Top honors, at Lincoln Center, to a student jazz band from Livingston

You don't win the top prize at the Essentially Ellington jazz competition by playing it safe.

You win it — as Livingston's Newark Academy jazz band did this month — by choosing the toughest path up Mount Ellington. And then climbing the sheer face without flinching.

"We started working on this music months ago, and we all thought it would be too difficult to play it at a sophisticated level," said tenor saxophonist Anirudh Chakravarthy of Montclair, 18, a senior.

"Yet, we persevered and kept getting better at the music, and we were rewarded for it by executing it on the highest stage," he said. "If you keep pushing and striving for something you want, anything is possible."

A $5,000 cash prize, plus a year's bragging rights, comes with the first place win. But for the Newark Academy's jazz band, also known as Chameleon, the biggest joy may be the sheer mastery of some of the toughest material in jazz.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

Raising the roof

It was Chakravarthy's own spirited solo on "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" that helped seal the deal, when the 24-piece band took the stage at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater on May 11. The 37-year-old organization, overseen by Wynton Marsalis, is the gold standard for jazz study and preservation.

But Chakravarthy, when he played his solo at the 1,200-seat Rose Theater, left the hard work in the bandroom and just let 'er rip.

"I was just feeling the music," he said. "I stopped thinking about the notes I had practiced, and just listened to the rhythm section. I just went with the flow of things."

"Diminuendo and Crescendo" had been a pivotal moment for Duke Ellington himself. The Beethoven of jazz, its most significant composer and bandleader, Ellington was at low ebb in the mid-1950s. He'd been thinking of quitting music entirely when, in 1956, saxman Paul Gonsalves climaxed "Diminuendo and Crescendo" at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival by wailing 27 solo choruses and driving the crowd wild. The piece hit the reset button for big band jazz, and for Ellington.

Not that Chakravarthy took that kind of solo. "He didn't do 27 choruses, because there's a time limit," said Newark Academy band director Julius Tolentino. "But he had everybody clapping at the end."

The "Diminuendo and Crescendo," though important to jazz history, is not one of those famous Ellington titles like "Sophisticated Lady," "Mood Indigo" or "Take The A Train" (actually written by Billy Strayhorn). Nor are the Academy's other two selections liable to be overly familiar: "Golden Cress" (which showcased the trombone work of senior Vanessa Fang, 17, of Edison) and "Boy Meets Horn" (which featured Tolentino's son Jacob, 18, a senior, on trumpet).

That was the point: to challenge the teen musicians with music that wasn't obvious, wasn't easy. And the band upped the ante by performing everything by memory.

"We really came together as a band because we connected with each other on stage in a newer and deeper way," Fang said. "And I think that atmosphere came from our pride in seeing all of the work that we had put in individually culminating in something bigger than ourselves."

Top guns

They all had to bring their A game. They were competing with the best of the best: 15 school bands, selected from more than 100 around the country. That was one of the reasons Tolentino deliberately chose less familiar, more difficult pieces — things that would really make his band stand out.

"I think a lot of it was picking harder material for the group, things that would really push them to their limits," said Tolentino, a Roselle Park resident and himself a seasoned musician who has played alto sax in The Ellington Orchestra, The Mingus Band, the Roy Hargrove Band, and The Illinois Jacquet Big Band.

"The sound of Ellington is a very specific sound," he said. "Even the simplest pieces have so much depth to them, and the most complicated pieces have a simplicity about them."

His kids got both things. The complication and the nuance, but also the fun. That, he thinks, is why they scored with the judges.

"I had a lot of people telling us that our performance was the most joyous, that you could see it on the kids' faces when they interacted the whole time," he said.

It was a big win for the band — which had been reaching for this particular brass ring for seven years running. Also for the Newark Academy, one of the nation's oldest private schools, founded in 1774.

"Standing on the stage at Rose Hall and representing the legacy of Chameleon was a dream come true," said drummer Ben Schwartz, 18, a senior from Maplewood. "Winning the entire competition? There are no words I can say."

Building a repertoire

It was a big win, too, for Jazz At Lincoln Center — which launched the Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition and Festival 29 years ago precisely to encourage kids, and school music programs, to stretch themselves.

"It was really about raising the level of music that is available for high school bands to play," said Todd Stoll, vice president of education at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

As late as the early 1990s, Stoll said, there were only five or six Ellington arrangements available for high school bands.

And they weren't even originals: they were simplified orchestrations from "Sophisticated Ladies," Broadway's 1981 Duke Ellington revue. Where classical students worked with real Beethoven and Tchaikovsky scores, the jazz programs were expected to make do with a hodge-podge of old tunes in dubious arrangements, and music by new — mostly white — composers.

"There was very little music from Black composers available in jazz music education," said Stoll, himself a trumpet player. "Think about that."

Through a deal worked out by Jazz at Lincoln Center, some 200 original orchestrations by Duke Ellington and others have now been made available to schools. And the Essentially Ellington competition is the proof of the pudding: a yearly demonstration of how much school jazz bands have been learning.

"Jazz is a very young art form, and it's very tied up in race and gender and show business," Stoll said. "I think we're finally to the point where people are starting to realize that the music of Duke Ellington or Benny Carter or Mary Lou Williams is important and worthy of study."

As it will be studied, again, next fall — when Tolentino starts with a substantially new batch of student musicians at Newark Academy, and they begin their long climb toward Lincoln Center once again.

"I'm definitely going to be losing some of the strongest players I've ever had all at once," he said. "But you always have to be looking ahead."