When I mass emailed every music/arts teacher working in the Boston Public School District about ‘Improv Alive’ and the experience we hoped to bring their kids for a day, I was thrilled when three schools wrote back to me only hours later: Boston Latin Academy (Roxbury), Odyssey High School (South Boston), and McCormack Middle School (South Boston). All week, Stu Mahan, Phil Mcgowan and I visited these schools, and we had some experiences that we can’t keep to ourselves.
We went into the session at the Boston Latin Academy, the first Boston-area school we visited, with all of the inspiration and joy we’d found in our earlier school visits throughout Southern Maine. After reaching the front doors of BLA, fully equipped with our instruments, Stu and I slowly worked our way through a long hallway full of middle schoolers in-between class periods. The middle schoolers that took notice of us greeted us with curious smiles, and looked with awe at the size of Stu’s acoustic bass. It was as if they’d never seen one before.
Down the hallway, we heard the sounds of many jam sessions taking place at once, and figured we were nearing our destination. Towards the end of the hallway, a suited man joyfully waved at us from his doorway—Eytan Wurman, the music teacher from BLA who enthusiastically responded to my September email, an energetic and exuberant individual who is not much older than me. After introducing ourselves to Mr. Wurman in person, we entered the wide sun-filled room that the BLA jazz band rehearses in every Wednesday, the same room they’d be welcoming us in for our workshop for that day.
The students, who were still filing in, met our presence with quiet and curious excitement. Around 2pm, Mr. Wurman shut the door, and we shared the space with a smiling group of 7th ,8th, and 9th grade boys and girls. Amongst the sounds of laughter and musicians noodling on their instruments, we introduced ourselves to the students sitting closest to us while setting up our equipment. Once we were finished, Mr. Wurman said a few words about our tour and asked the class to give us their complete attention.
Stu and I began the afternoon with a short performance, playing several songs from our new record. We improvised new arrangements to “Metropolitan Avenue,” “Fly” and “Go There,” and had no choice but to since neither Phil nor Andy (Improv Alive’s drummers) were able to make it to BLA for the afternoon. It was interesting playing these songs within a new instrumentation, and incredibly fun, as always, to play with Stu. We had a great time playing for the class, who gave us every ounce of their attention.
After Stu and I played our 20 minute performance, we asked the students what they knew about improvisation, where in life they’d seen it, and if they could help us define it. Really, they’d seen it everywhere, pointing to examples in comedy, hip-hop, sports, conversation, and daily life itself, one student wisely bringing up that “no person knows exactly what they’re going to do throughout the day when they get up in the morning!” The students came to life after our performance, asking us questions about our backgrounds, what inspires us, what other instruments we play, why we came, and if we were being paid for what we were doing. They were joyful and engaging, and smiled bashfully when we asked to hear a piece they’d been working on recently.
They pulled their music out and, to our surprise, played ‘Brick House’ by the Commodores. They’d only begun the piece three weeks prior (some of the players were just as new to their instruments) but they still found their way through the piece, as a unit. Even though they hadn’t yet accessed the funky exuberance that makes it impossible not to dance to the original recording of this tune, we were impressed at what they’d done in such a short period of time. Once they finished, Mr. Wurman turned to Stu and I and asked us to share our thoughts with the class and offer advice on what they might work on in the future.
Stu urged the class to go back to the original recording of ‘Brick House’ and listen to it again and again, so that they’d understand what the composer of ‘Brick House’ intended for it to be, which is difficult to convey entirely on paper alone. He recommended they check out a youtube video of the Commodores playing it live, to see how the musicians play their parts, and to think about what information you get about how to play ‘Brick House’ from the video but not from the score.
I asked the band if they had fun playing the tune. After five seconds, five or six half-raised hands came up. I asked why it wasn’t fun for those who didn’t raise their hands, and one girl replied “we don’t know our parts all the way yet.” But something told me that even if they all knew their parts, something would still be missing. That was when Stu and I decided to do an exercise with them.
We had six students volunteer to come to the front of the class to play a game, without telling them what the game would be. Six hands immediately shot up in the air this time, and we quickly had our participants. I told them that the game was called “own your note” and that the objective was to outlast the other participants in holding a single not for as long as possible. At the drop of my hand, their job was to take a deep breath, and begin sustaining any note, along with the other six participants. I told them that a terrible or beautiful harmony might be produced by their voices together, but that they had to embrace and accept whichever it would be, and sing their note for as long as possible, even after the other voices had fallen silent. After explaining the game to the six students at the front of the classroom, I raised my hand…and dropped it.
A weird harmony quietly emerged, and one student absolutely wasn’t singing at all. After ten seconds, all of the students were silent, except for one, who discreetly droned the deepest possible note within his range for another five seconds. The class erupted into laughter afterward. Stu and I laughed as well, knowing well enough that these kids could have held their note for much longer than fifteen seconds. So we had them try the exercise again, encouraging them this time to have the confidence to stick it out with their note and whatever its relationship was to the other notes.
Game two was much more competitive, and one of the girls of the class topped out around 40 seconds, singing a note all on her own. We gave them a round of applause and had another group of six give it a try. The second group of contestants rose to the challenge and turned out to be a bold group of note-holders.
Afterward, Stu and I asked them about their experience singing the note. For them, it had been “scary,” “unpredictable,” and “fun.” What was hardest, one student noted, was to be “the last person singing alone.”
But this, we told them, is exactly the confidence one needs to be an improviser. Sometimes the notes we improvise will be beautiful (on their own and in relation to those we’re playing with), and at others they’ll be the opposite, but in both cases we must accept and embrace whatever notes we choose, and move forward with an open mind. We must treat every note with unconditional love.
All the same, it isn’t always clear what the consequences of our actions will be. But we can’t let this prevent us from acting at all. What is most important is that we believe in our actions wholeheartedly. Musician or non-musician, we have to resolve ourselves to the possibility of mistakes, discord, unpleasantness, when in pursuit of our dreams.
We ended our BLA visit with a lesson on the blues scale. We taught the students the C blues scale, and Stu and I played an original of ours, ‘Betrayal,’ to demonstrate how the blues scale might influence an improvisation. We invited them to jump in whenever they felt the spirit. But after two minutes, it had just been Stu and I playing the tune on our own. That was when we heard a trumpet way in the back of the room
Stu and I smiled at each other when Rufino, a young trumpeter in the class, entered, lightly embellishing upon the vamp that carries the tune forward. For a minute he danced beautifully around the first three notes of the blues scale, infusing a simple musical idea with great expression. After Rufino and I played a minute of call-and-response together, several other members of the class decided that they wouldn’t let us have all of the fun.
Before we knew it, absolutely everyone was playing. Mr. Wurman and I went around the class, teaching the students the blues scale so that they could play along with us. The two bassists had learned Stu’s bassline and were experimenting with it. The trumpeters were isolating pieces of the blues scale, and were exploring with how they could make those simple combinations of notes sound beautiful and soulful. The drummer was swinging on his ride cymbal and was complementing the sounds in the room. We were all together, uninhibited, and full of joy.
After a fifteen minute jam inspired by the c blues scale, Stu and I brought the song to a close— we were having so much fun and it sounded so good that we could have easily kept it going for another fifteen minutes. The students were so brave to jump in with us and improvise and, already, they sounded so beautiful on their instruments. We encouraged them to improvise more and take more creative risks in their lives. After we said our goodbyes and left our email addresses (BLA kids who are reading this, my email is ahmjazz@gmail.com and Stu’s is Stu.Mahan@gmail.com!) we left room 130 to the sounds of a blues inspired after-school jam session beginning.
Tomorrow, I’ll blog more about BLA, Odyssey High School and McCormack Middle School. I have way more to say about these experiences…
-
adrienne-wells reblogged this from ahmjazz
-
la-crepe liked this
-
ahmjazz posted this
