Performance

The most public-facing medium, performance is my bread and butter. It started with singing and acting in elementary school and then the tuba when that appeared and then spoken word. At the core of all of my performance is embodiment. I embody the material to present it, whether that’s embodying the story under the surface in a tuba solo, embodying a character in sketch comedy, or embodying the person I was when I wrote a specific poem. 

My mission as a performer is to leave the audience feeling seen, heard, or witnessed through my art. If you are in the audience for any of my performances, you will feel things you have never felt before. 

Tuba…

“Music’s my language. Tuba’s my voice.” - 2025 Jazzie’s catchphrase

I’ve been playing the tuba since I was ten years old, stacking up accolades since 2007. Most of my recognition has come from this instrument, and I have a love-hate relationship with it. 

I chose the tuba because something about Larry the Cucumber opening up every episode of Veggie tales with it called to me. My teacher didn’t think I was serious, but I was. I quickly became a tuba nerd, making the brilliant decision to go into higher education with it. After a couple summers at Ithaca College Summer Music Academy, I decided to go there for undergrad. (Ithaca is gorges! I’ll stop now.) 

I entered as a music education major, but I gave my first solo recital in 2016 and performance hooked me. Turning my recital into a comedy bit by acting with friends in Ten Blind Dates for Solo Tuba, I had the whole audience laughing so hard they cried. Seeing just how much I could turn someone’s day around with a short performance made that impact a drug for me. It further solidified in February 2018 when I was one of three musicians on a joint solo tour to Costa Rica in the Promising Artists of the 21st Century series. The most memorable moment was a packed library in Limon, singing along to spirituals I played on my tuba. 

I went to Michigan State University in 2019 to continue studies in tuba performance. Two weeks before everything shut down, I won the school’s music grant competition for my EP Revolution: The Next Generation of Tuba Music. It was a project I started to increase representation in Black music styles and composers within the tuba repertoire. While I cringe at the premise now (more on that another day), that began my public-facing activism in music and became my first recording project. 

The pandemic happened (it sucked), and my visibility picked up through random projects and social media pushes I did. I ended up moving to Baltimore, MD to work on my doctorate at the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. After a last minute decision to enter their Yale Gordon Competition, I ended up winning it in 2022—the first tuba player to do so. I performed Reflections on the Mississippi by Michael Daugherty with the Peabody Concert Orchestra in December 2022, and in January 2023, I gave a sold-out recital at the Baltimore Museum of Art in the Shriver Hall Concert Series. 

Outside of school and institutions, I started my own touring solo career—traveling across the United States and Latin America to perform solo recitals and give masterclasses to collegiate tuba studios. The recital programs for the seasons reflected my evolution as a performer, artist, and person: Gateways (2022-2024), Foundations (2025-2026), and Becoming (2025-2026). And all of them accidentally followed the same narrative arc of my Unlocked Door Thesis (thanks subconscious).

Anyways, I’m not going to belabor you with more details about my tuba portfolio. If you want the specifics, you can download my CV here.

Voice

My voice was my first instrument. Growing up in the church, watching my dad on stage as the worship leader, I learned how to sing first. Singing went hand-in-hand with the tuba through high school. I did all-state, got all the chorus awards, sang the national anthem everywhere around town (y’know, all the usual normal things amateurs do). And then, I got to college where they make you commit to either/or, and my vocal skills were minimized and forgotten. While at Ithaca College, I sang with the Dorothy Cotton Jubilee Singers for years. When I moved away, Negro spirituals were still pivotal to me and my creative practice so much that I wrote my dissertation on them—finally reuniting tuba and voice towards one thesis. After that came Visions, the first work where they are fully integrated.

Acting and Spoken Word 

My acting and spoken word are both the same thing.

My acting and writing debut was in 2005 when I thought it would be super cool to write, direct, and perform in a play about the class pets (Toady and Toadinator). Unfortunately for little Jazzie, it didn’t stick. I moved in the sixth grade, developed intense social anxiety, and never acted again. That is, until January 2026, when I began to embrace my acting mode through comedic character skit reels on social media (@jazzie.speaks). 

My spoken word is performed through the same level of embodiment. (Now, the biggest caveat with my spoken word is that it doesn’t fully fall into the typical box of spoken word. A better name for it would be narrative performance prose poetry, but that’s a mouthful, so spoken word works.)

The first spoken word poem I wrote and performed was “Why Am I Black?” in November 2016 (following that dreaded presidential election). Since then, I wrote the rest of the Visions show/cycle that I began performing intermittently starting with “Gateways” (2022). “Gateways,” “Reflections,” and “Foundations” were all performed as through-composed tuba and spoken word works from 2022 - 2025. When I got my loop pedal, I laughed at the concept of not using it to keep texture under the words, so that’s why it’s there. 

When I perform the works for Visions, I am using all of my mediums simultaneously. The performance is through tuba, voice, and acting, but the development of the whole show came through both my writing and composition. (Both of those mediums also use embodiment in their own ways to achieve their final forms. Find out more!)