Kahlil Childs and Jacob Hart: Two Young Stars Rise From Detroit

The Detroit Jazz Festival is a huge draw. For fans, it is the largest free jazz event in the world, removing financial barriers and accommodating over 300,000 attendees over Labor Day weekend annually. Over four days, four stages present the best the jazz world has to offer and in the process, celebrates the great jazz history in Detroit by booking the best of the local scene and giving them ample time on the festival's main stages. A very unique aspect of attending Detroit, is the after-hours jam sessions at a variety of locations, generally beginning at 11 PM. The most prominent and well attended of these sessions is at Cliff Bell's, the iconic Detroit jazz club that houses the local scene as well as touring acts. There, festival headliners mingle with locals and students from area university programs, igniting the mentorship cycle that has sustained the music throughout its history outside of institutional learning. The session is also time for musicians, writers and fans alike to hang and find fellowship in friends both old and new.

Towards the end of July each year, the Detroit Jazz Festival partners with Wayne State University in presenting the JC Heard Jazz Week, a week-long workshop for the best of Detroit area high school musicians. An all-star group is gleaned from the participants and granted a set at the festival itself. It allows the jazz public to witness the future of the music in Detroit, to gain an understanding of the inter-generational nature of America's only true, original art form.

Two years ago in 2023, a pair of fourteen-year-old players attended and participated in the late-night session at Cliff Bell's, playing alongside such stars as Karriem Riggins, Shirazette Tinnin and Isaiah Collier. Remarkably, they held their own and then some, much to the astonishment of musicians and journalists. Moving forward to 2025, the now sixteen-year-old duo are highly developed musicians, open-minded professionals pondering their future in music. Saxophonist Kahlil Childs and pianist Jacob Hart have developed a close bond both on and off the bandstand. They recently hit the studio to record Hart's original compositions for an upcoming release.

The 2025 edition of the JC Heard All-Stars took the stage at the festival early Sunday afternoon, displaying the fruits of what they had gathered over the course of the week, and more importantly, over the past year. Childs and Hart lead the way, showing the humility and maturity of seasoned bandleaders while playing with great energy and virtuosity.

Hart is a native Detroiter and has grown up around the scene there. He attends the vaunted Detroit School of Art. Childs hails from San Diego, but has put down musical roots in Detroit with the help of his highly supportive parents. He has had the good fortune of studying in San Diego, with one of Detroit's all-time jazz icons—Charles McPherson. He is scheduled to perform at the 2025 Monterey Jazz Festival as part of the Next Generation Jazz Orchestra directed by Gerald Clayton.

The night before the festival JC Heard All-Stars performance, Hart and Childs played a 11PM set at Spread Art in the city's Woodbridge neighborhood. The out-of-the-way gallery is an incubator for young artists in Detroit, and a bare bones one at that. The performance room featured seating for forty, a beat-down and out-of-tune piano, and a marvelous, relaxed vibe where it seemed only cool things could happen. The quartet included bassist Langston Kitchen and drummer Travis Aukerman. Aukerman also served as the host, sitting in for Hart's usual drummer Sam Melkonian.

A small audience gathered, including Hart's mom Dorrene, and Child's parents Dennis and Saranella. The expectation was solid jazz interpretation, but what came down was quite something else. The set, both in terms of the compositions performed and the virtuosic interpretations of them, was east coast, hard-driving, swinging post bop at its best. Child's playing was melody driven with clear intent. Hart somehow made the aforementioned piano sound great, playing torrid, well conceived solos while comping just enough to give his bandmates harmonic figures to work with. The duo would rush down to catch the end of the Cliff Bell's jam after the set, leaving their parents more weary than themselves. What we were left with was the fact that these two young men had something to say. While so many young musicians play extremely well, the mainstream of them play as they are taught at institutions of higher learning—understanding the language in detail, and often not having a lot to say. Childs and Hart play fully in the moment, and have the wonderful ability to offer something meaningful in the process. Their love and enthusiasm for the music is obvious, inspiring and hopeful in so many ways.

The two connected originally when Hart learned of Childs by word of mouth when his mother was alerted by a friend to a video of the saxophonist on YouTube. They met at Cliff Bell's and bonded almost immediately. They spent time together taking in sets at the festival and played their first gig together the following January at Aretha's in Detroit. Their respective backgrounds are somewhat different, but share a commonality in supportive families and deep love for the music. Of course, talent is another thing they share.

Hart is from a musical family, having a grandfather and father who are musicians. "My grandfather was a trumpet player. He brought me into music. My dad is a bassist—jazz and rock mostly," he says while acknowledging that those are the musical styles that suit him best as well. Childs did not begin playing the traditional beginner's way. He started at nine years old, in a house that often had jazz playing giving him access to records, and thus, tunes. "It was the music I associated with the instrument. I immediately started learning jazz standards instead of learning the basics," he recalls, something one can easily hear in his playing, as well as Hart's. Both have learned close to four hundred standards to date, gaining a keen understanding of bebop language and group dynamics. It is how musicians have learned the music for generations, and something lacking in modern music education.

There is a vast difference in their daily lives and the methodology surrounding their practice habits. Hart attends school, pushing practice time to late at night, if at all. "I practice every chance I get, but I don't get to just sit down and practice until the summer," he says, at which point he puts seven hours a day into his instrument. Childs is home schooled, but has been dealing with the demands of being a professional musician at a very early age. Currently, he averages about two gigs a week, while also putting time into his activities at the Young Lions Jazz Conservatory in San Diego. "A lot of my time goes to learning music for gigs. I don't consider that practice because that's not me working on bettering myself. I usually play six hours a day, but really, I actually practice every other day," he remarks. "Every day I definitely do long tones and scales, that's thirty minutes for me, for technical advancement." Hart has his "must do" activities as well, just to keep things up to snuff. "In my practice there's specific things I have to do or else I don't feel good about my playing," he observes.

The large issue on the horizon for both of these young musicians, is what to do upon graduation from high school. The traditional route in 2025 is to go to a conservatory, most likely in New York, and get a master's degree in order to create the fall-back option of teaching. Both are more than capable of passing auditions for the likes of Juilliard, MSM, The New School, Berklee and other highly regarded schools. While the experience has tremendous value and creates opportunities down the road, it does negate time-wise, the ability to play professionally and seek out musical alliances. Child's remarks on the subject illuminate that concern. "Obviously the dream is to go to Juilliard. The ideal would be to play with someone who's a big deal and get to that place that I would be if I had gone to Juilliard, without spending that kind of time." Hart points out the idea of getting out in the world and exploring destinations outside of Michigan. He knows he must leave at some point to fulfill his ultimate goals, but has a clearly grounding attitude and understanding about the scene around Detroit that has raised him as a sort of favorite son. "I'd love to spend some time out of here. I'll eventually come back, always, because Michigan is my home," he offers pensively.

Aside from these types of real life decisions, the music remains the constant to pursue, no matter where they do it. While every musician works to create an original sound and approach, the route taken on that journey matters most. The collision resulting in friendship and musical alliance between these two may be the largest and most meaningful factor in their respective paths to musical enlightenment. Together they have learned how to listen and respond, how to remain grounded in the exploding moment. Ultimately it is those basic elements of playing improvised music that draws them together and creates common ground from where to create freely. "I'm listening to the whole color spectrum of what's going on, I'm always listening to the drums," cites Childs, seated alongside his chord-playing, harmony-creating partner. He is after all indebted in some degree to Hart's advanced comping style that allows him to focus on the rhythmic pulse of a piece provided by the drummer. To that end, Hart remarks, "I don't want to have one thing that I'm playing. I don't have to do that if the soloist is taking me in another direction. It's more of a conversation."

The familiarity they have gained through many hours playing together brings with it a strong dual presence that is obvious and infectious to the listener. The love and respect they have for each other on the bandstand is based on a clear understanding of each other's tendencies. In remarking about why he enjoys playing with Childs, Hart states. "I don't want to have to tell you everything, and I don't want to be told everything. He doesn't just listen and he doesn't just lead."

What the music looks like ten, twenty years from now is a concern of course, but it is a certainty these two young lions that met in the great jazz city of Detroit will be in the thick of things. Both are open to exploring new directions in the music, whether that means directly impacting jazz itself, or joining it with other forms in the spirit of the times. "Everyone is going for their own sound. I want to play like Jacob Hart. I want to write music that represents myself, says Hart emphatically. Childs cites the accessibility to the music online that is available to his generation, not only in terms of actual instruction, but in international access to current and historic recordings. "People said jazz was dying when bebop was invented. Jazz is so easy to access—there is so much educational access to jazz in the world."

Childs, like many generations of jazz musicians before the advent of jazz institutions of higher learning, learned this music and developed his art by listening to the records and learning the tunes of his trade. "There's the right way that people say you have to do it now. 10 years from now, there's going to be those who play like you're supposed to be doing, and there's going to be the people that are merging jazz with hip hop. Hip hop started with people sampling jazz, now jazz people are sampling hip hop. How I see myself in the music scene is that I'm always going to be trying to find the music that I want to hear, and create music I want to listen to, authentically as I possibly can."

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