duo Stephanie & Saar as part of the score for a July 11 concert of original dances by Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami at The Moss Center.
Two Frost School faculty led Miami musical celebrations of the 4th of July and our nation’s 250th Birthday. Associate professor Craig McKenzie, the dynamic Associate Director of Bands and Director of Athletic Bands who leads the Frost Band of the Hour, conducted the Greater Miami Symphonic Band in its annual Independence Day concert at the historic Biltmore Hotel. And Scott Flavin, resident conductor for The Henry Mancini Institute, conducted the Miami Music Festival Symphony Orchestra in an Independence Day concert on South Beach.
Marysol Quevedo, an associate professor of musicology, expanded her scholarly research and standing by contributing to the Job Market and Careers Colloquy issue of American Music, a journal published by Johns Hopkins University’s Project Muse. Quevedo joined the scholarly discussion with the article “Demystifying, Reimagining, and Modeling Career Paths within and Outside Music Academia,” where she writes about, among other things, what she describes as her nonlinear academic trajectory from dissertation to her current position.
And faculty member Roxana Amed, a multi-award-winning Argentine-American jazz vocalist and composer, was nominated for best jazz album by Premios Gardel a la Música, Argentina's top music award, for her 2025 recording "Todos Los Fuegos."
