PLAYING JAZZ
IS like playing basketball, says trumpeter Jeffrey Holmes. "They're
positioning themselves around me," explains the professor,
his face still beef-red from blowing the high notes in Billy
Strayhorn's "Take the A Train," which he and his students
have just performed.
"When I take the ball, they're gathering around to support me. Then I pass the ball to someone else. Maybe someone takes a shot over there and it bounces off somewhere else. Just as in basketball, we have the flexibility to react to what's happening, even though we're playing within the structure of the game."
The analogy appears to strike a chord with the children at Samuel Bowles School in Springfield. Sitting cross-legged on the gymnasium floor in the first shorts and T-shirts of spring, the audience grasps the metaphor readily.
"You want to hear the Michael Jordan of the band?" asks Holmes. "YA-A-A-AH!" shout the youngsters. That's the cue for Gerald Myles '00 to launch into a rousing demonstration of everything his drumset has got: high-hat, bass, snare, sticks, mallets, brushes. He plies his instrument with athletic ease, and the scuffed sneakers of 100 kindergarten-through-second-grade children jiggle to the beat. Myles finishes his high-energy demo, and the kids burst into cheers and applause.
That Myles is black like many of them may be pure coincidence. But for the kids, it is a happy coincidence. That, combined with a musicianship that would make most anyone itch to pick up the sticks, is exactly the point of the UMass Jazz Quintet's spring visit to Bowles School.
For the last three years, Holmes and other professors and students have traveled to Springfield to strut their stuff for the youth of Amherst's urban neighbor. As a partnership between UMass and the city's schools, "Connecting Through Music" has the express goal of gifting children with live music and planting the idea that they can make it too. As teacher Malita Brown says, "My hope is that they can see themselves doing the same thing ten years down the road. We can say, `See, this is what can happen if you pursue music.' "
Unfortunately, many of these children will never get to do that, not because they lack talent or interest but because of diminished opportunity in their schools. Like most Massachusetts towns, Springfield has lost most of its school arts programs to the tax-limiting measure known as Proposition 2 1/2.
A generation ago, 40 percent of all fifth and sixth graders in the city were enrolled in music lessons, recalls Warren Myers, who retired last year after teaching music for forty-five years (five of them at UMass). The schools owned hundreds of instruments which students could take home for practice. Families of schoolchildren kept downtown music stores in business with rentals and sales. There was a full-time music teacher in almost every school in the city.
Today, so few kids are learning to play instruments that there aren't enough to fill the places in the high school concert and marching bands. Teacher Carol Palm receives audition notices for the Springfield Symphony Youth Orchestra but, sadly, almost no children from inner-city schools play in it. A new venture, the Community Music School of Springfield, opened three years ago, receiving kudos for its programs. But Palm knows of no current or former pupils of hers who take part.
"My kids can't afford it," said Palm bluntly, citing fees and transportation difficulties. "It's simply out of reach for them."
ENTER UMASS, AT THE suggestion of one its own.
Before becoming UMass music department P.R. dynamo, Marilyn Kushick worked for the Springfield Symphony, and in that role became convinced of the value of exposing children to living, breathing, blowing, bowing music-makers. "They're so fixed on video and television that the presence of a live musician is quite exciting," she says.
Four years ago, Kushick and others from UMass set up a meeting with Springfield teachers. Determined to avoid the appearance of noblesse oblige, they stressed collaboration, asking what the teachers needed and wanted that the university could provide. The result was "Connecting Through Music," wherein campus musicians visit the city, city teachers bring classes to campus, and music-minded high school juniors are urged to spend a day at UMass. The visits link the campus with a population currently underrepresented here; just 343 Springfield residents were enrolled at UMass last year, most of them graduate students.
The program has also enabled UMass to bring Rene Boyer Alexander, an urban music specialist from Cincinnatti, to Springfield to work with schoolchildren. The high point of last year's visit was a free, standing-room-only concert at Springfield's Central High. The concert gave scores of parents and grandparents the pleasure of seeing their offspring on the wide stage, making music alongside advanced ensembles from UMass Chapel Jazz, Lab Jazz, Chamber Jazz, the Doo-Wop Shop, the Premium Quartet.
The college students were well-received as they made their practiced way through the program, but the audience eventually became restless and began calling out, "We want the kids! Bring out the kids!" Finally, the dozens of fifth-graders who'd worked with Alexander that week trooped onto stage. It was way past their bedtimes, but the audience hooted and cheered along with their jagged but earnest performance.
The April concert was the grand finale of a rich array of workshops and performances in the Springfield schools from September through June, as professors and students load up vans and drive south to keep everything from string quartets to Strayhorn happening in the Springfield schools. Talking peppily about music to the Bowles School students this May, it was clear that Holmes could have made a go of it as a grade-school teacher. "Why is the bass brown?" asked first-grader Francisco Cintron. "Do you ever run out of breath?" asked another kid. "Do you get hot?" "Do you get tired?" others wanted to know.
"Can I touch this?" asked kindergartner Tynika Mark-ham, tentatively reaching the hand that wasn't in her mouth toward the strings of student Chris Kozak's bass viol.
"What UMass has offered has been unbelievable compared to what my students would get otherwise," said Carol Palm. "The support UMass has given has kept me from feeling discouraged. My teeny school having people say, `This is important enough that we'd bring students down' that means a lot."
NOT EVERYONE
AGREES that Springfield's children are
musically deprived because they don't have regular lessons in
the European musical tradition. Professor Abdul Baki `93G is
an ebullient, reflective man who often makes his trips to Springfield
solo, accompanied only by his collection of rhythm-keeping instruments
from around the world. There is a touch of vestigial imperialism,
claims Baki, in the idea that children must know their Bartok
from their Brahms.
"A lot of the music that's taught to kids makes them feel it's something foreign to them," said Baki. "I see my role as getting them excited about making sound in time, and making it with other people." Rap music, misunderstood and even loathed by many in the white mainstream, is an outgrowth of a long tradition of wedding word and beat, freestyle music that people without access to expensive instruments have always made.
"Drop all harmony and melody, and rap music is just rhythm with poetry laid over it," said Baki, whose highly participatory workshops in Springfield show children how the rap they listen to evolved from jazz, blues and folk music. "Music offers a level of cooperation that's hard to find in this culture at this point, at least for these young people," said Baki. "Music is just something they can do wherever they are. They don't even need a ball."
How can something so basic to our species be lobotomized from the curriculum? With all the talk of getting computers into inner city schools, some of Springfield's schoolchildren could end up working for NASA; will they know enough about Scarlatti, Satie, or the cultural evolution of Snoop Doggy Dog to install them on future space probes?
Not in an educational climate that worships computers over the arts, says music and dance chair Earnest May. When people think of "the poverty-stricken inner city," says May, they think of the desperate need for jobs, and "the arts are not thought of something that leads to jobs. Yet in our department, we routinely turn out graduates who will make a perfectly good living." If some of the kids squirming in delight at the sounds coming from Jeff Holmes' flugelhorn or Abdul Baki's bongos decide they want to join the 150 music education majors currently at UMass, they, too, may become maintainers of the loop that runs from Springfield to Amherst and back again. Ali Crolius
