June 3, 2025 by Derby Academy
For the fourth consecutive year, students from Derby Academy have won DownBeat Magazine’s Student Music Awards. Grade 8 students Jack Murphy on saxophone, Benji Stuart on bass, and Charlie Hux on drums make up The Derby Dynasty Trio. Murphy won the Blues/Pop/Rock Soloist Award, and the Trio won the Blues/Pop/Rock Group Award. They are recognized in the June 2025 issue of DownBeat Magazine.
Founded in 1934, DownBeat Magazine is one of the nation’s oldest journals documenting jazz and jazz-adjacent music. In 1976 the Magazine launched the annual Student Music Awards, which recognize musicians and groups across ages–from middle to graduate school–from schools around the world. Categories include soloist awards, ensemble awards, compositional awards, engineering awards. In this year’s awards, there were students and schools recognized from China, Canada, Austria, Australia, New York City, Boston, Miami, Los Angeles, and Hingham, among others.
Before school and during lunches, Middle and Upper School Music and Band Teacher and Arts Department Co-Chair Brian Martin met with the Trio to prepare several songs for recording and submission to the Awards. Martin shares, “I’m so proud of these students for putting in the necessary effort to achieve such a prestigious award! This kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident, and I’ve been fortunate to have worked with so many students here at Derby who are not only willing, but eager, to go that extra mile.”
All three students have rich musical backgrounds. Murphy began playing clarinet in Grade 5, adding the saxophone to his repertoire in Grade 6. Stuart has been playing bass since Grade 4. Hux took up percussion at Derby in Grade 5, and he had taken drum and piano lessons prior. The students chose the name “The Derby Dynasty Trio” as an homage to their predecessors, “The Derby Academy Organ Trio,” which won the Student Music Awards in 2022, 2023, and 2024.