Our Story

Beginning in March 2020, as a response to the pandemic lockdown and the subsequent cancellation of so many cultural events, Roy Nathanson and other local musicians launched a community-based series of outdoor concerts on the porches and streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn. The New York Times wrote: “That Healing Jazz Thing on a Porch in Brooklyn – for 82 days straight, a diverse group of musicians found their way to a stoop in Flatbush, and everybody followed the sax player. (It was his house.)” (July 1, 2020). The neighborhood reaction was incredibly supportive as local working musicians, refusing to be settled by the lockdown, played improvised music that collectively provided a mechanism to cope with the pandemic trauma.

As the community support for the free concerts grew, Roy and the other musicians realized that it wasn’t just the musicians who suffered from cancellations of all concerts and tours but that the youth in the community were facing a barren summer with no camps or activities whatsoever. Hence, JPMP’s founder, Roy Nathanson, created what is now called Brooklyn Porch Music (formerly called the 5PM Porch Music Program), which offered free, one-on-one, socially distanced music lessons to community youth. By August, the Multigenerational Playing for the Light Big Band, whose diverse members ranged from seven to seventy years of age, held its first free public street performance, video recorded in a short film called World of Fire, and later presented online by the Public Theater.

Since 2020, the program has provided over 200 students with high quality free, outdoor music education.