It was fate. I never wanted to play the clarinet – I’d always wanted to be a drummer, just because I thought it was a cool instrument. I was in elementary school, living in Baltimore, and I went to my band teacher and said ‘I want to play drums’. She said we already have enough drummers but we need clarinet players – so she gave me a clarinet. We learned maybe three notes, and I thought that was going to be the beginning and the end of my clarinet life.

Fast forward two years, I’m now in junior high school, and I go to my band teacher and say ‘I want to play drums’. He says ‘we have enough drummers but we also have other instruments like guitar.’ So I said ‘OK’, because that’s cool too, right? But about a week later he said ‘some of your friends said that you play clarinet and we need clarinet players in the band.’ So he takes my guitar back, and gives me a clarinet. I really wasn’t a good reader of music, but I had a good ear and so I would go home, learn songs from the radio, and just figure it out.

The Baltimore School for the Arts had only been open for one year and they were at this point recruiting students – now kids from around the world are trying to get in. They came to my school and I heard their choir sing, and it just moved me. So I went to my band teacher and said ‘I want to go to that school’. He said ‘don’t even try, because you’re going to be auditioning against kids who’ve been taking private lessons since they were three years old, you’re just going to get your feelings hurt.’ But I told my mother, and she took me to my school and said ‘he wants to audition!’ So the band teacher says ‘go into that music room over there and get some music’. There was no clarinet music, so he says ‘get a trumpet part.’ In the back of the music is a cassette tape, and I learned the whole piece of music just from listening to it. My mum took me to the audition, I put the music in front of me, I gave the accompanist their part, and I played the whole piece as if I was reading it – but it was all just from memory. And I got in.

When I started at Baltimore I was the fourth clarinet. Then Bill Blayney came in. I was in a low-income household, but he believed in me, he saw potential in me, and so for half his rate he gave me private lessons all summer long. So by the time I got back from second year I was first clarinet. And in my senior year I auditioned for Juilliard – and I got in.

A lot of people know me as an actor from The Wire, but what they don’t know is that The Wire is about the neighbourhood that I grew up in, while I was growing up in it, studying clarinet. You’ve got to imagine a young kid – 13, 14, 15 years old – walking through those neighbourhoods carrying a clarinet case. It wasn’t easy. But it was going to the Baltimore School for the Arts that showed me a new world: this is what you can do, these are opportunities that are available to you if you go down the route of classical music. Had I not found that, and considering the environment that I was in – all you have to do is watch the show to see – it’s likely I would have been doing something else, or I might not even be here, who knows. If you want to talk about how classical music affected my life, it saved me, that’s how I feel about it.

Three years ago a really great friend of mine, Troy Stuart – we went to high school together, he’s now a cellist and teacher at the Kaufman Music Center – called me up and said ‘would you be interested in playing a chamber music concert a year from now?’ And I thought, in a year, I could probably do that, so I said yes. I played that concert and that was it – I’ve been practising again every day since. I’ve played other concerts, and performed a few solos – I played a few months ago at the Kaufman school for their fund raising event. I’ve been enjoying it, and am excited about telling my story, and about helping raise money for the arts.

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Gramophone. Whether you want to enjoy Gramophone online, explore our unique Reviews Database or our huge archive of issues stretching back to April 1923, or simply receive the magazine through your door every month, we've got the perfect subscription for you. Find out more at magsubscriptions.com