By Javacia Harris Bowser | For The Birmingham Times
By day, Kimberly Strickland serves as Director of Student Services at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) in Birmingham. After hours, she becomes Kim Scott, an accomplished classical flutist, Billboard chart-topping jazz musician, and host of the weekly two-hour nationally syndicated radio show “Kim Scott’s Block Party Radio.” (Scott was Strickland’s last name before she married Stephen “DJ Strick” Strickland.)
With five albums to her credit, Strickland is considered a mainstay in jazz, and she’s made her name for herself in classical music, too, playing with the Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra and as a soloist.
Though she’s called Mrs. Strickland when she’s inside the walls of ASFA—where she is a National Board Certified Teacher and previously held the role as chair of ASFA’s music department—and Kim Scott when she’s performing on stages around the globe, Strickland stresses that she is both a teacher and an artist in both worlds.
“What I do in my professional life allows me to be great at ASFA,” said Strickland, who’s also a 1993 graduate of the school. “God gave me the gift of performance, so I’m going to continue to do that. And everything I learn from doing that, I’m going to bring back to these kids.”
In fact, Strickland loves teaching so much that when she transitioned to her current role in administration at ASFA, she volunteered to continue teaching flute in the music department for no extra pay.
“I’ve been able to bless [my students] by the steps that I’ve taken and through the experiences I’ve had,” said Strickland, 48. “It’s like a dream.”
An Appreciation For Music
Teaching is important to Strickland, in part, because she credits her teachers for getting her to where she is today. Her first teachers, however, were her parents, who led by example, instilling in her an appreciation for music.
“I grew up in a musical household,” said Strickland, raised Birmingham’s South Hampton neighborhood, near Forestdale and Pratt City, with her parents and two brothers. “My mother was a music educator in the Birmingham City Schools system for 30-plus years before retiring.”
Strickland’s mother, Belinda Floyd, retired from Norwood Elementary School but also taught at Kirby Middle and West Hills Elementary schools during her career.
“And my dad, although he worked for [a telecommunications company], also played saxophone and sang,” she added.
Strickland’s parents nurtured in her a love for all genres of music.
“I can remember my mom putting on the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s vinyl records, and we would just sit there and jam out to symphonies by [Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky] like that was normal,” Strickland recalled. “And then my dad would put on some funk music by [flutist and saxophonist Hubert Laws].”
Before having children, Strickland’s parents were signed to Stax Records, the legendary Memphis, Tennessee-based record label often credited with the creation of Southern soul music.
“You can still go to YouTube to this day and look up the Dynamic Soul Machine and listen to their records,” Strickland said.
As a child, Strickland played piano and violin, but when she tried the flute she’d found her true love, she said: “My mom bought me a flute, and I became obsessed with it. I took it super seriously.”
“The Ultimate Band Nerd”
At the time, though she was only in the fifth grade at the now-closed Robert C. Arthur Elementary School in Birmingham, Strickland was committed to practicing her flute whenever she could. When she went to Lewis Martin Smith Middle School, also in Birmingham, the following year, she met Suzanne Winter, the school’s band director, who was also a flutist.
“I felt like I won the lottery,” Strickland said of Winter. “She wasn’t just my band director, but she played my instrument. She had great insight on how to build technique on the flute, how to make a really good sound, how to have the right posture.”
Winter often would give Strickland additional lessons after school. “I thought she was doing that for everybody, but later she told me, ‘I just felt like you were on to something,’” Strickland recalled, adding that she made first chair, meaning she was the lead musician in her band section, every year in middle school.
“I was a good student, but band was my jam,” Strickland said. “I was the ultimate band nerd.”
Strickland’s mother saw her daughter’s commitment and soon learned about ASFA, a state-funded, tuition-free public school that provides an intensive education in the arts, math, and science to students from across Alabama. The school, located in downtown Birmingham, begins this year’s fall semester on August 12.
After spending each morning in core academic classes that exceed state high school diploma standards, ASFA students devote their afternoons to honing their craft in one of six specialties: creative writing, dance, music, theater, visual arts, or math and science.
Students attending the school consistently receive recognition in competitions in the arts and in academics at the state, regional, and national levels. Furthermore, in the past five years, 91 percent of ASFA’s graduating seniors have received merit scholarships for study at colleges, universities, and conservatories.
When Strickland first applied for ASFA’s music department as a student she was accepted but turned down the offer. She wanted to go to John Herbert Phillips High School (now John Herbert Phillips Academy), so she could study with renowned band director Harry McAfee and be part of his lauded marching band.
While Strickland loved her marching band experience, she said she often felt like “the oddball” at the school. After a year and a half at Phillips, she enrolled at ASFA.
“Once I got [to ASFA], I found my spot, I found my people,” she said. “I had extra time to practice. I was in an orchestra and taking music classes with an amazing flute teacher, Katherine Kitzman, who nourished my gift and exposed me to so many things I had no idea existed, like National Flute Association conventions and competitions and summer camp intensives.”
Kitzman also gave her extra lessons after school, free of charge: “She said, ‘I’m doing this because I know where you’re going,’” Strickland remembered her flute instructor telling her.
“Monster Talent”
After graduating from ASFA in 1993, Strickland went on to study at The University of Alabama (UA) in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she worked with renowned flutist, Sheryl Cohen, Doctor of Music (D.M.).
“She was the flute teacher that said, ‘I’m preparing you because you’re a star and you don’t know it,’” Strickland recalled. “She just nurtured every gift. She set me up to be a great educator, to be a great flutist, and to be a great performer. She took me on my first plane ride to go to a flute convention in Chicago, [Illinois]. She told people about me in other countries. So, when I was 21. [I was invited to] teach in South America for flute festivals and to go here and go there.”
Cohen, who retired from UA in 2004 but continues to perform and teach at international festivals and via private lessons, said her goal with all her students was to teach them to become world citizens.
“[Strickland] has utmost integrity as a human being, she’s brilliant, and she has monster talent,” Cohen said of her former student. “She has all the qualities, and she has the temperament to be an artist. She has the temperament to go out on stage and own the place. All those things were in her. I didn’t put any of that in her. What I did was I helped her draw them out. I helped her realize what was inside and to go for it.”
After doing her graduate work from 1998 to 2000 in pedagogy (the study of teaching methods) and flute performance at Oklahoma State University, Strickland got a call from ASFA. The school needed a flute teacher and thought she’d be perfect for the job.
“Teaching was very natural for me, and I felt like I was home,” Strickland said. “I was working with students that reminded me of myself when I was at ASFA. I loved working with students who were little sponges for music. They were flute nerds just like I was.”
Once Strickland started teaching in August 2000, she knew she didn’t want to stop.
“I loved the gratification I got from watching [students] succeed and win competitions or make good grades on their juries and be so excited,” she said. So, she knew she’d keep teaching while also building a career as a performer.
Smooth Jazz
One day while listening to a jazz radio show, Strickland noticed that she hadn’t heard any flutists, so she broke out her flute and recorded a jazzy cover of “Déjà Vu,” by megastar Beyoncé. She posted the video to YouTube in the summer of 2010 and shared it with friends who encouraged her to do more.
Next, Strickland did a cover of “Orange Moon,” by singer-songwriter Erykah Badu, often called “The Queen of Neo Soul.” Pretty soon, she was performing at a jazz festival. When folks in the audience started asking to buy her record—which she didn’t have at the time—she knew it was time to get in the studio.
Jazz guitarist Keith “Cashmere” Williams showed Strickland the ropes of the record business, teaching her how to find a manager, put a band together, and write songs. He taught her about publishing and royalties, too.
“I didn’t know anything about [the recording] world, but we recorded a record, put it out, and radio picked it up,” Strickland said.
Eventually, she was signed to Innervision Records and today has five albums and scored multiple number-one hits on the Billboard music charts.
Strickland, who has been married to Stephen “DJ Strick” Strickland for nine years and has an 18-year-old son and twin “bonus sons” age 28, is currently working on her sixth album, which she hopes will be released early next year. Still, she has no plans to stop teaching any time soon.
Of teaching, Strickland said, “I could do this forever!”
“Aspirational Role Model”
Tim Mitchell, Ph.D. President of Alabama School of Fine Arts, calls Strickland an “aspirational role model.”
“When she leads a department for student support, the students know she gets them; she’s been one of them,” Mitchell said. “She’s an alumna of the school who came back to serve the next generation because her own education was transformational in her life. That is why students, especially young aspiring Black musicians at ASFA, are inspired to challenge themselves. They know they can thrive because she shows the way.”
Strickland believes that she can break stereotypes that Black people don’t play in symphonies. “I think it’s important for all people to see people of color in the arts and to see them be successful in the arts,” she said.
While women are more prevalent in classical music today than they were in past decades, they’re still the minority in jazz, Strickland said, and must work twice as hard to gain respect. “And when we perform, we’ve got to be decked to the nines,” she added.
Strickland’s proud to be part of the supergroup Jazz in Pink, a collective of today’s top female jazz artists.
Balancing performing with her career in education and her life as a wife and mother used to be overwhelming, Strickland admits.
“I was working all week and then jumping on a plane on Fridays to go play shows and coming back on Monday, getting off a plane and coming to work,” she said. “Sometimes I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what am I thinking?’”
Then she learned that the key to balancing it all was to stop compartmentalizing the different parts of her life, she said. When she’s on tour she can be both organized and creative because that’s what she must do as an educator. At ASFA, she can pour into her students because of lessons learned while performing. And she can take her passion for music and put it into caring for her family.
“I have to stay aware of all of that to continue to make it work,” she said. “But what I found is, when I do that, I’m not stressed out.”
Now entering her 25th year in education, Strickland said her goal at ASFA is for her students to be even more successful than she has been.
“Everything I’m learning, I’m supposed to teach them so that when they become professionals, they go way, way further than I have,” she said. “I think of students like Coreisa Lee, who started with me and now I get to watch her on stage with Lizzo.”
Lee has not only performed with Lizzo but also at the Met Gala and on Broadway. She’s currently in Los Angeles working on a project in connection with the blockbuster Barbie movie and she’s doing all of this while pursuing her doctorate at West Virginia University.
Lee still remembers Strickland teaching her to “play to the very back of the audience.”
She said, “That really did something to my psyche, and I still repeat this message in my practice.”
Moreover, Strickland also showed Lee what was possible.
“Ms. Scott helped me to see that I didn’t have to stay in a box as a classical flutist,” she said. “Watching her teach me, and conduct the orchestra and string orchestra, and then run to a jazz recording session – a different genre than what she was teaching me — that was very cool to see. I really think it’s important to see someone you relate to in a bigger light.”
Strickland’s proud of her students who decided not to pursue music professionally, too. “They work for NASA, they’re doctors, they’re lawyers, and they still keep in touch,” she said.
Full disclosure: Javacia Harris Bowser is a graduate of the Alabama School of Fine Arts and taught English at the school from 2009- 2019.
