Founding Director & Dean, Trombonist Angela Wellman, hailing proudly from Kansas City, Missouri, has performed with the McCoy Tyner Big Band, Joe Williams, Al Grey, Slide Hampton and other noted musicians.
From 1991-94, Angela was a California Arts Council Artist in Residence, during which time she designed and implemented a Jazz Studies Curriculum for Cole Visual and Performing Arts Magnet School in Oakland, CA. In 1997, she was awarded a Master’s degree in Music Education from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. She subsequently returned to the Bay Area, and served as the Education Director for the Oakland Youth Chorus where she developed award-winning community music education programs.
Ms. Wellman is a recipient of national, state, and city Arts awards and fellowships for performance study and music education. Among these awards is the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Study Fellowship to study with trombonist Steve Turre.
Raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Ms. Wellman was nurtured in a musical family, and is a third generation jazz musician and music educator. She grew up listening to the stride piano style of her grandfather, her father's swinging ballad & blues piano, and the soul-stirring vocal stylings of her mother, Jyene Baker. Ms. Wellman inherits her passion and understanding for the preservation of musical traditions through education from her uncle and mentor, Eddie B. Baker, Sr., founder of the Charlie Parker Memorial Foundation & Academy for Performing Arts and the International Jazz Hall of Fame. Her initiation into the world of Jazz as a player began while hanging out at sessions at the famed chitlin' circuit Local 627, the once–Black musicians' union in Kansas City, and now sanctuary for the spirits of jazz pioneers such as Ernie Williams (The Last of the Blue Devils), Count Basie, Charlie Parker, and countless others who got their start in that very place.
Since founding the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, Ms. Wellman continues to perform as much as possible and teaches theory, instrumental music, and is Dean of OPCMusic. Her band, New Roots, performs spirited, contemporary music, creating new forms, styles, and roots in the Jazz tradition.