Grammy Award-winner and Southern University alumnus returns to Baton Rouge to inspire young musicians

A Southern University A&M alumnus and Grammy Award-winning band director is returning to Baton Rouge this week as an arts advocate helping the next generation of Louisiana musicians succeed in the industry. 

The Texas Supremacy of Music and Arts Conservatory (TSMAC) and Southern University’s Band Department are teaming up to bring the annual Southern University Concert Band Festival back to campus. This year, the event carries a homecoming story from Dr. William Allen, the Grammy Award-winning founder of TSMAC, a Dallas-based nonprofit, and Southern University alumnus.

The two-day event will run from March 17 to 18 and will feature schools from across the country showcasing their musical talent while supporting local middle and high school programs. The event ensures that Baton Rouge students, regardless of funding, have the opportunity to perform on a prestigious stage known for its signature sound and collegiate tradition.

“Students will have exposure when it comes to warming up or playing the instrument on a collegiate level, on a college campus or in their band room,” Allen says. “Now, students can foresee themselves, as far as the future, as to what it’s like to play in Southern University’s band.”

With help from the Albemarle Foundation, TSMAC is able to work with the East Baton Rouge Parish School System to remove financial barriers for young musicians while showing them a possible future in music. Six local schools even have their festival registration fees covered, along with additional resources to help prepare their bands for participation and the Louisiana Music Education Association (LMEA) competition.

The nonprofit centers its programs on urban performing arts and Historically Black College and University (HBCU) traditions, including marching band, dance, cheer, step and music therapy. TSMAC has served more than 1,500 students from primarily low-income communities since 2019. Through free camps, afterschool enrichment, cultural showcases and college-readiness experiences, the organization paves a path to higher education. “As the founder and CEO of TSMAC, it helped me realize the need, not only in Louisiana, but also across America, that a lot of these programs are under underfunded, and so it’s my assignment and due diligence to find the resources and make the connections to put band programs on a platform for them to be successful and shine,” Allen says. 

Originally from Texas, Allen attended Southern University and earn his bachelor’s degree in music, and during that time he was deeply shaped by HBCU band culture and performance excellence, he says. 

While at the university, he met the late Carnell Knighten, a longtime assistant band director for Southern’s “Human Jukebox” and the creator of the concert band festival. 

“He mentioned to us,” Allen says of the late Knighten, “‘We need to have a concert band festival to highlight more than just marching band, what Southern is known for, but we also have the concert band style, and we need to let the kids in the community know that concert band is most essential just like the marching band.’”

Allen was the president of the Mu Psi chapter of Phi Mu Alpha, Southern University’s music fraternity, founded in 1898. In 2010, he helped revive the festival after the event had been dormant since the early 1990s. As a student, he brought his fraternity together to put on the music initiative. The members began reaching out to middle school and high school programs to see if their students would be interested in attending. 

“From a student to a band director to an arts activist, it is truly a blessing,” Allen says. “I didn’t know what I was doing. It was more so like, ‘Let’s shoot in the dark and let’s make this happen.’ So it’s a blessing to see that it’s still continuing in band programs around Baton Rouge.”

Allen is a Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, and his commitment to mentoring students and bands led him to receive a Grammy Award for Band Instruction in 2021. With over 20 years of experience, he believes there is more to the arts than performance, and TSMAC is his path to providing culturally rooted arts programming to the youth.

“We want to be able to not only host an event where they can showcase their programs in a concert band style, but enhance their programs—maybe grow their numbers or find ways to get more funding for their programs,” Allen says. “We want to get more concert band instruments and be able to attend multiple pre-concert band festivals that are out there in Baton Rouge.”

Many students Allen has worked with attend college because of the resources provided by TSMAC, such as band scholarships, with over $3.3 million in scholarships secured. Those students have gone on to become successful in their college band, working with artists like Lizzo, Usher and Beyoncé for special projects. 

“Students will come to our programs and don’t really know where to go or what to do in life,” Allen says. “But once they leave our programs, they can say, ‘I belong’ or ‘This is for me.’ So that’s where I step in and create platforms for them.”