BJA’s new board member: Charmaine Michelle
Trumpeter Charmaine Michelle recently joined the board of the BJA. Raised in Vienna Virginia, her music career began early, as with so many Black musicians, in the church, where at age four, she was singing with the choir. In elementary school, she started with cello but later moved on trumpet. She played at the Kennedy Center with the award-winning “Pride of Virginia” James Madison High School band. During this time she was heavily involved with the music ministry and creative arts team at Christ Fellowship Church in Herndon, Virginia, where her father was associate Pastor. She wrote plays, led the worship team, and performed with church band abroad in the Caribbean.
Chairmaine attended Spelman College in Atlanta, where she played in the jazz ensemble with Grammy Nominated jazz saxophonist Tia Fuller. At the University of Virginia, she earned a bachelor’s degree in African History and Foreign Affairs and received a masters’ degree in Instructional Technology from Virginia Tech. At UVA, she knew Stokely Carmichael’s son and studied with John Dearth.
Charmaine explains that because her father was a Southern Baptist pastor, she became an “Evangelical Republican” and thought that jazz was the devil’s music–until 2008, when she had a chance encounter with trumpeter Sean Jones and heard his song, “I Come To Thee,” featuring Gospel vocalist Kim Burrell. The song helped her see that God can redeem and use any art form to tell authentic stories about love, forgiveness, repentance and grace.
She moved to Baltimore in 2010 to study jazz at Peabody Institute, receiving the Noble Levi Jolley Sr. Jazz Scholarship, and studied under trumpeter Joe Burgstaller (formerly of the Canadian Brass). While Peabody provided Charmaine with a strong foundation in Jazz theory, but she truly blossomed when she was given a special invitation to join the Dunbar Alumni Band directed by Charles Funn.
Besides playing Jazz, Charmaine does digital marketing work. She was the digital strategist for Capital Bop and redeveloped their whole brand, helping the publication be featured on NPR and win large grants. She also did digital strategy for League of American Orchestras and National Arts Strategy and for the Hipnotic Jazz Record Label. One of her digital strategy clients is Billboard charting violinist, vocalist and educator Dr. Chelsey Green. She plans to apply her digital marketing skills for the benefit of the Baltimore Jazz Alliance. She aims to present the organization in a “polished, eye-catching way” and demonstrate how the BJA differentiates itself from other jazz organization. She says, “BJA tends the soil for jazz in Baltimore. We are the gardeners.” The board of the BJA welcomes Charmaine Michelle. We are eager to see the great fruits and flowers of her work as a digital marketing gardener!
–Liz Fixsen