Collen Clark ’09 grew up in a musical family in Colchester, Connecticut, but her musician origin story starts with her being driven to elementary school by her father. The two were in his car in the daily line of cars where students were being dropped off. “The day before, they’d assigned us instruments, and I had come home with the flute,” she said. “Me being assigned the flute was kind of a gendered assignment, and my dad, who was a bass player, drove to school with me the next morning, where the music teacher was the line attendant, and when we pulled up, he said, ‘I’m not moving until you let her play the drums.’”
That small act of parental civil disobedience set Clark off on a path that has taken her across the country, where, when she’s not breaking glass ceilings, she’s opening doors for the next generation of female percussionists. “I felt at home on the drums, and I knew that’s how I could reach people,” she said of her time growing up and taking part in jazz bands in secondary school.
When it came time to choose a college, she was torn between IC and the University of North Texas (UNT). And while she was familiar with Ithaca, where her older sister had gone, it was during her audition with Gordon Stout, who is now professor emeritus of music performance, that she knew where she wanted to spend the next four years. “He is a legendary percussion professor,” she recalled. “It was only supposed to be 15 minutes, and it lasted an hour. We played and we talked, and when he came out afterwards, he told my parents, ‘She’ll be a great fit.’”
He was right. Double majoring in music education and percussion performance, Clark relished all the opportunities she got at IC, especially those from Janet Galvan, who is now professor emerita of music performance. “She would say to me, ‘We have a gig in a week, and you need to learn something.’ And because she threw me into the fire, I became a consummate musician,” Clark said.
After earning a master’s from the State University of New York at Purchase, Clark realized she wanted to have a lasting impact on the industry, so she turned to the other college in the running just a few years before to pursue a doctorate at UNT. There, at the oldest jazz program in the country, she accomplished something no one else had done, becoming the first woman and drummer to get a doctorate in jazz performance.
While at UNT in 2019, she asked her department chair if the school had ever done a “women in jazz day” as part of Women’s History Month. When the answer was no, Clark invited a friend who was a jazz vocalist to come to campus, and she held one. “It was great, but I realized it wasn’t going effect a lasting change,” she said. After completing her doctorate, she got a job as an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina and set about creating something more permanent. In January 2022, the university’s first ever Jazz Girls Day was held. “When I was hired, only 30 schools out of approximately 300 in the state had any kind of jazz program,” she said. “We’ve made it part of our mission to uplift jazz education in our state.”
A one-day immersive program for middle and high school students of any experience level, Jazz Girls Day features a lecture on women in jazz, learning music by sight and ear, and improv and breakout sessions for the specific instruments before closing with a celebratory concert. The first one had 14 participants, and the latest in the thrice-yearly event had 32. Clark has ambitious plans to have a Jazz Girls Day in all 50 states by 2030. “It is so difficult to get a bunch of girls in the room playing jazz,” Clark said. “Our goal is to uplift the community, and if they walk out of there with a friend, or saying they can see themselves in the building in the future, we’ve accomplished that.”
For all that she’s attained, Clark still remembers her time at Ithaca fondly. “It was really the golden era of music education here, and I got to experience it from legends in the field,” she said. “I still have my acceptance letter. Gordon mailed it to me with a note saying that I should ‘keep it in case you need a reminder of how special you are,’ and I still look at it.”