Excerpt from NYT article That Healing Jazz Thing by Michael Powell

“He was our heard-out-the-window Pied Piper, this saxophonist who signaled the arrival of evening by playing that haunting hymn “Amazing Grace.”

He began playing in the depths of plague and loss in Brooklyn, those early April days when the wail of ambulance sirens was our city’s night song. It took several days of listening out our window in Flatbush for my wife, Evelyn, and me to slip on our masks and wander around the corner to Marlborough Road.

We found our neighbor, the wiry jazzman Roy Nathanson, 69, with a gray-flecked goatee and a Groucho Marx smile, blowing up a storm on his sax on his second-floor balcony, while in the yard below the jazz teacher Lloyd Miller thumped expertly on his stand-up bass.

Mr. Nathanson’s band grew by the day. Albert Marquès, a Barcelona-born Latin jazz musician and public-school teacher, began piping away on his melodica as his children, ages 3 and 6, danced and twirled on the sidewalk. The Haitian jazz guitarist Eddy Bourjolly came in from Canarsie, while Eric Alabaster, a retired teacher and drummer, and Mo Saleem, a Pakistani musician marooned by the virus, kept rhythm on drums and the dholak, a two-headed hand drum…Mr. Nathanson and his band played each evening from April 2 until Father’s Day, 82 days total. In that time, they started a website, raised donations for local food pantries and penniless musicians, and lit up a neighborhood…”

Rosetta Serrano

Excerpt from article Como no hay aulas, clases de música en la calle en vecindario en Brooklyn

“Es el “Programa de Conciertos en los Patios” que ofrece clases gratuitas a adolescentes del área…Los patios de estas casas en Ditmas Park se han convertido en salones de clases para que adolescentes practiquen sus habilidades musicales durante el verano.Es el “Programa de Conciertos en los Patios” que ofrece clases gratuitas a adolescentes del área.

"Ya que no hay salones lo hacemos afuera, porque no podemos parar, no podemos parar la educación, no podemos parar la música...es lo más hermoso porque estamos compartiendo con los jóvenes, enseñándoles lo que sabemos", explicó el maestro de música Bam Bam Rodríguez…”