There is a drum kit in the corner that is older than the students who play it. The amps cost about a hundred bucks each. The guitars were donated. And yet, the music room at Berkeley Carroll is producing the kind of musicians that make you stop and pay attention. Students who are forming bands, booking shows, and in at least one case, landing spots in NYU's Clive Davis program before they have even graduated high school.

One of the people behind the success of the music program at Berkeley Carroll, is Christian Robinson, a trumpet player from Buffalo, by way of LA, who spent years on the road with some of the most popular acts in punk and ska, Blink-182, Reel Big Fish, Goldfinger, Streetlight Manifesto, Save Ferris, before trading the tour bus for a school bus. This spring, the Recording Academy and Grammy Museum named him a quarterfinalist for the 2027 Music Educator Award, selecting him from a field of more than 2,100 nominations across 36 states. It is, to put it plainly, a big deal.

But Robinson isn’t quite sure how he feels yet. "I'm still kind of processing it," he admits. But ask him about his students and the processing stops. He's got stories.

He spoke about Madden ‘24, a "monster vocalist" who showed up to BC's first-ever Studio Ensemble class in 2021, a singer-songwriter who wanted to do her own thing separate from the school’s choral tradition. Robinson worked with her one-on-one, helped her build a social media presence, researched singer-songwriter nights around New York City, and eventually helped her apply to play Breaking Sound, a Brooklyn showcase for new musicians. The minimum age at the door was 21, so none of her friends could attend, but she crushed it. She's now at NYU's Clive Davis program, playing shows around the city with a band she put together herself.

Then there's Kieran ‘26, a senior drummer who absolutely rips, playing “Everlong" by Foo Fighters for the final song of the Studio Ensemble Concert this year. Robinson describes watching him grow over four years into a musician good enough to head to Berklee College of Music in the fall to study music professionally. "He doesn't want to play jazz," Robinson says with a grin. "He wants to play stuff like that!”

Robinson’s Studio Ensemble, soon to be renamed Rock Band in the fall, launched in 2021 with seven students and a deliberately loose structure that once alarmed a school administrator who sat in to observe. Backpacks on the floor. Kids on their phones. No teacher at the front of the room conducting. "I had to explain," Robinson recalls, laughing, "that they were using their phones to look up guitar chords, and using apps to tune their instruments. We were learning Bohemian Rhapsody at the time."

The class, he explained, is a lab. Students perform informally at the start of the year, a talent show of sorts, everyone playing what they know, then self-select into bands. They pick their own set lists, name their own groups, schedule their own rehearsals. When a bandmate skips practice, their peers are firing off emails. "They're learning how to navigate relationships," Robinson says. "How to operate in a group and sometimes have tough conversations. That's a skill they're going to use for the rest of their lives."

The program now enrolls 25 to 30 students organized into six full bands. This spring, they played Littlefield, an actual Brooklyn music venue, for the second year running. Robinson wants it to be an annual fixture. Parents have been pushing for a Mercury Lounge show. He's not ruling it out.

Before all of this, Robinson was a road musician. He went to school for music education with a trumpet performance focus and a minor in jazz studies, then moved to Los Angeles in 2015 with a plan: teach during the school year, gig in the off-season. It worked. He spent summers on the Vans Warped Tour, eight weeks at a stretch, playing with whichever band on the bill happened to need a trumpet part. Blink-182. Reel Big Fish. Goldfinger. Plain White T's. American Authors. "They're all old guys now," he says, "with kids and stuff. But they're still playing."

Then 2020 hit. Live music evaporated. Robinson, itching to be closer to family in Buffalo, started looking for teaching jobs in New York State. He found a posting for Berkeley Carroll that looked like it was written specifically for him, brass specialist, jazz background required, and applied. Two days later, Music Department Chair Kate Mollica called.

"Right time, right place," he says. "Kind of crazy."

He started the job on Zoom, meeting his students through screens during the height of the pandemic. By the time he was back in the building, the wind ensemble had two students enrolled. He started rebuilding, and then noticed something else happening in his room. During free periods, during lunch, kids who weren't enrolled in any music class kept drifting in to play drums, guitar, piano. Fifteen of them. Twenty. Just hanging out, playing music, with nowhere else to do it. How can you make a garage band in a neighborhood with no garages?

Robinson wrote up a course description and brought it to Upper School Director Jane Moore. Studio Ensemble was born.

Berkeley Carroll's music program has always cultivated serious artists. This spring's orchestra concert featured a stunning solo cello concerto performance by senior Peter C. '26 that moved audience members to tears. The jazz ensemble, under Robinson's direction, performs music drawn directly from the Duke Ellington songbook, learning parts transcribed from original recordings and playing them as close to the source as possible. Robinson sees Studio Ensemble (Rock Band) not as a departure from that tradition, but as an extension of it, another room in a house that keeps getting bigger.

"There are so many students in schools around the country that would benefit from having the opportunity to play in a rock band, an R&B group, whatever kind of ensemble speaks to them. You have to meet your students' needs. Do you have students that play banjo? Start a bluegrass class." - Christian Robinson

The Grammy nomination, Robinson is clear, isn't really about him. It's about an argument he's been making for years, in application essays, in conversations with other music educators, in the simple act of letting students run their own rehearsals in a Brooklyn classroom. Band, orchestra, and choir are important, and Berkeley Carroll does them beautifully, but the more voices you make room for, the richer the music gets. Those kids deserve a seat too.

"If a school doesn't have programs like ours," Robinson says, "they're doing a disservice to the students."

He's been a quarterfinalist. Next comes the semifinals in September, then, if things go right, a finalist announcement ahead of Grammy Week 2027.

"It feels pretty cool," he says, in the studied understatement of someone who has spent a career making space for other people's voices. "I'll probably put it on my resume."

He pauses, then laughs.

"Not that I want to go anywhere. I love working here, man!"