Scott G. Douglass

Scott Gray Douglass is a bassist and youth orchestra teacher from Richmond, Virginia. He started teaching beginning orchestra musicians while still in high school for Henrico County's Strings Discovery after-school and summer program. A certified teacher, Scott has taught K-12 students in public and private schools in New York City, Connecticut, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania. A career highlight was leading DC Youth Orchestra students in performance of the music of James Brown and Duke Ellington at the Kennedy Center alongside Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell. His mentors include orchestra director Veronica Jackson, band director Michael Breaux, music education scholar David Elliott, bassists Christian McBride and Roland Guerin, and composers Erik Desiderio and Guillermo Klein. Scott's research interests are jazz studies, the history of music education and school integration, double bass pedagogy, oral tradition musicianship, creativity, and digital humanities. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Scott studied Music Education at New York University Steinhardt School, served as student teacher at Amber Charter School and MS 54 in Manhattan, and for his MA thesis created an ethnography of community musical traditions in coastal southwest Madagascar. His PhD dissertation (Penn State, ’22) is entitled, “Commonwealth of Jazz: A Community History of Jazz Musician Educators as Agents of Social Change in Richmond, Virginia”.

You can follow Scott's research on the history of jazz, public education, and integration in Virginia and across the South on his Substack.