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Kelly Rossum is currently Jazz Director at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. CNU was listed in U.S. News & World Report's America's Best Colleges 2009 as one of the top 10 "up and coming" liberal arts schools, and it now ranks as one of Virginia's most selective public universities. In collaboration with the incredible Ferguson Center for the Arts, the CNU Department of Music provides unforgettable performances, masterclasses, and artists found only in the leading conservatories and schools of music.
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“While teaching jazz improvisation you, as a teacher, must play with your students. The foundation of any jazz experience is participation and listening. Why do so many beginning improvisers have a poor playing concept? It’s because they only hear each other during rehearsals and have no mature musical role model.”
- from “Jazz Education Concept No. 1”, published on Jazz Police
“trumpeter Kelly Rossum began his talk on free jazz with a six-minute, totally improvised collaboration demonstrating the use of sound, harmony, and time to striking musical effect. Rossum’s lecture explained his concepts on the use and the beauty of free jazz. ‘It is a Community of Collaboration with all members of the ensemble, with each member able to play and communicate in a way that simply does not happen in any other kind of music.’”
- from “Free Jazz and the Trumpet” clinic in Bangkok Thailand
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Kelly Rossum Receives Jane Matteson Jazz Educator Award
On August 28, 2009, the Dakota Foundation for Jazz Education presented its 2009 Jazz Educator Award to Kelly Rossum, Director of Jazz at the MacPhail Center for Music. Rossum was honored during his performance with his quartet at the Dakota Jazz Club in downtown Minneapolis, his “farewell weekend” before relocating to New York City. The Jane Matteson Jazz Educator Award is named in honor of jazz patron Jane Matteson, who helped found the Dakota Foundation (DFJE) with Dakota Jazz Club owner Lowell Pickett in 1997. The award recognizes significant contributions to the education of young jazz musicians as well as the general public.
Read full press release
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MacPhail Center for Music is one of the nation’s largest community music schools. It serves more than 7,500 students annually with 35 instruments taught by more than 165 teachers. In 2002, Kelly Rossum founded the jazz program at MacPhail. With over twenty faculty members, the program focuses primarily on improvisation through small combo classes and private jazz instruction. During Kelly’s tenure, he pioneered a partnership between MacPhail Center for Music, Minneapolis’ Dakota Jazz Club and the Dakota Foundation for Jazz Education to form an all-star high school jazz combo called the Dakota Combo. Each year, advanced high school students from around the state audition for participation in this group. Rossum was at MacPhail from 1996 through his move to New York in 2009. |
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Kelly Rossum after a lecture at
McNally Smith College of Music
During a clinic at
Houston Community College
Kelly Rossum, student Sophie Spencer, and Rex Richardson in Sydney, Australia |
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