Brattleboro Jazz Heroes
Pianist Eugene Uman and multi-talented Elsa Borrero met in the East Village of New York City in 1990. He was a former forester from Vermont, invited by his jam session mentor trumpeter Howard “Dr. Bebop” Brofsky to enroll in the burgeoning Queens College graduate program in jazz; she was studying dance with Merce Cunningham and lighting design with Alwin Nikolais. Their relationship blossomed — to the benefit, certainly, of the jazz community in Brattleboro and way beyond.
After Uman received his MA in 1992, the couple moved to Medellín, Colombia, Borrero’s hometown, where they had two children and helped a jazz scene coalesce, starting a jazz festival and establishing jazz education programs in two universities. After three years, they returned to the States to raise their kids.
Years earlier Uman had met Attila Zoller, the Hungarian guitarist who’d come to Brattleboro in the ‘70s to foster a jazz scene, at a Vermont Jazz Center summer workshop. They hadn’t stayed in touch, but in an early 1997 meeting (facilitated by Brofsky) Zoller, who’d recently learned he had late stage cancer, offered Uman the job of director of the VJC, entrusting him to sustain his efforts.
Uman recalls, “Elsa and I moved up to Brattleboro with our two little ones and ran our first summer workshop in 1997. We spent quite a bit of time with Attila during his last months. He lived until February of 1998. We became friendly and played music together often. We visited him a lot while he was in hospice at Grace Cottage in Townshend, Vermont. He spent a good deal of time at our house and we hung out with him at his place in Townshend as well. We became friends with his daughter Alicia, as well.
“The Jazz Center holds his Archives. We received a $40,000 grant from CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) to digitize Attila’s tapes and videos and are working on presenting them to the public.”
Together — Eugene as musical and artistic director, Elsa as operations manager, graphic designer and and consultant with special experienced in large multi-media productions — the couple has worked tirelessly to build the VJC’s community straddling the Vermont/New Hampshire border. For 27 years they’ve held weekly jam sessions, afternoon ensembles, a summer jazz workshop and hosted a regional big band. The Vermont Jazz Center presents a yearly solo jazz piano festival and an emerging jazz artist festival, and has hosted hundreds of world-class jazz artists in concert.
As a result, Uman has been the recipient of the 2022 Vermont Arts Council’s Ellen McCulloch-Lovell Arts Education Award. In June of 2023, Uman and Borrero were lauded by the Vermont State legislature in a proclamation that recognized their two-decades-plus years of arts and educational leadership. This Jazz Hero Award from the JJA celebrates the teamwork Eugene Uman and Elsa Borrero apply to ensuring that the sound of jazz — and not incidentally the legacies of such important figures as Howard Brofsky and Attila Zoller — rings throughout our region.
— David Beckett
A friend to Jazz since 1983
Broadcaster, scribbler, shutterbug
