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Title Bringing jazz back to its roots: Urban students explore their musical heritage

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9fk9x1sc

Journal Teaching Artist Journal, 4(1)

Author Brouillette, LR

Publication Date 2006

Peer reviewed

eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Bringing Jazz Back to Its Roots:

Urban Students Explore their Musical Heritage1

Liane Brouillette University of California, Irvine

This article looks at an inner-city playwriting project that brought professional writers and artists into inner city classrooms to help students explore the cultural history of their community and begin to find their own voices as writers. Scholars have argued that artistic voice is deeply rooted in one's past experiences, so that development of one’s voice as an artist becomes an ongoing process that involves the discovering and sharing of personal and cultural history (Fine, 1987; Giroux, 1988; Walsh 1991). In addition, research concerning the effect of arts education on academic achievement has repeatedly shown that classroom drama enhances verbal achievement in other areas (Hetland & Winner, 2004). Since initiating drama activities can be daunting for inexperienced teachers, this is also an area where a pivotal contribution can be made by professional artists and writers working in K-12 classrooms.

Bringing Artists and Writers into Public Schools

My first involvement with teaching artists came while I was spending a postdoctoral year with Writers In The Schools (WITS) in Houston, Texas. Drawing on the rich talent base of the

1 Brouillette, L. (2006). Bringing jazz back to its roots: Urban students explore their musical heritage. Teaching Artist Journal 4(1) 39-46, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

1 creative writing program at the University of Houston, WITS arranged for professional writers and artists to carry out year-long residencies in Houston’s public schools. Having just finished my Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Foundations of Education at the University of Colorado, I was fascinated by the wide variety of approaches that writers had developed. Although the teaching methods employed drew upon widely accepted ideas about the writing process, there was a unique focus on connecting the teaching of creative writing with the visual and performing arts.

A primary goal of the program was to awaken in inner city children a delight in, and an appreciation for, the written word. An African-American writer explained how he structured the writing experience for the third and fourth graders he worked with:

What I feel I bring, as a writer, is a fresh approach, even in the words I use to describe familiar terms. For example, my third graders get a kick out of defining a paragraph as a family of sentences, or rap as a poem with a beat, or elaboration as stre-e-e-e-e-tching a sentence. In my class we define "Why?" not as the beginning of "Why do I have to do this . . .?" but as the word that makes us dig a little deeper. And the shovel we use is the word "Because." When I have children start building up a home-made thesaurus, I call it "building ammunition." Children like a fresh approach, but they also value having little rituals they can depend on. Even the moment when I have to take my leave has its own little ritual, which eases the leave-taking. I say, "Got to leave now . . ." and the class echoes back: "Peace!"

During sessions with their writer-in-residence, children were taught that writing is an on- going process, beginning with the seed that is the original idea and growing, through additional ideas and through the feedback of others, into a finished work. As one classroom teacher put it:

2 “The writer encourages the children to trust their own perceptions, to write in their own voices, and then to make the changes that allow people to comprehend as they comprehend.”

Turning Poetry into Song Lyrics The following excerpt from my notes describes a lesson that took place during a field trip to the Community Music Center of Houston, where approximately 90 African-American third- graders took part in a workshop entitled "Rap, Rhythm and Rhyme." Students not only learned about African culture and the African roots of contemporary U. S. rap music, but had the opportunity to read their own previously written poems to the beat of African drums. By demonstrating the process by which a poem can become a song lyric, this lesson helped students to integrate their knowledge of writing with their interest in rap music. Samuel Dinkins III is the speaker.

Your writer has been teaching you about poetry and how to write. A lot of what you have written could be put to music and made into a song. What you are going to learn about today is how you could go about doing that. This is a talking drum from Africa. (Holds up a drum with woven cords attached to the outside and plays it, squeezing or slackening up on the cords on the outside to raise or lower the pitch.) This drum works the same way your vocal cords do. Women talk in higher voices because their vocal cords are shorter. Men's are longer, so their voices are lower. The best drummers in the world come from the West Coast of Africa. Give me a sentence. (He is handed a child's notebook and plays the drum, reading a sentence aloud at the same time. The intonation of the drum and that of the voice are remarkably similar.) Human beings were made rhythmic. Your heart has a beat. So does your breath. The way you walk or run or move your hands is based on rhythm. Notice how your eyes blink. They blink in the pattern of your heartbeat. (Imitates

3 heartbeat on drum, first slowly, then as if after running. Children giggle and clap when he's done.) Don't forget. You're very rhythmic. See? When you squeeze real tight, it tightens the drumhead. When you let it loose, it loosens the drumhead. The drumhead is made out of goatskin. The strings are goat hair and the wood is teak. These instruments over here are hand drums. (Plays on a set of drums.) The large drum is a tomba. Say 'tomba.' ('Tomba.') Konga is the middle drum. ('Konga.') Quinto is the smallest. ('Quinto.') In Africa they're the papa drum, the mama drum, and the baby drum. Bongo is both these two drums here. They're not called 'bongos' with an 's.' Both together are the bongo. (Plays.) Notice all the finger movement. There are five distinct notes you can play on all of these drums: bass, tone, rim, slap, and a muffle note. (Demonstrates.) (Children sway to the rhythm as he goes back and plays an assortment of the percussion instruments, with tape recorded drum rhythms in the background. They clap loudly when he finishes.) I had two drum patterns going on under what I was doing. That's what rap is. It's called sampling, putting a sample of one thing over another. There's nothing new musically under the sun, just different versions and ways of putting things together. A boy is invited to come up to play the drumset. Sam demonstrates a simple rhythm using the bass, snare and cymbal. The boy plays, while the other children grin and watch intently. "Who's a good reader?" A girl comes up and reads a poem she wrote during an earlier class, while the boy on the drums provides a background beat. Other children are invited to read and to play the drums, experimenting with the new rhythms that Sam demonstrates. By the end of the class, the children reciting their poems had enthusiastically adopted the persona of the performers, reading with expression and conviction. Those in the

4 audience leaned forward, caught up in the moment. When Sam asked for more volunteers, a forest of hands waved in the air.

Visual Art as a Stimulus to Writing

One Monday morning, when the Menil Collection was closed to the public, 60 children in grades three through five stepped off the buses in front of the museum. Approximately two- thirds were Latino, a third African American. The children were divided into groups small enough to encourage individual response. A professional writer joined each group of 12 to 15 students, leading them on a writing tour through artists’ depictions of sunlit jungles, medieval peasants and monarchs from Benin. The children were encouraged to experience art in an unaccustomed way, following their own creative impulses, arriving at their own conclusions, writing about what they saw. They were asked to envision the story behind a specific painting, or what had taken place just before – or after – the scene the artist had chosen to depict. In this way, the art became a road map to lead children through their written compositions.

This program had been started because writers-in-residence had found that slides, prints and photographs helped children to make the leap beyond merely following a formal process of brainstorming, writing and editing. Through interacting with the images before them, children were able to find the doorway into their own imaginations, so that they could begin to make use of writing as a means of personal exploration. The museum tour was designed to complement in- school work, with poems and stories begun in the museum taken back to the classroom to be worked on further. Several writers described their approach to the museum sessions:

* I would have them look, then describe the painting with their backs to the painting,

without looking at it again. Usually they couldn’t tell me much. Then I’d tell them they

could take another look. This time they really looked at the painting deeply and could list

5 off one thing after another. It was a great exercise because it got them used to active

looking and the kind of focus you need to be able to remember details.

* I have them treat their writing notebooks as art, an emblem of their experience, the thing

they will keep. I have them fill the notebook in all sorts of interesting ways. Every page is

different, with stories, poems, lots of kinds of drawing, answers to questions. Sometimes

I have them break up the page, like an exhibit is broken up, with different pieces that fit

together like a stained glass window.

* I talk to the children about decisions the museum made to hang certain works in certain

places, the juxtaposition, and the way it works together with the museum’s architecture.

This helps them to not just think in terms of individual paintings, but also how everything

works together to create a more complex experience.

Music as a Community Rallying Point

After a year with WITS, I accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of Houston. Larry Hunter, an African American playwright who worked as a writer-in-residence in public schools and also ran a summer drama program for urban youth, approached me about helping with a year-long project. During weekly visits over the course of the school year, he and other writers would introduce children in the upper elementary grades to the history of African

American music; writing exercises would build on parallels between the improvisational nature of jazz and of creative writing. The project would culminate with the production of an original play that would provide a glimpse of the lively jazz culture that had long thrived in Houston.

6 My role would be that of principal investigator on the grant that funded the project. I would create a written record of the project through interviews, focus groups, on-site observations and videotaping. In addition, I would arrange for the use of the Cullen Auditorium at the University of Houston where The Rawley Street Whistler would be produced at the end of the year.

A Bit of History

Even though Houston never rivaled major Southern jazz centers such as New Orleans or

Memphis, from the 1930s through the 1970s several Houston artists (including Charlie Christian,

Arnett Cobb, Teddy Wilson and Milton Larkin) gained national reputations. During this same period--a time of racial segregation--jazz and blues gave voice to the experiences of Houston's

Black community, shoring up community solidarity. After the 1960s, however, Houston’s Black community bifurcated. As many middle-class families moved to the suburbs, a marked change came over inner city neighborhoods. Residents who did not have steady jobs, or who had recently moved in from impoverished rural areas, increasingly set the tone of these neighborhoods. The project described in this article focused on one such neighborhood,

Houston’s historic Fifth Ward. This section of the city was once nicknamed "French Town" for the number of former residents of Southern Louisiana who lived there.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the Fifth Ward had pulsated with the rhythms of jazz and blues. “Urban High School,” which served the Fifth Ward, had been a source of great community pride. In those days, football games between Houston’s Black high schools were major community events. The school band leaders were almost as competitive as the football coaches. A former teacher familiar with Houston’s Black high schools in the 1950s explained:

7 I had the pleasure of knowing (jazzman) Milton Larkin and a lot of those young men who

came out of low-income areas when the high schools in Houston began to form bands.

Many of them had never picked up an instrument, never had one in their hands. When

they went to the school, the band teacher would throw this one a clarinet, throw this one a

sax, or throw this one a harp, and that's how they learned to play. That's how Milton (he

and my husband were classmates) learned. They had never had a music lesson. They

would practice early in the morning, before school started, and late in the evening till

night. And many times on the weekends they would come together. People would come

from everywhere, just sitting and listening.

As this former teacher pointed out, local residents made an effort to show support for a local band in the same way that they showed up at football games.

I think that in the 50's, a lot of people just looked on playing jazz as “These were ‘wild

kids’.” It finally began to get a level of respectability later on, when you had band

teachers that tried to do for the band what the football coach used to do for the football

team. Kind of keep them out of trouble. They would march up and down the street.

Neighborhood people would come out and clap as they paraded up and down.

After the 1960s, however, the economic base of these urban neighborhoods eroded. The

Fifth Ward became an area defined by its poverty and high level of violence. Yet successful alumni of Urban High, now living elsewhere in the Houston area, still spoke proudly of their roots in the Fifth Ward. Several such alumni enthusiastically lent their support to our project, lending logistical support and taking key roles in the production of the play at the year’s end.

Creative Dramatics: Acting the Part

8 To bring the culture of jazz alive for local children, Larry Hunter set up a year-long project in which third, fourth, and fifth grade students not only listened to, learned about, and wrote about jazz, but also accompanied him on his journey as he completed a play, The Rawley

Street Whistler, which wove together the story of a young musician and his community. At the beginning of the school year, students heard the basic story line and learned about the cultural context within which the plot unfolded. As the year progressed, students witnessed the gradual elaboration of the story line into a fully developed dramatic performance.

During workshops given by their writers-in-residence, students would write their own stories or scenes, using music or literature read in class as a jumping-off place (much as a jazz musician might use a standard tune as the inspiration for impromptu exploration). Children were encouraged to plunge into the writing process and to improvise; later on, they would return to their writing to decide which ideas to expand upon or to discard. As he polished and refined the script, Larry Hunter would share excerpts of his play. At the end of the year, all who had participated in the project traveled to the university to attend a production of The Rawley Street

Whistler.

The plot, based on the early history of a well-known local jazz ensemble, centered on “a young saxophonist who began practicing on the front porch of his home, located on Fifth Ward’s

Rawley Street.” Wilton Felder, the young sax player, eventually joined with pianist Joe Sample, trombonist Wayne Henderson, flutist Hubert Laws, and drummer Nesbit Hooper to found the

Jazz Crusaders. Together these young musicians created a Gulf Coast sound that combined funk, gospel, and R&B. The Penguin Guide to Jazz on Compact Disc (Cook & Morton, 1996) succinctly outlined the subsequent history of The Crusaders ("Jazz" was dropped from the name in 1971):

9 The group has maintained a consistency and occasionally perverse integrity of purpose

since first emerging in 1961 out of a Houston high school band. The basic line-up--

Felder, Hooper, Sample, Henderson--has been in place from the start, despite individual

projects and excursions, fallings-out, and Star Chamber reshuffles (pp. 309-310).

During Hunter’s weekly visits to three elementary schools the children heard, commented upon, and acted out the dialogue from specific scenes. They also experimented with creating their own plays. When the day of the performance came, half the audience was made up of 600 elementary children who had worked weekly with Larry Hunter and other writers-in-residence.

These children were familiar with the play. The other half of the audience was made up of high school students whose teachers had taught a historical unit that focused on jazz. This was the high school students’ first encounter with the play. The student population in attendance at the performance was approximately 70 percent African American and 30 percent Latino.

As part of the culminating activities, jazz saxophonist Wilton Felder (who was a cousin of playwright Larry Hunter) visited Houston. Felder attended final play rehearsals, jammed with the young musicians featured in the play, and visited music classes--both at his former high school and at Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA).

The Adult View

Speaking of his motivation for creating The Rawley Street Whistler project, Larry Hunter insisted that, taken as a whole, the African American cultural tradition is about opening up possibilities. The music emphasizes freedom and spontaneity. Moreover, during the five centuries that have passed since the first Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic, music has played a pivotal role in the struggle of their descendents to preserve a sense of human

10 dignity and to create for themselves a psychological living space in the face of demoralizing living conditions.

During interviews, several community members involved in this project brought up their early experiences in racially segregated schools. None wished to return to those days, yet their recollections often were tinged with “sadness… about the loss of the sense of community over time.” In recounting their school experiences, they mentioned the close ties that had existed between segregated Black schools and the surrounding communities. The music that had swirled through the community was invariably among their strongest memories. Whether at school, at weekend dances, or in church, the act of making music created a felt sense of social harmony, an empowering sense of “we.” The young actors who played roles in The Rawley Street Whistler described a similar sense of community.

The Student View

Attendance at the play appeared to have had the strongest impact on audience members in grades three to five. Technical aspects of the production—lighting, sound, changes of sets, the ornate old auditorium—received almost as much comment as the play itself. The children were very interested in the actors, especially the talented young musicians who played Wilton and

Oscar during their junior high years. They talked about their reactions:

The best part was when young Wilton was playing the sax and big Mama called him in. It was funny.

I like when Mama sang a song at Daddy's funeral. It seemed very true. It felt like I was just in it.

My favorite was when Wilton and Oscar was bullied around. Also when they all grew up. Kit (the bully) was living on the street and Wilton and Oscar grew famous.

11 The children also talked of how the play helped them to understand new things about their families and communities. For example, a student noted, “When my grandma gets up and starts to dance, I’d never thought about what's in her head, what she remembers.” Another student, comparing jazz improvisation to a contest between rappers, said: “Jazz is like…where people play music to talk.”

The youngest actor (11 years old) to play a major role in the play talked enthusiastically about what music and acting had meant to him. His role in The Rawley Street Whistler not only required him to master 30 pages of script, but to play the saxophone.

Interviewer: How did you get interested in acting?

Student: Mr. Hunter worked with me these four years, I've been in his summer program. He really got me started, getting me on the big stage. [Until now] I really didn't have a speaking part, but it was important enough for me, just being on stage, being around the major actors.

Interviewer: What was it like, being on stage?

Student: Oh, it was pretty exciting at first, but when it came down to it, the minute before the show, [I was] just nervous, scared. But when you have to go into the play, it's like everything, everybody, disappears. And there you are, alone, acting. Like, I did it perfect and everything.

Interviewer: What did that feel like?

Student: Like my mind is telling me "Do this right! Do this thing! The character wants you to do this! The character wants you to do that!" It's like it's in my mind what the character wants me to do.

Interviewer: Do you think other kids might benefit from learning music and acting?

Student: Kids can learn how to believe in other people not putting them down all the time, but helping them by showing them not to be afraid.

Conclusions

For young people traumatized by high levels of neighborhood violence, the intergenerational connections built up during the project had special value. Artistic endeavor

12 established a common meeting ground, while music built a sense of emotional connection.

Through talking about the characters in a play, personal experiences were shared by old and young in a way that might have been difficult in other circumstances. A sense of community was created. Through their shared love of music, members of differing generations were brought together and given a common set of experiences upon which further dialogue could be built.

The elementary school students who came to see The Rawley Street Whistler were eager to take an active role in the proceedings. They responded with laughter, shouts, handclaps. An evening performance for parents and community members ended with a jam session in which the adult musicians, who were not reading from printed scores, were free to respond, altering their performance in a process of on-going interaction with the listeners. This improvisational approach to musical performance was markedly different from that which is most often followed in school-based bands or orchestras.

Christopher Small (1987) describes three culturally significant characteristics of the improvisational manner in which African American musicians have traditionally worked:

In the first place, it is not exclusive; the gift of musicking is open to all. It

is not necessary for aspiring musicians to undergo any extended process of formal

instruction, let alone be examined and certified, before they can begin to make a

contribution; they simply start with what they can do, just as in the arts of speech

(also much cultivated among black Americans), and build upon it.

Even more important, the relations that are established between the

participants during a performance in which 'thinking and performing music

simultaneously' takes place are much richer and more complex than those

established when a player is realizing a score, since the listeners (and the dancers,

13 should there be any) are not mere witnesses at a spectacle but active participants

in that human encounter which is the performance.

Thirdly, relationships between the participants in a performance are not

hierarchical; the performers do not dominate the audience, nor are they dominated

by any outside person such as a composer or conductor. Nor is the performance

dominated, or the relations mediated, by a written score; where notation is used it

tends to function more as a guide or a set of promptings to performance than as a

set of prescriptive instructions (pp. 464-465).

The strengths of this way of experiencing music do not diminish the significance of other types of musical performance. However, the characteristics of African American music that are pointed out by Small can provide a powerful bridge to other kinds of creativity. If educators are to actively engage students, an awareness of the human encounter in which they are engaged is necessary. What better place could there be to start than with making and hearing music?

For the 600 elementary school children who attended The Rawley Street Whistler, this experience provided a unique window on the rich cultural heritage of the community of which they were a part. The response of high school students, who had studied the historical context of jazz but had not had a teaching artist in their classroom to provide an experiential link to the music, was more wary and reserved. Still, the enthusiasm of those few high school students who had previously been introduced to jazz by their families hinted that, if their fellow students had been able to have a more imaginatively engaging encounter with this influential art form, their wariness and hesitation might have been replaced by appreciation.

Since the early years of the 20th century--when ragtime, jazz, and the blues first began to find an appreciative audience outside the African American community—this music has found

14 enthusiastic listeners around the world. Yet, it is seldom treated as an area of serious study below the university level. This project suggests that combining the study of African American music with creative writing and classroom drama has the potential to spark enhanced student achievement. Yet, for this to happen, some of the excitement inherent in live performance must be preserved.

Bringing professional artists and writers into the classroom allows both teacher and students to step back from their established roles and to experiment with a new artistic medium.

Through this process new perceptions arise, sparking insights that energize students. However, for the emerging creativity of the students to be nurtured, the active collaboration of the classroom teacher is necessary. Children’s experience with the teaching artist is greatly enhanced if similar themes are reflected in other lessons. For this to happen, the visiting artist must have a sense of what is going on in the classroom during the remainder of the week, designing arts activities to connect to other learning. When undertaken in this manner teaching, itself, becomes an art.

References

Cook, R. & Morton, B. (1996). The Penguin Guide to Jazz on Compact Disc. Third Edition.

New York: Penguin Books, p. vii.

Fine, M. (1987, February). Silencing in public schools. Language Arts, 64: 157-174.

Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as Intellectuals. New York: Bergin & Garvey.

Hetland, L. & Winner, E. (2004). Cognitive Transfer from Arts Education to Nonarts Outcomes:

Research Evidence and Policy Implications. Handbook of Research and Policy in Art

Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 135-161.

15 Small, C. (1987). Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American

Music. New York: Riverrun Press.

Walsh, C. E. (1991). Pedagogy and the Struggle for Voice. New York: Bergin & Garvey.

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