A Sacramento nonprofit and a New Orleans-style brass band are the same engine, teaching kids in South Sacramento the horns that stock the city's second lines.
Eddie Stratton · June 27, 2026
A fifth-grader in Valley Hi picked the alto saxophone because of Lisa Simpson. That kid was Benwar Shepard, and he started elementary-school band in South Sacramento the way a lot of kids do: half on a whim, half because the horn was sitting in front of him. He chose the sax off a cartoon, and it took.
He kept playing, earned a music scholarship to the University of the Pacific, and built a career teaching and performing. "I now make a living teaching and playing music," he told Comstock's, "because I had access to both school and community programs from elementary school to present day."
Shepard got a door into the music. Bigger Than Us Arts exists because most kids in his old neighborhoods don't.
Daniel 'Dan the Man' Smith on tambourine during a jam session at the BTU Arts studio. Photo: Jason Pierce / Sac Setlist
What BTU Arts is
BTU Arts, short for Bigger Than Us Arts, is a Sacramento arts-education nonprofit. Shepard and his team ran it as a program from around 2015, and the IRS recognized its formal 501(c)(3) status in 2025. It works the layer underneath the bands: whether a ten-year-old in Meadowview ever gets a horn in their hands.
The work is concrete. In-school assemblies, some built around Black music history. Instrumental workshops, after-school programs, student showcases, and classes in music, visual art, and performing arts for kids and adults. Shepard's staff also trains teachers to fold music into their classrooms. BTU aims first at the neighborhoods Shepard names: Meadowview, Florin, Valley Hi, Oak Park, Del Paso. South Sacramento, the part of the city the arts-funding map skips.
BTU runs like an organization, not a hobby. Shepard is executive director, Dr. Torence Powell chairs the board, and a staff handles school programs, community programs, and operations alongside the teaching artists on payroll. The budget grew roughly twentyfold in a few years, from about $11,000 in 2018 to a quarter-million by 2024, almost all of it from contributions and grants. "Community arts nonprofit" usually means one tired person and a Google Form. This one has a staff, a board, and a jam session running in its own studio.
Element Brass Band rolls through Sacramento during its annual second-line bar crawl: Joby Morrow on trombone, Byron Colborn on baritone sax, Reagan Branch on saxophone. Photo: Jason Pierce / Sac Setlist
The brass band is the trick
BTU touches the music you can go see through the brass. Sacramento has a whole brass-band scene, a loose family of New Orleans second-line outfits that turn a sidewalk into a parade. The hub is the Sacramento Brass Band Collective, which calls itself an ensemble of musicians from Element Brass Band, the City of Trees Brass Band, the All Female Brass Band, Dirty Chops Brass Band, and a Bigger Than Us Arts Brass Band. BTU has its own band on that roster, in the same company as Element.
Shepard plays sousaphone in Element, a Sammie-winning band that Byron Colborn leads and that predates the nonprofit. That is the connection at the top. The deeper one runs at the bottom. Many of the players in Sacramento's brass bands first learned a horn through programs like BTU's. The kid learns the instrument, then grows into the second line. The Collective roster is that pipeline after it worked.
A 2022 to 2023 California Arts Council Impact Projects grant of $18,000 and an earlier $5,000 City of Sacramento Creative Economy grant paid for BTU's own second-line parades through South Sacramento and Midtown. On June 19, 2026, BTU led the third annual Juneteenth Art Walk: a free procession from Celebration Arts on B Street to CapStage on J Street to The Sofia on Capitol Ave, the crowd following BTU's second-line band on one leg and Element on the next, with B Street Theatre and Capital Stage co-hosting. The nonprofit and the band are the same circle of people, and the parade does double duty as the lesson and the show.
BTU Arts students lead a second line through Valley Hi in South Sacramento, playing for the blocks they come from. Photo: Jason Pierce / Sac Setlist
The kids lead the parade
The students make the idea plainest. BTU's young players have led their own second line through Valley Hi, Shepard's neighborhood, marching with their horns and a tangle of balloons, playing for the blocks they come from. Shepard got his shot in Valley Hi. The Arts Council money funded second lines in Valley Hi. Now his students lead the parade down the same streets they grew up on.
A kid with a trumpet in their own neighborhood, the street closed and the crowd there for them, does not forget that day. Some of them will be holding down a Sacramento brass band in ten years. That is the point.
A brass player performs for demonstrators at a George Floyd protest in Sacramento, 2020. Photo: Jason Pierce / Sac Setlist
When the city needed a sound
A brass band can do one more thing. During the George Floyd protests in 2020, players from Sacramento's jazz and brass community brought their horns to the demonstrations and played for the marchers. Jason Pierce photographed one of them mid-line, trombone raised against a wall of hand-lettered signs. That is what Shepard means by the creative economy, which he defines to Comstock's as "the space that we allow expression, creativity and innovation to develop and strengthen." A neighborhood that can field a brass band can speak for itself.
Benwar Shepard, BTU Arts founder, plays sousaphone with the Element Brass Band. Photo: Jason Pierce / Sac Setlist
Why it belongs in this column
Sac Setlist mostly covers bands: who's playing, what they put out, where to catch them. The bands come from somewhere, and the pipeline starts earlier than most coverage looks. A band needs members, and members start as kids who got handed an instrument and a reason to keep it. In a lot of Sacramento that handoff doesn't happen on its own. BTU makes it happen on purpose, in the zip codes where it otherwise wouldn't.
We opened this node looking for a venue or a collective. We found a loop. The kid who picked up a sax off a cartoon in Valley Hi now runs the program that hands the next Valley Hi kid the same shot, and he plays sousaphone in the band that carries it down the street. The scene stands on work like this.
Want to see it. BTU's young players have taken a monthly youth showcase at the Shady Lady, and the org runs open jams for any age, so bring a horn. Or follow the next second line down the block. Check @btuarts for the date.
Reporting by Eddie, with photographs by Sac Setlist's Jason Pierce. Facts drawn from Comstock's, the California Arts Council, the Sacramento Brass Band Collective, and IRS filings.
BTU ArtsElement Brass BandbrassjazzSouth SacramentoDaily Deep Dive
