Photograph: Gail Oskin/Getty
Guardian Weekly, Tuesday 29 May 2012 14.25 BST
Roger Brown, 55, has presided over the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, since 2004. Reputedly the world's top school for "modern" music, it is, as he says, "an institution established for people who hate institutions".
Since 1945, Berklee students have won many top prizes, including 205 Grammy Awards in categories such as pop, rock, jazz and film music. Quincy Jones started here in 1951 with a scholarship, going on to win 27 Grammys. In 2011, shortly after leaving the school, the jazz bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding won the Grammy for the Best New Artist. She entered the school aged 17 and went on to teach there.
The college boasts a truly impressive honours board. Former students include Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Branford Marsalis, Diana Krall, Melissa Etheridge, but also Howard Shore, well known for his film scores, and Brad Whitford, the Aerosmith rhythm guitarist.
The college is close to Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Indeed its founder, Lawrence Berk, was an MIT engineer. His aim in starting the school was to convince elite Boston that popular music, with its strong African-American influences, was far more sophisticated than they thought. It was originally called the Schillinger House of Music and specialised in a system of harmony and composition based on mathematical models by Joseph Schillinger, a Russian musician who died in 1943. George Gershwin and the clarinettist Benny Goodman studied under him. The college later changed its name to Berklee, a tribute to the founder's son, Lee, who took over from his father in 1979.
Brown was born in Gainesville, Georgia, in the days of segregation. He led "the marvellous life of southern kids" focusing largely on US football. But his mother, unusually for a woman in the south, had played trombone in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Brown was classically trained, but the local radio station gave him his first taste of pop music.
The college's third chief executive, Brown has strong connections with Africa. In 1978, having graduated in physics, he went to Kenya to teach maths. "At the time I hadn't made the connection between the segregationist situation in the southern states and my desire to go there. I understood later," he explains. Before he set off for Kenya, he looked for a book to learn Swahili. "I walked till I reached a bookshop in Harlem called Revolutionary Books. Being white, with a very noticeable southern accent, I was scared stiff. But the man was very friendly." Brown went on to play drums in a gospel choir in Kenya and in Gainesville.
Every year Berklee College presents honorary doctorates to musicians from outside the college. In 2010 Angélique Kidjo, of Benin, received this award "for her exemplary work for Africa", Brown explains. The college operates a talent-spotting scheme there that enabled the guitarist Lionel Loueke, among others, to obtain a contract with Blue Note and team up with trumpeter Terence Blanchard.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/may/29/berklee-college-grammy-music
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