Lovett Hines Taught Questlove and Christian McBride in the Same Room

Christian McBride has eleven Grammy Awards. Questlove has an Academy Award. Both of them sat in the same room on South Broad Street, in front of the same man, and most people in Philadelphia could not tell you his name.

He is Lovett Hines. He is 83 years old. He plays alto saxophone, and also bass clarinet and piano, and he created the education program at the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts, the musicians’ union hall that became a school. For decades he has done the least visible job in American music and produced some of its most visible people.

A classroom on South Broad Street

The Clef Club building sits at 736 South Broad Street, on the stretch of road the city calls the Avenue of the Arts. Its ground floor windows carry three words in order: present, educate, celebrate. The middle one is the reason this article exists.

Hines built the education program inside that building, and he taught at the Settlement Music School as well. The roster of players who came through his hands is not a list of promising local talent. It is a list of people who define the instrument they play. The Philadelphia Inquirer names Ahmir Thompson, known everywhere as Questlove, alongside the bassist Christian McBride, the alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, the drummer Justin Faulkner, the singer Bilal Oliver, the bassist and producer Derrick Hodge, and the late organist Joey DeFrancesco.

Any one of those names would make a teaching career. The full list belongs to one man, in one city, working mostly out of one building.

McBride alone now holds eleven Grammy Awards, a total WBGO confirmed after the February 2026 ceremony. Questlove won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2022 for Summer of Soul. Between two students of one Philadelphia teacher, that is a shelf most conservatories would advertise for a generation.

What the students say about the method

The interesting thing about Hines is not the trophy count. It is how consistently his former students describe the same approach when they are asked about him separately, years apart, in different rooms.

Questlove told the Inquirer that Hines began by locating what a young player was already good at. “The first thing is, he finds your strength,” he said. “He describes the importance of listening and absorbing. Really, he was just super encouraging.”

McBride described the other half of it. “He always gave us room to make our own mistakes,” he said. “He never said, ‘You have to do it this way, you must do it the way it says on the paper.‘”

Put those two statements together and a method appears that has almost nothing to do with repertoire. Find the strength. Protect the mistakes. It sounds gentle until the implication lands, which is that a teenager needs somewhere safe to be genuinely bad at something for several years before anyone hears the result. That somewhere costs money, needs a roof, and produces nothing measurable for a long time.

A first time director and a visibility gap

Donn T, the singer and songwriter also known as Donn Thompson Morelli, has now made a short film about him. The Philadelphia Sensei: Lovett Hines is her directorial debut, and it had its world premiere at the BlackStar Film Festival at the Kimmel Center in August 2026. It travels next to the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival.

Her reason for making it is the clearest statement of the problem anyone has offered. “I just became so curious about the gap there between the visibility of the artist and the visibility of the person who helped shape them,” she told PhillyVoice.

She also named something harder. “His impact is deeply felt worldwide,” she said. “But he’s not documented in that way.”

Donn T describes the short as a proof of concept for something longer, possibly a feature or a series. That framing is worth noticing on its own. A film about a Philadelphia music teacher currently has to prove that it deserves to exist at length, while a film about any one of his students would not.

Why a teacher is public infrastructure

Harry Hayman spends most of his working life on questions of local economy, which is why this story reads to him as an economic one rather than a sentimental one.

Philadelphia has a habit of describing itself as a place that produces musicians, as though production were weather. It is not weather. Somebody paid for a room. Somebody kept the lights on in that room across decades when nothing measurable was coming out of it. Somebody stood in front of fourteen year olds and told them their mistakes were allowed. Then, twenty years later, a city collects the reputation.

The economics of this are unromantic and completely legible. Performance is fundable because it has a date, a ticket price and an audience. Teaching has none of those. A grant cycle cannot see a career that will not appear for two decades. So cities fund stages, and the rooms where players are made get funded by whoever happens to care, for as long as that person holds out.

The reputational return, though, is enormous. Philadelphia’s standing as a jazz city rests substantially on people who learned in buildings like the one on South Broad Street. That standing draws visitors, festivals, students and press coverage. It has never been separately paid for.

Naming Hines while he is alive is a small correction to that ledger. It also puts a number on what a single teaching career can produce, which is the kind of figure that changes a budget conversation.

September 20 at the art museum

Hines is not retired, and this is the part of the story that stops it from being an obituary written early.

On September 20 he is leading the Coltrane Remix Youth Ensemble at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, part of Coltrane 100 Philly, the citywide centennial for John Coltrane organized with Senator Vincent Hughes, Jazz Philadelphia, Creative Philadelphia, Ars Nova Workshop and WRTI at Temple University.

The programming logic is neat enough to be worth saying plainly. A centennial for a musician who lived at 1511 North 33rd Street is being marked, in part, by putting young Philadelphians on a floor and letting them play. The man organizing that ensemble taught the people who are now the reason the city gets asked about jazz at all.

The Northeast Times and The Philadelphia Tribune both covered the premiere in the same week the September program was confirmed, which means that for a few weeks this summer the teacher and the teaching were visible at the same time.

That will pass. The ensemble on September 20 will not be reviewed, and the young players in it will not be named anywhere for years. Somebody will still have to pay for the room.

A classroom on South Broad Street

What the students say about the method

A first time director and a visibility gap

Why a teacher is public infrastructure

September 20 at the art museum

Sources and references