Alumni Spotlight: Carl Chisolm

When New York photographer Carl Chisolm was around 11, his mother signed him up for the New Amsterdam Boys Choir. Rehearsals meant being “locked up for three hours” with the choir and its young director, James Backmon, who demanded respect and taught the boys to respect one another, too. It was even better when the choir moved its rehearsals into Boys Harbor at 104th Street and Fifth Avenue where there were basketball courts and other activities to let off some energy when rehearsal was over.

When Carl was 13, the choir made a trip to Europe where they sang not only Classical arias but some Pete Seeger favorites and “Children of the Sun,” a song still part of the choir’s repertoire. “To be a 13 year-old boy with a passport was definitely cool,” Chisolm says, and his mother signed up his younger brothers Aaron and Chad, too. Unlike most of the members, Carl says, their parents, Marietta and Cecil, were together, but he saw how the choir was a dependable part of the lives of other boys who from single-parent homes. Mr. Backmon, he said remained even-keeled when the boys made him upset.

In 1995, 10th grader Carl Chisolm in choir uniform headed to a performance.

“I never really thought I could sing,” he says with a self-deprecating laugh. In college, he studied sociology, but according to Carl, his decision to follow a career in the arts was influenced by his time with the choir, which lasted through high school.

Today, he and his wife, Priya, and his two daughters live in Central Harlem, not too far from where he grew up. And now Carl is chair of the choir’s board!