The vibraphone, that sweet-sounding array of metal bars that can make its presence known even when alongside a big band of trumpets, saxes, and trombones, has never been as commonplace as those instruments throughout jazz history. Vibraphonists are still out there, of course, lugging the large, unwieldy instrument to various gigs as they follow in the musical footsteps of greats such as Lionel Hampton, Red Norvo, Milt Jackson, Gary Burton, and others, but their numbers are comparatively small. Female jazz vibraphonists are even rarer—and a 14-year-old female vibraphonist, who is already dazzling audiences in concerts and in clubs she’s too young to patronize as a customer, is nothing less than unique.
Evelyn Yosmali, who completed the 9th grade in June at Clark Montessori High School in Cincinnati, is that outstanding musician. She continues to improve and impress those who witness her swing on the vibes to classic jazz standards not only in school, but in a variety of venues around the city.
After seeing her play in both Barcelona in 2022 and at the CPS Jazz Festival in Cincinnati the following year, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Evelyn and her mother Amy together via video chat several times. Evelyn’s experience, knowledge, and enthusiasm for jazz is increasing and expanding at a fast and steady clip, as she pursues life as a musician with a happy but sensible determination.
She began her musical training on piano, and in October of 2020 joined the CPS (Cincinnati Public Schools) Jazz Academy, created and led by music educator Dr. Isidore Rudnick, founder of the annual Cincinnati International Jazz Festival. The festival presents the city’s aspiring school-age musicians of the CPS Jazz Academy in a concert (with guest professionals as well), allowing them to exhibit their blossoming jazz skills, and even more importantly, their potential. Over 120 public school kids participate, with many from underprivileged regions of the city. The academy provides an after-school outlet for them to discover and pursue their musical interests in jazz.
Evelyn joined the Jazz Academy after Rudnick placed a call-out to band directors in the district, looking for a pianist. She admits that jazz was still an unfamiliar genre to her when she first joined. “It was new to me,” she says, “I didn’t really have much experience because I started on classical piano. And that was all that I knew how to play. When I joined the jazz academy, it was kind of eye-opening, and introduced me to another, just completely different genre. I had never really heard it except in the background of a movie or something like that. So, I didn’t have that much experience with jazz until I got a chance to play it more and listen to it, and the more that I listened, the more that I played, and listened to other people play, it made it a lot easier to understand and kind of connect to it.”
She shared piano with another student for her first year and a half at the academy, which cut down on her own playing time. “I wanted to play more, so my mom and Dr. Rudnick thought it would be a good idea for me to try the vibraphone, because the vibes have the same basic key layout as a piano, so it would be easy to pick up. And I did pick it up, really quickly.”
As is the case with any organized music program, some students inevitably rise to the top in prominence due to their advanced talents. Evelyn is clearly one of those individuals. A good deal of her whirlwind jazz education has come from studying recordings of the greats, such as Hampton and Jackson. She can rattle off a list of her favorites with ease. “I love listening to The Modern Jazz Quartet,” she says. “I can’t get enough of ‘Angel Eyes,’ I love that song so much! I also listen to Ella Fitzgerald. I think I relate to vocalists a lot more now, I really like big bands, like the Basie big band, ’cause they really swing like crazy. It’s so fun to listen to. It’s great.”
A memorable opportunity came for her in 2022, when Rudnick and the Jazz Academy students were invited to Barcelona to play with the famed Sant Andreu Jazz Band, founded and directed by Joan Chamorro. That project is world-renowned for its nearly two-decade history of producing teenage and pre-teen jazz musicians and singers with musical skills far beyond their years.
“I had been playing vibes only half a year before we went to Spain,” Evelyn says. Her brother Wolfie joined the jazz academy in 2022, deciding to give bass a try, and six months later he was in Barcelona with her and others from the academy jazz combo (in 2023, the SAJB Dixie Band, a smaller offshoot of SAJB musicians, reciprocated by accepting Rudnick’s invitation to take part in the CPS Jazz Festival that year).
Further opportunities for Evelyn to play for audiences, sometimes alongside the pros, have been coming in quick order in the past few years. At the 2023 Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho, she was runner-up in the Student Performance Instrument Solo competition, while the CPS jazz combo won First Place. She also played with professional vibraphonist Cary Kocher and his group during a program titled “A Toast to Nat ‘King’ Cole,’ with bassist Paul Keller, pianist Phil DeGreg, and drummer John Taylor.
As her mother Amy explains, “Mr. Keller, Mr. Kocher, and John Taylor had conducted a workshop earlier that afternoon with her combo, and had asked for her (and the drummer from her combo) to open with them that evening — to perform on stage on short notice with amazing, world-renowned jazz professionals…what a priceless experience, and all thanks to Dr Rudnick and the supporters from our community. Dr. Rudnick [who retired at the end of the 2025 school year] has given Evelyn some really amazing opportunities.”
In Rudnick’s words, “Evelyn has this ability to take her improvisations to great heights in situations where she is inspired. She is at her absolute best when she can visualize a tangible musical goal to work towards. She brings a potent combination of abundant musicality, fierce determination and sharp wit to her musical endeavors.”
The Clark Montessori High School band director, Clark Roderer, offers further praise:
“With Evelyn,” he says, “the age factor is part of what’s remarkable, but with her, there’s three categories: there’s her technical mastery—for her age, it’s great that she’s excelling and working four-mallets and getting better day after day. But as a young musician period, her technical mastery is excellent. The second category is her improvisation. For a young person of any age, she is exceptional at improv. She knows her techniques, she pushes herself to get better in that area, she listens—I would say, if there was an 18-year-old senior doing what Evelyn is doing, that would be remarkable.
“The third category is her ability to comp. That is what I think really starts to set her apart, because it doesn’t matter what the chart is. If she has a lead sheet or a keyboard part or guitar part, she can read the chords and comp out an appropriate comping pattern. That is pretty exceptional. That’s not typical. For most students who play vibraphone sometimes don’t get into comping like she does until well into college.”
In 2024, she returned to the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival with the Jazz Academy combo and, at age 13, won first place in the Junior Instrument Solo competition. “My first year there, I came in 2nd and that was a big win, but as soon as I heard my name, I thought, ‘Oh, I want first place next time!’ It just kind of manifested into reality. I really wanted it. And I did get first place when we went back last year, and I was very happy about it.” She also received recognition as “Outstanding Musician in a Large Ensemble” at the festival.
She joined the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music High School Jazz Combo in the fall of 2024. Another way she has been keeping on the fast track to a professional career is by playing at a Cincinnati jazz club called The Lounge, which has a house jazz band and opens the session every Monday night with sit-ins for outside professionals or college musicians. So, thanks in part to her contacts at the conservatory, the Yosmali family often loads the vibraphone in the car for a gig at The Lounge (especially in the summer after the school year) to give Evelyn and Wolfie more opportunities to perform.
Amy is glad to see her offspring taking advantage of the music opportunities in Cincinnati. “It’s also lovely in that, to me, there seems to be this unique little pocket of young professional jazz musicians in Cincinnati right now, so it’s been fun in that Evelyn and Wolfie have been getting to know them — it’s truly a special time to be into jazz in Cincinnati.”
Likewise, Evelyn is grateful for the extra-curricular learning opportunities, even when they include taking a bit of constructive criticism from the pros.
“It’s fun, I really like it,” she says. “I like playing with adults more. I love playing with the Jazz Academy, but sometimes I need a rhythm section that can give me ideas, or tell me if I’m in the right direction, or what I need to step up and play.”
The more she talks about playing jazz, the more animated she becomes. In the middle discussing a fine point about soloing, she interrupts herself to blurt out, “I just love talking about this stuff!” before resuming her train of thought. She thinks, speaks (quickly) and plays jazz as a professional would—again, all this at the age of 14 (she turns 15 in mid-August). She knows she’s good, but is also modest about it, well-aware there is still much to learn and experience as a musician, and that seeking improvement is a never-ending process. Her maturity and self-awareness is admirable, even stunning.
“She’s articulate,” Roderer observes, “and she’s also mature in her language around music or jazz, or improvisation, and the context of all of it is accurate and appropriate. You rarely see that with teenagers in general.”
Evelyn regrets that her daily schedule prevents her from playing more often during the school year. “I think the only thing keeping me from really being a professional is having the time in my personal life to go out and actually do gigs,” she says. “I did a lot in the summer, I played in a little coffee shop bar and a couple of gigs with my directors—I’m in the high school jazz combo, under Miles Twitty, and Dr. Rudnick, of course, and with other kids in my high school combos.
“Of course, you’ve got to practice,” she says, even as she confesses, “I don’t practice as much as I should. I really need to practice more, a lot more. Sometimes, if I’m playing with the big band, I come onstage all confident, and then I’m like, ‘oh, wait, there’s this one area that I didn’t get down completely, and I might mess this up.’ And then I’ll make spaces more when I’m playing, and feel more critical of myself…but if you make a mistake, make it confidently. You can’t expect everything to be perfect if you’re not practicing, and you shouldn’t be expecting anything to be perfect in general, because there’s no such thing as perfect.”
As she indicated earlier, she holds the function of a jazz rhythm section in especially high regard. “A lot of young players—even me sometimes—they’re too scared, and need more confidence, and the rhythm section is meant to make everyone sound good, including themselves. And when students are too focused on playing the right notes or the right rhythms, they’re not fully sure of themselves yet, or [musically] mature. It’s really just a maturity thing. Or, they haven’t played as much with other people, and they’re scared.”
She had the same issue herself not so long ago. “The first few times I played at The Lounge, I had no idea what I was doing, but now I know. You get to feel the atmosphere more if you’re with a rhythm section that’s backing you up. They’re listening to you. So, if you play a lick, then they’ll play it back in some way, or you can hear something they play, and they’re like, ‘here—here’s this…’ You can build a story even more with the solos.
“And I get a taste for how to do it, and I just play. Playing in front of other people isn’t really much different from playing by yourself, or in a private lesson, other than that there’s more people watching you. Maybe that’s a little better because you get more energy off the audience, and it’s more fun.”
Not one to miss out on a chance to mingle with or play with other jazz musicians in town, she is usually the youngest of the participants in the events and jam sessions she finds in the area.
This begs the question of how Evelyn’s teen friends who are not musicians or listen to jazz react to her involvement in the genre. She acknowledges that most of them just don’t “get” jazz and wonder how and why she does. When she isn’t with her fellow musicians, it can feel just a bit isolating sometimes.
“I feel like that a lot,” she says. “Some of the kids in my band don’t even really listen to jazz! So it’s really just me and my friend from the jazz academy, Jonas, alone and listening to music. He’d say things like, ‘oh, you need to check this out!’ and I’d listen and say, ‘oh, that’s so good!’—but my friends don’t really listen to jazz. For some people—even me at first—it’s a bit of an acquired taste. Especially nowadays kids don’t listen to stuff that’s like that ’cause they need lyrics, or they want something that they can relate to more, like pop, and they just don’t get it. They’d say, ‘why do you listen to this?’ or someone might say, ‘you’ve reached “unc” status [as in “uncle”],’ meaning I act older than I seem.
“It’s nice when you find someone who matches your musical tastes or understands,” she says. “Sometimes older music sounds more refreshing than the new stuff, ’cause that’s what all the new stuff is based on. It’s not really trying so hard, ’cause it’s just straight-up expression. When I was little, my mom would play ’80s music all the time, and I love ’80s music!”
At the Beavercreek Weekend of Jazz festival earlier this year, Evelyn played one of her most impressive solos during the Jazz Academy’s big band rendition of the classic “Cherokee.” She performed her solo at the breakneck speed customary for the number, but she also gives credit to Wolfie on bass. “My brother can play a million miles an hour. If we were playing at the full speed that we could, he could play over 330 bpm (beats per minute) for multiple choruses, too. They loved him, they liked my solo… Wolfie can solo really well. He’s just as good as me, he’s very good. He has a good ear. That’s something I’m very proud of, having a very talented brother who can play with me.”
She played with the CPS Jazz Academy in Lisbon, Portugal, in June, and has recently returned from a three-week summer High School Jazz Performance and Improvisation program at the prestigious and internationally renowned Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan, which has been offering band camps, orchestra camps, and more for nearly a century. It’s an intense program that has the young musicians studying, rehearsing, and playing eight hours a day as they learn from seasoned professionals and educators. Brass and string musicians and gifted songwriters of several genres populate the grounds each summer, as do students of dance, visual arts, and creative writing.
Evelyn as a vibraphonist may have caught the camp honchos somewhat off-guard when she first applied last year. There wasn’t even a satisfactory instrument category for vibes on the application form, with the closest possibilities being percussion, piano, and “other.” She got waitlisted. Her mom suggested to her, “I don’t think they knew what to do with you.”
“There are always hurdles, no matter what!” Evelyn says, “but I don’t get discouraged,”
This year, however, she became the first applicant to be accepted at Interlochen solely as a vibraphonist, rather than as a percussionist.
“What’s really unique about her,” Clark Roderer points out, “is that she’s up for, and likes, a challenge. If I were to say to her, ‘you can’t really be the dominant force in a big band setting,’ that’s all she would need to hear. She’ll find a way. She really enjoys a challenge. Her making it into the Interlochen camp was a byproduct of that very thing. It was more of a challenge for her than anything else.”
As for her time at Interlochen, “I came in with not much expectation, but I learned a lot and was able to improve on a lot of things and get input from other people.” And, being the only vibraphonist, she was relieved to find a few vibraphones waiting for her (she brought one with her just in case), but she also needed to make a few adjustments with the music she was given. “That was a little tricky. I ended up getting a lot of piano parts and guitar parts…in big band, I got more charts. In combo, we did things by ear, and one of the songs I already knew, and we did sort of my own version of it.” Lugging the vibraphone from one rehearsal space to another at one point was no easy task, either. “The trials and tribulations of playing the vibraphone,” Amy laments.
Whether or not she begins to branch out musically on other instruments (along with piano, she plays some guitar and drums), make no mistake about it—Evelyn Yosmali is someone for us to keep our eyes on—not five or ten years from now, but today. A fresh young talent is here to play jazz, and, should she decide to continue on this path, the rest of us would be wise—and fortunate—to see what lies ahead for her.
For over twenty years, Garry Berman has written books and articles related to pop culture and entertainment history. He has contributed articles to Beatlefan magazine, Nostalgia Digest, and History magazine. In addition to his non-fiction work, he also writes comic novels and screenplays.He is also co-administrator of the Facebook group page Friends of Sant Andreu Jazz Band. Visit him online at www.GarryBerman.com.
