Hello, and welcome. I'm Kyle Benford, Founder of the Department of Jazz.
Born in Beverly Hills, CA and raised between Miami Beach and Surfside, FL, I began with classical piano and the violin—learning the grid before discovering what could be created in real-time and off of the page. By the time I was two years old, I was attached to the piano. By the age of six or seven, I explored six or seven different instruments, and studied with or sought out teachers on at least four. At the age of thirteen, my English teacher at Chestnut Hill Academy - poet Iain Pollock - assigned that I write an essay on Max Roach. I joined my high school’s Jazz band at fourteen, and at fifteen, mentors at the University of Miami introduced me to bebop recordings that revealed music not as notes on a page to be performed, but as monuments created live, in real time.
The path led me from Miami to New York—first as a student at the University of Miami, where I developed a philosophy that would reshape everything - I needed to learn from the true masters of this music.
I discovered that my family’s roots in Jazz stretch back to the earliest minstrel shows, appearing on records with Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Jelly Roll Morton, and other giants who shaped America’s music and art form. This realization led me to question and explore what Jazz truly means — to me, to America, and to the world.
Tommy Benford. Bill Benford. Vassal Benford.
I withdrew from Miami, packed my bags, and moved to New York to learn among the masters who have carried the torch of this monumental art form of historic and dynamic proportions. A friend convinced me to audition to Juilliard, where I studied under Wynton Marsalis and his faculty—learning not just repertoire and technique, but from the greatest Jazz faculty on the planet. I would occasionally Yo-Yo Ma in elevators where even brief hellos confirmed that mastery transcends genre.
But institutions can only transmit what can be codified. I withdrew from Juilliard to immerse myself in the deeper education that happens only in performance—studying Harold Mabern's conviction, Roy Hargrove's soul, Louis Hayes's wisdom, Roy Haynes's proof that age is irrelevant when consciousness stays present. These masters taught through embodiment rather than explanation, through the risk of public performance rather than the safety of classroom exercises. I needed to learn the city, and the world. I was an artist before I was a student in a classroom. Even while learning in the clubs, I found myself in Wynton's residence, pulling Jung books from his shelves—understanding that jazz literacy extends beyond chord changes into the philosophical frameworks that make those changes necessary. This dual education—formal and underground, institutional and improvisational—revealed that Jazz operates simultaneously as rigorous discipline and spontaneous creation. The real education emerged in the space between—where preparation meets presence, where study becomes style, where irreversible commitment creates meaning.
When the pandemic froze live performance, I recognized the need to build infrastructure that could sustain this practice, and me. The business ventures that followed—working with Fortune 500 companies, legendary athletes, attorneys, energy companies, tech firms, banks, hedge funds—weren't departures from Jazz but applications of its principles: real-time problem-solving, distributed leadership, value creation through presence rather than product. These experiences revealed that institutions participate in what Jazz teaches: coordination, innovation, constraint, and propulsion.
The Department of Jazz emerges from this recognition. Jazz represents America's most sophisticated technology for navigating the paradoxes that challenge freedom. Music is a language older than English, and is older than our country. To the extent that Jazz uses that language and its meaning on command is one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments.
At this moment of technological inflection, when artificial intelligence promises to automate thought itself, Jazz demonstrates capacities that remain irreducibly human.
Beyond this, Jazz is an American national treasure — a living monument to human excellence, American Dynamism, and the overcoming of adversity. It represents a standard of innovation achieved through technology — the instruments — and articulated through a language — classical harmony. Its power lay not in archives but in real-time invention: live, spontaneous, collective performances and creations that reshaped the world.
My practice centers on three investigations:
Music: My primary instrument is the drums. The Drums are the first American instrument. I also dabble in the upright bass and piano, and am quite fluent and vocal on these instruments as well. I study how Coltrane's quartet achieved collective consciousness, how Charlie Parker compressed entire harmonic systems into split-second decisions, how Thelonious Monk revealed that wrong and right were conventions that could be negotiated and renegotiated in real-time. The question isn't historical—what did they play—but operational: how does rhythm create the conditions for emergence, how does harmony affect a human’s paradigm, how does the fusing of both in live performance demonstrate intelligence that humanity doesn’t yet understand? How did these great musicians make such monumental impacts on the consciousness of humanity? Sometimes I am concerned with what it looks like theoretically, and on paper. Ultimately, I’ve got a lot of practicing and listening to do!
Consciousness: Since childhood, I've experienced states where individual awareness dissolves into collective coordination—what you may call "E.S.P." but what neuroscience confirms as inter-brain synchrony. These aren't mystical experiences but documented phenomena: the quieting of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the activation of mirror neuron systems, the phase-locking of neural oscillations across multiple nervous systems. Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" wasn't just music but consciousness research conducted in public. I mean, it is unbelievable what these musicians are doing. It is too advanced to explain in text. I can explain that Coltrane’s live command of the circle of fifths in conjunction with the phrase “All paths lead to God” on “Acknowledgement” is proof of the infinite. This can be proven with music theory and the analysis of frequencies, harmony, and rhythm.
I work a lot, I meditate a lot, I think a lot, I play a lot, and I feel impassioned to learn and help others. There are a myriad of topics that I think about, and when it all boils down to the brass tacks, I just want to be the best, happiest, most useful person that I can be.
Business: Through Helius Partners, we identify and help companies grow through consultations, technology implementations, or acquisitions.
The Department of Jazz exists because humanity stands at a threshold.
We can become passengers in our own consciousness, letting algorithms complete our thoughts and predict our desires. Or, we can develop the technologies that Jazz has already proven: the ability to think together without external control, to create meaning through irreversible commitment, to coordinate through presence rather than prediction.
This isn't nostalgia for an analog past but preparation for a post-computational future—one where the human remains essential because certain capacities emerge only from mortality, only from risk, only from the irreversible now of performance.
Not a government agency.
