As a leading and innovative jazz educator, Eli Yamin believes teaching and learning jazz should be as joyful and creative as playing it. He has developed a methodology to consistently deliver this experience to thousands of students of all ages around the world.
Especially for children, Eli co-founded The Jazz Drama Program, which builds jazz communities by creating original jazz musicals for children to perform for their peers. He also co-designed and serves as head of instruction for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Middle School Jazz Academy.
Eli creates and leads a wide range of experiential workshops where participants mine their own creativity and expand their capacity to make meaningful connections with jazz, blues and each other. Venues include the The Mesa Arts Center and The Washington Performing Arts Society, as well as teaching and performing at the White House for the first ever White House Jazz Studio hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama. For the last several years, Eli has created specialized workshops for musicians touring internationally with The Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad: a program for cultural diplomacy produced by the United States Department of State and Jazz at Lincoln Center. For executives, Eli co-designed and leads two popular workshops in partnership with Jazz at Lincoln Center and Fordham Graduate School of Business and it’s partner programs around the world. The workshops feature performances by Eli’s ensemble, guided reflection on the way jazz musicians collaborate to create and a sequence of carefully crafted hands-on experiences designed to allow participants to make important discoveries about how jazz and blues can inform work in their own fields. The two workshops are titled Jazz and Managing Autonomous, Flexible Teams and Jazz and Entrepreneurship. Eli also presents and performs at music festivals and teacher retreats including the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho, Mississippi Arts Commission’s Whole Schools Institute in Meridian, Mississippi and Arts are Basic in Crete, Nebraska.
Eli offers:
- Masterclasses
- Professional Development
- Teacher Training
- Customized Workshops
- Education and performance program consultancies
Background:
From 1991-2005, Eli worked as a freelance teaching artist in New York City in over 100 schools partnering with classroom teachers to bring expansive experiences to students pre-Kindergarten through graduate school. He trained in the Maxine Green inspired Aesthetic Education Practice of Lincoln Center for the Arts in Education (LCI) and was a member of the Focus School and Higher Education Collaborative. At the same time, he got his Masters in teaching music at Lehman College, City University of New York, and designed and performed hundreds of in-school concerts including The Magic and Mechanics of Jazz for Young Audiences New York, The Different Moods of the Blues for Lincoln Center Institute, and Jazz Means Freedom for Jazz at Lincoln Center. Eli was commissioned by WBGO Radio to create and perform Jazz Play/Play Jazz, an interactive jazz and theatre performance that toured Newark schools.
Eli has his Bachelor’s in music from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey and his Master’s in teaching music from Lehman College, City University of New York. Eli studied jazz with Barry Harris, Kenny Barron, Jaki Byard, Fred Hersch, Kenny Werner, Keith Copeland, Amiri Baraka and Phil Schaap. Classical piano with Eleanor Hancock and John Kamitsuka. Composition and orchestration with John Corigliano. He continues vocal studies with Jeannette LoVetri of the The Voice Workshop and is a certified Somatic Voicework Teacher Level I.
