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Since his arrival, Jeffrey, who comes to the College from the United States, is busy adjusting to life in the UK – including the inclement weather.

"Lots of things about the culture here are different. I can walk to the city centre very quickly, and my sons are learning to ride bikes everywhere. I thought it would be a much bigger adjustment, but it hasn't been too bad." Even queuing for a coffee in Wolfson's Club Room, Jeff adds a new word to his British lexicon. He laughs. "I just learned 'quid' today!"

The Arkansas Visiting Fellowship began at Â鶹ËÞÉáµçÊÓ¾çin 1988 in partnership with the Fulbright Program, allowing the College to welcome an academic from the United States in any discipline for one year. Jeffrey is an award-winning music educator whose research interests include culturally responsive pedagogy in the choral classroom, music in urban schools, and social justice in music education. 

He is already getting involved in the music community at Wolfson. "Lyn Alcántara has been amazing and showed me the ropes," says Jeffrey. "I'll be working with the choirs here at Â鶹ËÞÉáµçÊÓ¾ç– we're working on a Christmas project of Gospel music and spirituals, which should be a lot of fun. I'm also going to be doing a workshop and then a concert with that. I'm just looking forward to sharing my work."

An accomplished classical musician, Jeff is also a skilled Gospel musician. He has served on the conducting staff of the National Baptist Convention and has collaborated with Gospel recording artists including Donnie McClurkin, Richard Smallwood, and Mary Mary.

"Gospel music has only recently become a staple in academic communities and has become worthy of study in academic spaces," he explains. "I just built a Master's degree programme around Black sacred music, and it's the first one of its kind in the United States."

Jeff was a high school teacher in Memphis, Tennessee for eleven years, where he learned a lot about disparities in music education. "Music classrooms in the more affluent communities had the best pianos. They had sheet music and the best teachers, because the better teachers wanted to go to those schools. Schools that were in the inner cities were left with second-hand, hand-me-down sorts of things. Morale was low in those schools. I wanted to explore the phenomenon of why music seemed to be more accessible in some places and less accessible in others."

Jeff started his PhD work on bridging the gaps in these communities, seeing how Gospel music, rap and R&B could help students to develop an appreciation for Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – known as culturally relevant pedagogy. "It's building on what students know," he says. "Building upon a Gospel tune, for example, and then using that to teach solfège – Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do – with a Gospel song and then be able to transfer that to Handel."

Jeff describes Gospel music as being rooted in the southern United States: a meeting of blues, jazz, hymns and spiritual songs. "Gospel music is all about feeling. It's very easy to just sing the words in a very sterile way, but I think the emotion is also very much a part of the performance practice. When I'm teaching Gospel music to an audience or to a group of people for whom the music is unfamiliar, or for those who maybe like the music but who have never experienced it, I encourage a deep dive. Go to a Black church. Go experience that. Try to connect with some of the social movements behind the Gospel music, like the protest songs of the 50s and 60s. Being able to understand the history, I think, helps people to better appreciate the music and the spaces from which it comes."

Jeff's love for and interest in Gospel music comes from his experiences while growing up. "Growing up in the Black church," says Jeff, "I was exposed to Gospel music and to this idea of playing by ear. Music has been very much a part of me. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have music."

In addition to his career as a high school teacher and an academic, Jeff is also the Founding Director of the Arkansas Center for Black Music at the University of Arkansas. Among its acquisitions, the Center houses the largest collection of published and unpublished works from Black composers Florence Price and William Grant Still – "It's really become kind of a one-stop shop, so to speak, for all things Black music."

In recognition of his teaching, Jeff was put forward for a Golden Tusk Award by his students at the University of Arkansas in 2018, awarded to an outstanding faculty member.

"Just the idea that the students value the work that I do so much was just validating. It helps me to know when days get tough, that I am touching the lives of students."

Jeff says that a pinnacle of his career was winning a Grammy Award for Music Education in 2021. "When I won, it was surreal. The Grammy has helped me to be able to disseminate what I do on a worldwide stage, and that's been, I think, probably the biggest change for which I'm thankful. Also, it allowed me to meet lots of cool people. As an introvert and as someone who's typically a shy person, being able to live and to move in those spaces has been different. I'm thankful that people see and celebrate and reward what I do."

Covid impacted Jeff's experience of the Grammys – he didn't get to go in person that year, but his students held a watch party, complete with a black tie dress code and plenty of pizza. "We had a hall and they had a big screen, it was fun!" Jeff attended the next year's ceremony to give his speech. "When Trevor Noah announced me and my face came on the screen, Beyoncé and Jay-Z were sitting there," he says, "because it was right before the album of the year which Beyoncé won. When he made the announcement that I won, Beyoncé clapped." He jokingly adds, "So I've decided that she and I are besties. She doesn't know it, but we're besties."

In his acceptance speech at the Grammys, Jeff said that he always aspires to level the field in music education. "It goes back to my first days of teaching high school, this idea of music being accessible to everyone. They may not ever play at the Royal Albert Hall or at Carnegie Hall, or they may never sing at La Scala, but they become a person who can experience and appreciate music as a patron or as a creator of music." Jeff himself has performed in Carnegie Hall several times as a singer and a conductor, most recently in March, when he conducted Mozart's Requiem.

"You walk into the conductor's suite and there's pictures of Leonard Bernstein and Toscanini and all of these composers. The power and majesty of a place like that is really surreal."

When asked about his favourite pieces of music, Jeff struggles to decide. "Moses Hogan's Elijah Rock inspired me to become a music teacher, so that piece holds a special place in my heart." Another piece that he hasn't had the chance to conduct is Barber's Adagio for Strings. "Anything that falls under the genre of spiritual, particularly ones that were written at the turn of the century. Those old spirituals speak to me. I'm really into, believe it or not, high church hymnody and hymns. Like there's nothing better to me than walking into St Paul's Cathedral and hearing everyone in the space singing a hymn." He thinks again for a minute. 

"I like everything, I think! I also appreciate silence, because I do engage in music so much as a part of my job that sometimes I just want silence. I listen to talk radio sometimes, but it's probably not good for my psyche, especially when I'm listening to American politics. It unnerves me."

Jeff is also working on two books – a textbook on performance practice of Black sacred music, and 'When Black Voices are Silenced', about the marginalisation of Black music, and how there is more work to do to include it worldwide. "I think I have some pretty lofty and ambitious goals, but that's what I'm hoping to get done."