Ole Miss quartet uses chamber music to inspire Mississippi teens

Four University of Mississippi students took an Oxford-built chamber music project into six Mississippi high schools, using a Stamps Impact Prize to fund both a new album and a statewide outreach tour. The Shades of Blue Quartet, made up of Dekylan Jones, Parker Lofton, Martin Hinchey and Logan Sinquefield, used the project to reach teenagers who may never have seen saxophone chamber music up close.

The quartet’s album, Let the Funk Out!, was recorded, edited and mastered at Taproot Audio in Oxford with producer-engineer Jeffrey Reed, keeping part of the work inside Lafayette County. Reed founded Taproot Audio in 2002 after more than 30 years in audio work, including time at Malaco, Parallax Records and Ardent Studios. That local production piece gave the project a stronger base than a single campus performance and tied the outreach effort to Oxford’s music economy as well as its classroom life.

The Stamps Impact Prize that supported the work is a competitive undergraduate award for student-initiated projects at Ole Miss. The university says the prize can award up to $5,000 and typically backs about 13 to 15 projects in each of two application cycles. Ole Miss describes the program as the first of its kind in the nation for undergraduate students, with support aimed at creative work, community outreach and other hands-on learning experiences under faculty mentorship.

Sinquefield’s project listing identifies the effort as Cultivating Musicianship Through Chamber Music: Shades of Blue Recording Project and High School Outreach Across Mississippi, with Adam Estes named as faculty mentor. That matters because it places the tour inside a formal academic structure rather than a casual student ensemble trip, and it shows how Ole Miss is using mentorship to connect performance with public outreach.

The educational gap the quartet was trying to fill is straightforward: much of the saxophone quartet repertoire can be too difficult for younger players, which leaves pre-college musicians with limited access to chamber music that is both playable and inviting. Ole Miss has framed similar saxophone pedagogy work as a way to make the repertoire more available to students at the pre-college and early college levels. In that context, the Shades of Blue tour was not just a performance series but an attempt to build a future pipeline of players and listeners.

Sinquefield, a junior biochemistry major from Senatobia, said chamber music has helped him study scores more carefully and listen to every instrument in an ensemble rather than focusing only on his own part. He said he wanted other students to have that same experience. The quartet’s mix of majors, with Jones in music education from Ripley, Tennessee, Hinchey in music performance from Sumrall, Lofton in accountancy from Canton and Sinquefield in biochemistry, also showed how the project reached beyond one academic lane.

One of the tour’s concrete stops was Senatobia High School, where the quartet performed in the band hall. For Lafayette County, the project put Oxford in the role of launch point for a student-led effort that used local studio work to reach schools across Mississippi.