MUSIC DIRECTOR
JASON IKEEM RODGERS
Maestro Jason Ikeem Rodgers - conductor, composer, and arranger - is the Founder and Music Director of Orchestra Noir, the Atlanta African-American Orchestra. His conducting career began when the founding director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and Leonard Bernstein protégé, John Mauceri, invited him to Hollywood to study conducting as his apprentice during its 2006–2007 Concert Season.
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Following his apprenticeship, Maestro Rodgers continued to build his career on the podium, serving from 2011 to 2013 as Assistant Conductor of the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra in Philadelphia under its Founder and Music Director, Jeri Lynne Johnson.
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Since then, Maestro Rodgers has appeared with orchestras in North America and abroad, earning numerous international awards and accolades. In August 2015, he was awarded first prize in the London Classical Soloists Competition held in Great Britain. In 2014, he won the International Conducting Competition held in the U.S. and also took first prize in the Orchestra da Camera Fiorentina Conducting Competition in Florence, Italy. That same year, he made his debut with the Orchestra di Toscana Classica.
​In 2022, Maestro Rodgers made his Charlotte Symphony debut, conducting a program of Beethoven alongside his own orchestral arrangements of 1990s R&B and hip-hop hits. That same year, he ​
led Orchestra Noir in the first-ever Red Bull Symphonic in North America, where he also composed the Red Bull Overture - further cementing his reputation as a visionary bridging classical music with contemporary culture.
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As a composer and arranger, Maestro Rodgers has been commissioned to create orchestral works by prominent arts organizations in the U.S. and abroad - including Permanent for Atlanta’s High Museum of Art (2021) and Black Elegy for the British Columbia Arts Council in Vancouver, Canada, debuting in summer 2023. His work spans popular culture as well, from arranging hip-hop superstar 2 Chainz’s Forgiven for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, to arranging for Oprah’s OWN Network’s Greenleaf, to creating orchestrations for Amazon’s hit series Harlem (2022).
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Maestro Rodgers earned his Professional Studies Degree in Orchestral Conducting from the Cleveland Institute of Music under Carl Topilow and Louis Lane, his Master of Music in Conducting from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts under Serge Zehnacker, and his Bachelor’s Degree in Piano Performance, under Clifton Matthews, from the same institution.