Seventeen-year-old trombonist, composer, and recent Barrington High School graduate Miles Burke aspires to live and work the life of a jazz musician. And although it’s years off into the future, Burke can already feel, touch, breathe and begin to subsist in it today.

Over refreshments at the local Starbucks in town, college-bound Burke told me of his plans, hopes and strategies to achieve his goal. I found him to be extremely intelligent, judicious and perceptive. What struck me about Burke was his level of sensibility and independent thinking. Although he’s acutely aware of all things au courant around him, he’s not a follower of trends. His expanse of maturity defies his age.

To label him an old soul seems trite and deficient. One could argue that his teenage years are just a formality – a brief walk through on the road towards his true self – a living, working jazz musician.

A musical household

I wondered who Burke was and what got him into music.

“I am a 17-year-old musician who is looking to be college educated, and I have a goal to be a jazz musician and performer, hopefully in a city setting,” said Burke. “I’m going to sort of follow where the future takes me. I have a lot of aspirations. My parents are into music, so I was heavily exposed to it. They like a really mixed bag. My dad is a guitarist. He likes punk and he likes alternative, lots of world music too. All kinds of music going on around my house. Also, my parents have always been really good about bringing me to all types of musical shows. Bands that they like, but also jazz because they know I like it.”

Despite the fact that his dad is a guitarist and played mainly guitar music in the house, Burke gravitated toward the trombone.

“In the way our education system works, you pick an instrument in fifth grade, and guitar is not one of the choices. It’s mostly concert instruments. Clarinet, Oboe, Trumpet, Sax or Trombone. French horn as well. The brass and woodwinds.

“I wanted to play sax but my desire to play it waned and decreased. ‘Trombone Shorty’ is a trombone player that I’ve known about for a long time,” said Burke. “He makes pretty digestible New Orleans music, and my mom is from New Orleans so we had that influence in the house, the heritage, and maybe I was just connected to it because my mom played Shorty’s records a lot. I’ve since seen him live. He has also written a children’s book about how he found a trombone next to a garbage can. My mom brought me to one of his concerts, bought the book and he signed it for us.”

Jazz spoke to him

One day when Burke was in third grade, the Barrington high school jazz band came to his school to perform. “When I saw that concert, right there I knew that’s what I wanted to do. It just spoke to me. It was pop played by a jazz band, but I didn’t draw any lines in those days, and I didn’t know the difference. It got the ball rolling for me,” said Burke. “The real jazz came to me as a freshman in high school. Before that I could kind of pretend that I was a jazz guy, but I really wasn’t. I got turned on to it as a freshman in the jazz band because there were juniors and seniors in it. They were playing jazz and they were around me every day. I was being influenced by their elevated musical knowledge.”

“So, I was playing with juniors and seniors and even students that were going into college. I was obviously not on their level and I was humbled by them,” said Burke. “We would play in people’s basements, and I got kind of humiliated in a way when it was my turn to solo. The songs were always difficult and I would fumble it. That turned into motivation for me, playing with people that were much better than me. It was kind of a helpful motivational humiliation, if you know what I mean.”

Burke says there were a few trombone players when he was in fifth grade but they started to slowly drop out. He hung in there. He could only play music that they gave him in school, but he wanted to exceed the level of the sheet music that he was receiving.

“When I was in fifth grade my brother was a year ahead of me in sixth and he would smuggle me music from the middle school from the Pops band, which was sort of a specialty band he was in. He played French horn. His name is Quincy.”

Miles and Quincy? I asked if there was any connection to the jazz legends with the same names?

“Possibly,” coyly replied Burke. “But I’m not sure.”

Musical accolades

Before long Burke auditioned for and got in to the school band — the same band where his brother acquired the advanced sheet music for him.

“I always got in to all the things I auditioned for,” said Burke. “I made The Rhode Island All State, but honestly, it’s kind of a low bar here in Rhode Island. It’s the least impressive state to make all state because it’s so small. So, in seventh grade I started to do all state and wanted to play even more advanced music.”

What were you listening to at home outside of school?

“I wasn’t listening to trombone stuff. I was listening to Supertramp, The Rolling Stones and the Beatles, but not jazz. I even listened to some hip-hop and rap. I was moderately into it. Not sort of like the gangster rap and all that shouting and that vulgar stuff, just stuff that was a little more meaningful. Listening to Jazz and playing Jazz for me are two different things. Even now, I sometimes find it hard to actively listen to jazz for long periods of time because it’s lyric-less and dynamically aesthetic. I have to kind of have to play it to appreciate it as much as I do.”

What do your friends think of you being a jazz musician? Were you ostracized? A hero?

“I am neither. I’m right in between. I never got picked on. My friends view it very respectively, but it’s also a very foreign world to them. And you know, me being around some people that are singing songs and all this TikTok stuff, I mean I do get it, I’m not so out of touch with it, but because of the music I listen to now it sort of changes the atmosphere a bit, but they respect me and believe in me. I mean, I have friends that come to the gigs and support me. They’re not really coming for the jazz, they’re more coming to support me, but some of it is bound to seep in.”

In pursuit of music

In some ways Burke is reminiscent of high school senior Tom Curtis, the protagonist in Nat Hentoff’s classic novel “Jazz Country.” Minus the racial strife of the ’60s social and jazz scene, Burke is much like Curtis — young, determined, a bit of an outsider, willing to pay his dues to join the alliance, striving to unearth the path to enter that smokey, artistic ecosphere.

“I’m the only student that graduated in 2024 from Barrington High School who is pursuing an instrumental music degree. I have many friends in school that are really good musicians, but they are going on to major in non-musical careers, which is great. Sometimes I wish I wanted to do that – that I had a clearer interest in those kinds of choices – but I can’t imagine myself doing anything else other than music. In a way it’s a lonely road.”

Burke is currently studying under the tutelage of a renowned music teacher here in Rhode Island.

“My trombone teacher is Dr. Emmett Goods. He’s the professor of jazz trombone at URI as well as director of jazz studies at URI. He’s a wonderful jazz professor who also has a degree in classical music. I drive down, usually every other week, because it’s a long trip. Our lessons are an hour, and he helps me to focus on my practicing, guide me and steer me in the right direction.

A composer, too

Burke is also actively composing, but not on trombone.

“This year I really started to hone in my piano skills. The piano is where I compose. With piano you obviously have more control and can play multiple notes at once and matching melodies with chords. Whereas you can only play one note at a time on trombone. So I sit down by the piano and experiment and explore ideas with different tonal centers, and sometimes a melody just forms out of that,” said Burke. “This year everyone did a senior project, and for mine I explored composition and arranging and we rehearsed my final product, a composition that I wrote that is arranged for an entire 18-piece jazz ensemble. It’s clocking in at about seven minutes long. It’s called ‘Morning Glory.’ A friend of mine came up with the idea for the title. Titles never seem to mean much in jazz because they have no lyrics, but in truth the feeling of the song can dictate the title.”

I asked Burke about where he goes from here.

“I’ve decided to study at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio,” said Burke. “I also got accepted to the Manhattan School of Music in the heart of New York City, but honestly it was a money choice for me. I wanted to be close as possible to debt-free when my studies are complete. Oberlin is in the middle of nowhere, and I think that’s a good thing. No big city distractions. I visited with a friend there for a week and I loved it.”

“The Professor that I’ll be studying with at Oberlin is Jay Ashby. Strangely enough he’s the former teacher of my current teacher Emmett Good. He has also played with Slide Hampton. I’ve seen Ashby perform, have met him and love his recordings. I’ll be in good hands. There are not many jazz trombonists out there. It’s a small circle so there’s a lot of love in that close knit community.”

I asked Burke if he had any final thoughts on life, liberty and the pursuit of Jazz.

“Many of my friends think I’m brave and/or extremely cool for following this dream, but I’m just doing what I want to do and what feels right to me. I’m too young to talk about triumph and failure at the moment, but I do know I have to keep going and never quit, no matter what.”

Michael Khouri is a Barrington resident writing occasionally about the Rhode Island music scene. Reach him at mkhouri@cox.net.