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Jazz in the Schools: Wendell Harrison & Rebirth Inc. |
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Features
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Friday, 10 February 2006 05:11 |
Jazz in the Schools
Wendell Harrison & Rebirth Inc.
By John Sinclair
Detroit's public schools were once one of America's most prolific breeding grounds for world-class musical talent. During the 1940s and 50s an almost endless stream of top-quality jazz musicians poured out of the local school system to swell the flow of modern jazz throughout the world. Recent graduates of Cass Tech, Northern High, Miller High School, Northwestern High and other public schools serving the city's burgeoning African-American population went straight to New York and then international acclaim, gracing America's most popular working-bands from the Count Basie Orchestra to the Miles Davis Quintet.
The Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, Cannonball Adderley's quintet and sextet, the J.J. Johnson Quartet, the John Coltrane Quartet and many less established units boasted Detroiters like Milt Jackson, Paul Chambers, Donald Byrd, Barry Harris, Yusef Lateef, Tommy Flanagan, Betty Carter, Kenny "Pancho" Hagood, Doug Watkins, Louis Hayes, Curtis Fuller, Billy Mitchell, Roy Brooks, Kiane Zawadi (Bernard McKinney), Charles McPherson, Lonnie Hillyer and literally scores of their neighbors and classmates.
This incredible spate of hard-swinging, technically-advanced, quick-thinking improvising jazz musicians was augmented by a tidal wave of rhythm-and-blues singers and instrumentalists which flooded the popular music scene throughout the 50s and 60s. Jackie Wilson, Little Willie John, Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, Aretha Franklin, Andre Williams, Nolan Strong & the Diablos, and the many minions of Motown Records were Detroit public school products. Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Martha & the Vandellas, the Temptations and countless other R&B artists spread the Sound of Detroit around the globe, making their public-school musical education pay off in the biggest possible way.
But suddenly, in the 1960s, the Detroit public school system began to fall victim to the process of massive disinvestment and dislocation which continues to cripple public education and other city services here today. Crucial arts educational programs were cut to the bone and then completely severed by the "human being lawnmower" of white flight as more than one million Detroit citizens of European descent left the city for the former pastures of suburbia, taking their tax dollars with them and leaving behind their abandoned homes and commercial buildings.
The public schools' music program, which had once produced skilled symphony musicians, swing-band sidemen, dance-band technicians and commercial music professionals as well as jazz artists and R&B stars, was soon reduced to an infintesimal shadow of its formerly gigantic stature.
For the past 25 years music in the schools has suffered a precipitous decline, and only where a handful of outstanding individuals--like Ernie Rodgers at Northwestern High or James Tatum at Mackenzie High School--have dedicated an incredible amount of personal attention and extracurricular time to providing first-rate musical instruction for their public school students can the glories of the system's past triumphs be glimpsed.
Even less attention is paid in the public school system of today to providing modern-day students with instruction in the history and development of the African-American musical tradition and its art music, commonly known as jazz.
Students today are remarkably ignorant of their musical heritage, particularly with respect to jazz, its evolution and essence. This is a serious deficiency which must be addressed by our educators at once unless yet another generation of Detroiters is to be denied its sense of history, cultural continuity and self-respect.
Jazz must be taken into the schools--the jazz tradition must be preserved and extended into the future. While the bulk of professional educators continues to sleep on this issue, several Detroit jazz artists and grass-roots arts organizations have taken the problem into their own hands and developed small but effective modes of instruction and training, secured funding, and taken their ensembles into the Detroit public schools in order to begin to provide students with the fundamentals of jazz education.
One ambitious grass-roots program "to acquaint young people with classical American jazz music" is the Jazz in Education project developed by Rebirth, Inc. and its Artistic Director, saxophonist/composer/bandleader Wendell Harrison.
Rebirth, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit organization founded in 1978 and dedicated to preserving and presenting American jazz music in performances, workshops, audio and video recordings. For more than 10 years Rebirth has carried on a remarkable range of jazz activities, including concert presentations, producing and releasing jazz records, publishing original compositions and jazz instructional materials, organizing tours, establishing recording facilities, and developing sophisticated promotional materials for its many activities.
"For the 1989 season," Wendell Harrison reports, "Rebirth's main focus has been to acquaint young people with classical American jazz music. Presentations are directed toward public high schools, middle schools and elementary schools in the Detroit metropolitan area in an effort to broaden their musical scope and awareness of jazz.
"More than any city in the world, Detroit has been a spawning ground for jazz artists of international repute. Rebirth's Jazz in Education program serves as an educational supplement to the public school curriculum, introducing youth to jazz music on a professional level and providing a reference for those presently studying the art."
During the 1988-89 school year Wendell Harrison and his ensemble performed concerts in many of the Detroit public schools: Central, Western, Northwestern, Redford, Pershing, Murray-Wright, Mackenzie and Martin Luther King High Schools; Cerveny Middle School; and Pulaski, Wilkins and Trix Elementary Schools.
Following the concerts, Wendell and the members of his ensemble--vibist Robert Pipho, keyboardist Pamela Wise, bassists Ralphe Armstrong or Jeribu Shahid and drummer Tom Starr--conducted workshops with the music students in each school, providing them with the opportunity to participate and interact with the professional artists.
"What we're doing is dealing with kids who are at the basic school marching band level--kids who have never improvised before," Harrison explains. "I take simple scales and get the students to play them the way you actually play: accenting the upbeat, swinging the scale. I'm introducing arpeggios to them, going into musical intervals, and making them aware of the basic techniques of improvising. They were all very enthusiastic about improvising--the first time they tried it they didn't know that you use the scales and arpeggios, and they just had a ball!
"You know, the word improvisation comes from the root word improve," Wendell points out. "Every time you play a melody, each time you try to improve upon the melody or the changes of the song, which is a pretty unique thing. That's what makes jazz more challenging than so-called 'classical' music, where your goal is to play the piece exactly as it appears in the score. Jazz is really about utilizing your intelligence and technique to take the given material to a new level, to give it an individual touch instead of playing the same thing all the time.
"I'd really like to see a lot more jazz musicians teaching jazz music in the schools," Wendell continues. "How can you teach it if you don't know how to play it? Instead of musicians trying to make a living playing in bars, let them take their rightful place in terms of teaching and sustaining this art form in the schools--coming up with textbooks, lesson plans and exercises to get the concept over to the students. Most jazz musicians have to go outside their own idiom in order to get work as musicians anyway. Why not let us perpetuate the idiom by doing what we to best and help sustain the art form by teaching it to young people in the schools?"
Financial support for Rebirth's Jazz in Education project came from the Detroit Council of the Arts, the Michigan Council for the Arts, Rebirth members, patrons and supporters. Other Rebirth, Inc. activities receive funding (in painfully modest amounts) from the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Midwest Alliance, Gannett Foundation, Helen deRoy Foundation, Hiram Walker Allied Vintners, and the F. Lax Construction Company.
Rebirth, Inc. has also enjoyed considerable success marketing its excellent educational products, including two superb jazz instruction books compiled by Harrison "to teach young musicians the elusive skill of improvisation." The Be Boppers Method Book, written by Harrison "to help sustain the jazz tradition," contains musical exercises that Wendell learned in his student days from jazz great Barry Harris.
Harrison's second publication, Compositions in Odd Meters, is a songbook featuring compositions by Harrison, Pamela Wise, Harold McKinney and Eddie Harris. Through a tie-up with Jamey Aebersold Publishing, the nation's top distributor of jazz instructional materials, Harrison's books enjoy wide circulation and are fast becoming staples in music education throughout the country.
Wendell also continues to release his own music through Rebirth and its affiliate, Wenha Records. Both are successors to the historic Tribe Records collective, organized in the early 1970s by Harrison, Harold McKinney, Marcus Belgrave, Phil Ranelin and others. Wendell released three records on the Tribe label: An Evening with the Devil, Message from the Tribe, and Farewell to the Welfare, followed by Dreams of A Love Supreme and Organic Dreams on Wenha Records. Rebirth Records has engendered four more Wendell Harrison LPs: Reawakening (featuring Leon Thomas), Birth of a Fossil, "Wait" Broke the Wagon Down, and his most recent release, The Carniverous Lady.
The Rebirth complex on the near north side of Detroit now boasts its own recording studio, specializing in 1ive-to-two-track" digital as well as multi-track recording for Rebirth's in-house projects and an increasing number of community-based clients (Doug Hammond cut his latest Idibib LP at Rebirth Studios, for example). The Rebirth computer system is plugged into the creative process, too, kicking out musical scores, texts, promotional materials, mailing lists and labels, and a whole range of supportive services.
An informative and vastly entertaining videotape featuring Wendell Harrison performing with his band and interacting with students in the schools is now available on several Detroit-area cable systems. Produced by Chris Pitts for his Jazz Masters: Keepers of the Flame series, hosted by Jim Dulzo and announced by John Hardy, this program gives us a picture of the multi-talented Mr. Harrison from his earliest beginnings as a student of the great Barry Harris to his current activities as a performer, producer, educator and keeper of the jazz flame.
For more than a decade now Rebirth has continued to advance against all obstacles to become a vital force in the contemporary jazz community. Its Jazz in Education project is just one more of Rebirth's valuable contributions to the preservation and presentation of the art music of the African-American cultural tradition--commonly known as jazz.
--Detroit
Winter 1989-90
(c) 1990, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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