All photos courtesy of the Foundation.
Students in class at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation's Don "Moose" Jamison Heritage School of Music—an after school education program serving students in the New Orleans area.
Every spring, as we all know, hundreds of thousands of people pour through the gates of the Fair Grounds Race Course over two magical weekends for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, or “Jazz Fest.” This world-famous multicultural music celebration, beloved by Louisianans and international visitors alike, brings some $350 million dollars to the local economy every year while celebrating the fact that Louisiana’s music and culture set the state apart from virtually every other in the union.
The festival’s organizing nonprofit, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, Inc., carries forth that legacy by investing in future generations of musicians and artists in an enormous constellation of educational, music, culture, and art-boosting programs. This lesser-known work of the Foundation is the very thing that Jazz Fest exists to help fund. For our first-ever “Good Deeds” issue, we wanted to highlight one of the foundation’s most inspiring and important initiatives, the Don “Moose” Jamison Heritage School of Music—which is part of the larger project of ensuring young people in New Orleans and beyond have access to music education, and the many benefits it offers.
Passing on the Torch
Since 1990, the Foundation has operated the free after-school music education program, the Don “Moose” Jamison Heritage School of Music—named after the late jazz musician and Foundation board member. Today, the school serves nearly three hundred students, from ages eight to eighteen, every week, and gives them a tuition-free opportunity to learn from some of New Orleans’s best musicians. The students audition for enrollment, get plenty of opportunities to perform on important stages, and at the end of the school year, many of them get to perform on the second Sunday of Jazz Fest on the Lagniappe Stage.
As the program’s director, Derek Douget wears many hats: managing various aspects of the school; and teaching ensemble, woodwinds, horn sectional, and advanced theory. He emcees all performances (and participates in some) and is the liaison between the school and the Foundation, as well as between the school and parents of students.
Courtesy of the Jazz & Heritage Foundation.
Program director Derek Douget teaching a student as part of the Don "Moose" Jamison Heritage School of Music.
Douget has been playing music since he signed up for the school band at Gonzales Middle as a ten-year-old. “I kept playing baseball because the coach wanted me to stay in the outfield, but I really didn't want to,” Douget remembered. “All I wanted to focus on was music. ”
Benefiting from the opportunity in high school to study with Alvin Batiste, who encouraged him to further his knowledge of improvisational music, and to later play with Ellis Marsalis as part of his Quintet, along with scores of other influential New Orleans musicians—Douget knows better than most the value of a good mentor—or in his case, a whole stable of them.
“I got really lucky,” he laughed. “The elders that I met along the way, they gave me focus. [Ellis Marsalis], along with Harold Battiste, encouraged me to continue to study the saxophone as well as consider being an educator.”
The Impact of Early Music Education
It’s hard to predict where music education will take a child. Douget cites that the majority of students who partake in some form of music instruction in school will not become professional musicians, but regardless of the path a child ultimately takes, music education plays an important cross-disciplinary role in a well-rounded education.
“Whenever we send our kids to chemistry class, we're not expecting them to become chemists,” Douget quipped. “But some folks are like, ‘Well, you know, why would a kid study music? Everybody's not going to be musicians.’ And yeah, most of them are not going to be professional musicians. However, [studying music] can help develop other parts of their personality.”
Studies show that music education helps students academically. Ninth-grade musicians score significantly higher in algebra assessments than their non-musically-trained peers, and high school band students generally average higher English, math, and biology scores. Outside of academic scores, music education is shown to help children develop interpersonal skills, focus, perseverance, self-esteem and—perhaps especially in Louisiana—a sense of cultural identity.
Music can also help young people navigate self-expression and big life events, such as losing a loved one. Former Heritage School of Music student Sophia Parigi lost her father while she was enrolled at the school and used her music studies as a way to process her grief.
“I could use music to outlet my emotions; it was the only constant in my changing world,” said Parigi. “The Heritage School of Music is truly doing God's work by offering no-cost music lessons, because if I were not equipped with the skill set provided by learning an instrument when I was younger, I would not have been able to process my feelings and grief as efficiently and would not be where I am today.”
Courtesy of the Jazz & Heritage Foundation
Program director Derek Douget teaching a student as part of the Don "Moose" Jamison Heritage School of Music.
Despite all the clear benefits, music instruction isn’t always available in Louisiana schools—and when it is offered, there’s a plethora of economic and scheduling obstacles for children and their parents to overcome. Instruments aren’t cheap, and some schools require band students to show up before or after the school day.
Specifically in Orleans Parish and those surrounding it, there has been a low enrollment in music programs since Hurricane Katrina, and the fragmented school system is increasingly unable to standardize its music education programs.
“You don't have any sort of connective tissue that's connecting these schools together,” Douget explained. “So, some of the schools might say they have a music education program, but it's after school or it's before school. It's not part of the daily schedule of school, which is, to me, not great . . . It should be part of the regular curriculum, especially in the city that contributed probably, you know, the most to improvisational music and American music.”
“Whenever we send our kids to chemistry class, we're not expecting them to become chemists. But some folks are like, ‘Well, you know, why would a kid study music? Everybody's not going to be musicians.’ And yeah, most of them are not going to be professional musicians. However, [studying music] can help develop other parts of their personality.” —Derek Douget, program director of the Don “Moose” Jamison Heritage School of Music
The result is far-reaching; fewer and fewer students are able to consider pursuing music as a career. “That's going to affect New Orleans economically, and it's going to affect the culture,” said Douget.
The state of music education in Orleans Parish schools changes not just every year, but every semester, and providing the best solutions requires the harrowing task of continuously keeping tabs on the problem. To combat these challenges, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation helped develop a partnership with local like-minded nonprofits. Called the New Orleans Music Education Collaborative (NOMEC), the group meets monthly to work together to define and address shortcomings in local music education. Its members include The Roots of Music, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, the Trombone Shorty Foundation, Girls Play Trumpet Too, and over a dozen more.
“When people want to fund programs, it's important for us to guide those resources into the right direction,” Douget explained. “We're actually sending teachers into the Leah Chase School right now to help that band program start.”
Beyond the Crescent City
The Heritage School of Music is just one of many of the Foundation’s programs that directly support music education, though it’s naturally limited by a student’s proximity to New Orleans. Despite its name, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation’s mission extends to the entire state, and many of its other educational programs reflect this commitment. One of these is the Class Got Brass annual competition, in which Louisiana middle and high schools send twelve of their best brass or in-the-brass-tradition players, along with any “stepper” performers they wish, to compete for up to $10,000 in grant support. All competing teams receive a $1,000 stipend—even if they don’t place.
In addition, the Foundation’s Community Partnership Grants program has several categories that assist arts and music instruction in K-12 schools statewide. Schools can use these grants to purchase instruments, sheet music, visual art supplies and other materials, as well as fund instrument repairs. Nonprofits that operate after-school or summer music and arts programs can apply for grants to pay their instructors.
The impact these grant programs have across Louisiana is mind-boggling. In 2024, the Foundation’s Community Partnership Grants program alone impacted 50,000 children in schools and another 35,000 in after-school arts programs; and hired almost eight hundred teaching artists in Louisiana. In 2023, the Foundation’s community investment in grants alone totaled nearly three million dollars.
Courtesy of the Jazz & Heritage Foundation.
A student at the Don “Moose” Jamison Heritage School of Music
It’s the Foundation’s Director of Programs, Marketing, and Communications Kia Robinson Hatfield’s personal goal to get this grant funding into all sixty-four parishes in Louisiana. “We’re at thirty-six parishes right now,” she said, “but we’ll get there.”
The Foundation also sponsors several other initiatives to support the business end of the creative arts—even those that aren’t musical in nature. The Sync Up program, for example, is a series of sessions that connects independent artists with top entertainment industry professionals who can advise them on the finer points of making a living as an entertainer.
Another program is the Catapult Fund, which helps creative entrepreneurs from different industries accelerate their ventures by offering focused courses, pairing each participant with a business advisor. This program dives into non-musical ventures; and lately, it’s been focused on culinary arts, fashion, and jewelry-making.
“The coolest thing that we found in the Catapult program is 90% of the accepted applicants were musicians, gig workers, or some kind of culture bearers, like a Babydoll, a Spy Boy … [many of] these folks were in these other facets of culture, but then taking what they know from their culture, and basically trying to make a business out of it,” said Hatfield.
These are only a handful of the many impactful programs offered by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation. Considering all the good they do, a Jazz Fest weekend pass doesn’t seem all that expensive.
