Iyanna Boatwright-Buffaloe Hits All the Right Notes While Finding Her Own Sound
The 11-year-old girl stepped onto the school stage, her heart thumping. Why did she have to be picked out of all these fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders as the first one to try a new instrument?
The music teacher handed her the long, heavy piece of gleaming brass and urged her to purse her mouth and blow. She swung the trombone to her lips, and, to everyone’s great surprise, including her own, a lovely, clear note burst forth and hung in the air.
A smattering of applause broke out, and Iyanna Boatwright-Buffaloe gratefully regained her seat in the auditorium and out of the spotlight.
Seven years later, Boatwright-Buffaloe — a University of Pittsburgh sophomore majoring in computer science and minoring in music in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences— surprised herself again. In Fall 2015, she was chosen as the Pitt-BNY Mellon Jazz Scholarship recipient. The $5,000 award is given annually to a current or incoming Pitt music student; applicants submit a recording of jazz standards to the judging panel to be considered.
“Iyanna has a beautiful clear sound and technique,” says Pitt Jazz Studies Program Director and pianist Geri Allen. “She also has an innate feeling and retention of the soulful expression of great jazz trombone masters like Al Grey, Curtis Fuller, and Slide Hampton.”
Boatwright-Buffaloe played in Pitt’s Jazz Ensemble her freshman year, and was part of Pitt’s Jazz Combo — a new group composed of 10-12 students, with a rhythm and horn section— during the 2015-16 school year.
“I wanted to develop more as a musician and find my own sound,” says Boatwright-Buffaloe, explaining that the combo’s smaller size and more collaborative format encouraged the kind of personal growth and exploration she was seeking.
“The combo meant freedom for me in a lot of ways. It meant I had more time to pursue my own musical adventures, because we met less often than jazz ensemble,” she says, also noting that the combo challenged her because she and her fellow student-musicians had to compose and perform original songs each week.
“It was just the push I needed to get into recording my own music,” Boatwright-Buffaloe says. “The most important part, though, was the connections that I made to the other amazing musicians in the class.”
Though she is a computer science major, a love of music permeates her life and her studies. In fact, Boatwright-Buffaloe finds that her music informs her computer science work and vice versa: “They both require an extreme amount of attention to detail. One wrong note in a song can be as sour as one wrong letter in program,” she explains. “Working with computers has also taught me to be very persistent. It’s easy to get frustrated with programs, and I have to keep pushing through until I understand it. This comes in handy when learning music theory!”
Boatwright-Buffaloe learned a powerful lesson about persistence and working through frustration when she applied to college. A Philadelphia native, she had her heart set on attending the University of Maryland. She had all the right test scores, the right GPA, everything. “I was a shoe-in,” she recalls.
Something went wrong, and the application was never submitted. Boatwright-Buffaloe was heartbroken. But, she had applied to Pitt and had already been accepted.
“I decided to visit since I was already admitted, and had won a scholarship. Once I got here, I knew getting rejected was the best blessing in disguise ever. I’m so happy I came here instead,” she says. “I don’t know how to describe it, but so many days I wake up with the feeling that I’m exactly where I belong, doing exactly what I want to do.”
Boatwright-Buffaloe appreciates that the University has given her so much flexibility in choosing the schedule, classes, and activities that she wants. “I’ve been able to pick my own path and go after whatever it is I’m interested in.”
She has also had access to some of the best jazz musicians in the city through her professor Geri Allen, and has been able to perform at gigs as a college sophomore she would not have imagined in her wildest dreams. She has shared the stage with jazz greats and Grammy winners Sean Jones and Terri Lyne Carrington, among others.
In addition to performing in the Jazz Combo and at various jazz gigs around the city, Boatwright-Buffaloe plays with the Afro Yaqui Music Collective, an indigenous-jazz-hip-hop collective founded by Pitt music grad student Ben Barson. She enjoys the challenge of working with the other Afro Yaqui musicians, learning to adapt and enter their space: “I usually have to read parts in a different key, or transcribe, or have someone go over the rhythms with me. It's all a part of the process of learning how jazz musicians communicate, and I'm happy I get to do that.”
Boatwright-Buffaloe supplements her love of performing with composing and tackling personal projects. She is working on releasing a recording that combines elements of jazz, hip-hop, soul, funk, gospel, and neo-soul — a sound she says pushes the traditional jazz envelope.
“The goal is to get people talking about the future of jazz, and what we can bring to it as a new generation of musicians,” says Boatwright-Buffaloe. “So often, we get caught up playing the same 50-year-old charts and doing things the traditional way that we lose the very foundation of jazz, which is experimentation and creativity. I want to inspire people to create again.”
While Boatwright-Buffaloe cannot know exactly what her future holds, she is interested in software engineering as a career choice, and will continue to devote time to composing and performing music. She has learned the invaluable lesson of holding her expectations lightly and embracing uncertainty.
“I feel like so many people — myself included— come into college already knowing who they want to be and what kind of experience they want to have,” she says. “The more open you are to adapting and learning who you really are, the better. Embrace change.”