The 30th Annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition and Festival. Directed by John Reynolds, the Orange County School of the Arts band from Santa Ana, California, performs at the Rose Theater on Saturday, May 10, 2025. New York. Jazz at Lincoln Center. Photo: Leandro Badalotti/Jazz at Lincoln Center.

June 11, 2025

Ellington’s Legacy…And a Family’s

High school students from around the world took the stage of the Metropolitan Opera this spring as part of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington High School Band Program. The 2025 EE Competition and Festival saw a record 30 bands invited to New York City to compete for top honors, participate in workshops, and learn from peers and mentors. 

Launched in 1995, Essentially Ellington is a free program for high school jazz bands that aims to elevate musicianship, broaden perspectives, and inspire performance. EE provides high school and college band directors with resources for the study and performance of big band music. Each year, high school musicians from across North America travel to New York City to spend three days immersed in workshops, jam sessions, rehearsals and performances at the “House of Swing,” Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Essentially Ellington celebrated its 30th anniversary year, and this meant more bands and a bigger audience, necessitating the move from its usual home (the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center) to the main stage of the Opera House.

This event was covered in a recent New York Times article, “A High School Festival Keeps Duke Ellington Very Much Alive” (May 13, 2025).

Among the longtime funders who made this possible were the former trustees of The Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation, which in recent years closed down the foundation and opened DAF accounts at FJC to carry on the legacy of their family’s philanthropic work. 

“Our relationship with the family goes back many years,” explained Kevin Barnes, Assistant Director of Institutional Giving at Jazz at Lincoln Center.  “We first received funding from the The Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation in 2001 with a grant for EE. The program would have been only six years old!” Barnes notes the continuity of support from the family, even as the foundation closed down and moved its assets to donor advised funds at FJC. 

Members of the family said: “Participation in EE is a life-defining event for these kids. They are wonderfully talented and their joy in jazz is exhilarating to see, hear and feel.  That is what jazz is all about, and we are glad to be able to support it and add joy into the world.”