Here's how Long Beach's Benjamin Metzger brought music to this Lawrence yeshiva

Benjamin Metzger is familiar to many in the Long Beach arts scene where he lives. He is known mainly by his stage name, Benoir, but to students at Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, he is Mr. Metzger, music educator.

Metzger, 50, attended shul growing up, and recalls his love of music developing as he listened to Jewish music — a cultural experience similar to that of his students.

“That’s what enabled me to connect with the students at HAFTR Middle School,” he said.

He was approached by Jenny Feygin, a 2005 graduate of the high school and a pianist, who said there weren’t enough quality music programs at HAFTR when she was a student.

“She told me that there was a real lack of music in the school system,” Metzger recalled. “In HAFTR and in the Five Towns in general, that some of these schools have been without a music program for years. I was interested at this moment in my life.”

Feygin, who also lives in Long Beach and teaches classical piano, got to know Metzger through Arts in the Plaza, an art and live music event that takes place every Saturday from Memorial Day weekend through Halloween in Long Beach’s Kennedy Plaza.

“I wanted these kids to have what I didn’t have,” Feygin said. So she met a number of times with HAFTR Middle School Principal Joshua Gold a year ago and pitched the idea of a music program to him. She also talked with public school teachers in the area, and took notes on how the program would work at the middle school.

“I knew HAFTR needed a one-stop shop, like they’re going to start with someone who can do it all,” Feygin said. “Ben came to mind. He’s like the face of music in Long Beach.”

Metzger went to school in the Sachem district, where he tried a number of instruments, starting with the baritone horn in fourth grade — despite the fact that his first choice was the drums.

As an eighth-grader, he switched to alto saxophone, and once he started classes at Sachem High School, he joined an after-school rock program.

At the University of Miami in Florida, he auditioned three times to earn admission to the music performance program.

He joined Pharoah’s Daughter, a Jewish fusion band, in the late 1990s. The group performed around the country, and played at a Jewish music festival in 2001 at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

Metzger has performed at locations around New York City, including Lincoln Center, Joe’s Pub and the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn.

When he moved to Long Beach, his apartment doubled as his studio, Studio Noir, where he offered one-on-one lessons, until he opened his second one, Studio Noir East, on Magnolia Avenue.

Feygin provided Gold 10-15 musician friends/colleague that she knew and devised a trial program for elementary and middle school students bringing Metzger along.

The class, which focused on musical fundamentals such as identifying instruments and reading notes, began in February, during lunch periods. The first class attracted over 20 elementary students and nearly 10 from the middle school.

Near the end of the school year, the students asked Metzger if they could perform what they had learned in a concert, and he agreed. At the June 16 performance for parents at the elementary school, students played a Shabbat song and the Israel national anthem, “Hatikvah,” that Metzger said had an acoustical twist to it.

As he looks back on what he learned in the program’s inaugural year and plans ahead, he hopes to bring more songs and instruments — and more fellow teachers. This year, one of them was Five Towns native Ivy Landsman, a singer and songwriter who also teaches at Studio Noir with Metzger.

Landsman described the experience of working with the students as thrilling. “I loved it, and I got very close with them,” she said. “They all did their best. Some people were playing around and then, near the end, they were asking for help and rose to the occasion. It was just so wonderful.”

During the final concert, Landsman said, all the work she and Metzger did with the children filled her with emotion. “I felt so great, I was like, crying,” she recounted.

“They were like my little kids, and they really rose to it. I can’t wait until next year.