[Dixielandjazz] Fw: NYTimes.com Article: Jazz Sits In on the Curriculum and Moves a Young Audience

[Stan Brager]

Here's a promising start to help raise the awareness of youngsters to jazz.
Let's hear the applause for P.S. 156, their teachers, and Wynton Marsalis.

Stan
Stan Brager
----- Original Message ----- 
> Jazz Sits In on the Curriculum and Moves a Young Audience
>
> October 8, 2003
>  By ROBERTA HERSHENSON
>
>
> Before Billie, Dizzy and Miles melted the hearts of the
> sixth graders at Public School 156 in Brownsville,
> Brooklyn, the students viewed jazz as old people's music,
> their parents' music, as unhip as Beethoven and Brahms.
>
> But that all changed when jazz became part of daily life at
> the school this spring. There was the music itself, a
> panoply of new rhythms and sounds. There was the cast of
> colorful characters, each one a revelation. And there was
> the subject of jazz history, reflecting social concerns
> from segregation to the civil rights movement.
>
> No saxophones or slide trombones were in sight - just a CD
> player - the day in June when Tracey Bean, a sixth-grade
> teacher, played Billie Holiday's recording of "In My
> Solitude" in her classroom.
>
> "How did the music make you feel?" Ms. Bean asked when it
> was over.
>
> "Sad," several students said in unison.
>
> "I felt alone," Elise Long volunteered.
>
> "I feel like I
> want to cry," Jameel Baker said.
>
> Then Ms. Bean played an upbeat song, Ella Fitzgerald
> singing "A-Tisket, A-Tasket," and the students happily sang
> along.
>
> For the second year, jazz will be an academic subject at
> P.S. 156 and 1,900 other schools nationwide, thanks to a
> curriculum produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center, a nonprofit
> arts organization dedicated to jazz performance and
> education.
>
> The curriculum, aimed at upper elementary and middle
> schools, was developed with Scholastic, the children's
> publishing and media company, and financed mainly by the
> Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation.
>
> Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln
> Center, wrote and narrated 17 lessons on the history and
> significance of jazz, telling stories about important
> figures and providing 120 musical examples performed by the
> Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, with Mr. Marsalis himself on
> trumpet. The lessons, which range from the roots of New
> Orleans jazz to the latest Latin and Afro-Cuban music, are
> intended to be used without a visiting artist. More
> information about the curriculum is available at
> www.jazzatlincolncenter.org/. The lessons are on 10 CD's,
> so that teachers need only press start.
>
> But the teachers at P.S. 156, an arts-centered school from
> prekindergarten through eighth grade, took a more intensive
> approach.
>
> They added films, videos and recordings to the Lincoln
> Center materials to create a tapestry of African-American
> history, racial politics, artistic innovation and poetry
> for use in their social studies and language arts classes.
> The curriculum's music lessons were left to Jose Ramos, the
> music teacher, who led the students in Latin jazz and
> "stomp" performances.
>
> For 12 weeks, the sixth graders kept journals, recording
> their thoughts about hot jazz, cool jazz, bebop and the
> blues. They expressed in poetry and prose their feelings
> about the pioneering black musicians who spawned a new,
> uniquely American art. They learned of the toll that
> prejudice, alcohol abuse and drug addiction took on the
> artists.
>
> "They got so worried about these people," said Leonore
> Gordon, a consultant from the Teachers and Writers
> Collaborative who led the poetry sessions. (The
> collaborative is a nonprofit Manhattan group that sends
> professional writers into the schools to teach creative
> writing.) "When they began liking someone, they would ask,
> `Did he die?' "
>
> Mr. Marsalis provides vivid character studies on the CD's,
> telling how Louis Armstrong was sent to a correctional home
> "for young trouble-makers," calling Dizzy Gillespie "a hell
> raiser" and describing the diamond in Jelly Roll Morton's
> front teeth. He calls Morton "a pool shark" and "a con
> man," revealing the artists' flaws as well as their genius,
> because, he said in an interview, "the lesson to the
> students was imitate what you like about the people you
> idolize; don't imitate what you don't like."
>
> He promotes the curriculum as a tool for self-discovery
> that reveals the virtues of individuality (solo
> improvisation) and the benefits of cooperation (letting
> other soloists have their turn). He says that studying jazz
> "can give us a painless way to understand a new American
> mythology."
>
> He also feels that academic attention to the subject is
> overdue. "Jazz is our principal art form," he said, "and
> we've never taught it or went out of our way to be sure
> that our nation was informed about it."
>
> Oswaldo Malave, the principal of P.S. 156, said the
> schedule changes that had led other schools to cut arts
> programs had not affected P.S. 156 so far. The school was
> failing eight years ago, he said, but since it reorganized
> around the arts, reading scores have gone up. "We have been
> successful at integrating the arts into reading, social
> studies and especially writing," he said. "We're going to
> continue the same way."
>
> Ms. Gordon, who coaxes images from the students as they
> listen to jazz recordings, says her goal as the school's
> poetry consultant is to become obsolete by enabling the
> teachers to take over.
>
> Celeste Thompson, one of the teachers, is well on her way,
> provoking students with tapes by John Coltrane and Miles
> Davis, movies like "Cabin in the Sky" and songs like "Strange
> Fruit," as sung by Billie Holiday.
>
> One sixth grader wrote:
>
> Billie Holiday, your voice sounds
> like a
>
> bell
>
> shaking through
>
> a windy world.
>
> The students say that they still prefer Destiny's Child, 50
> Cent and Ashanti, the music of their own generation, but
> that they were glad to be introduced to artists like Louis
> Armstrong and Duke Ellington.
>
> "It's exciting to learn about how people lived before we
> were born," Shanice Schoolfield said. "Like Lady Day. She
> kept going on and believing in her dreams."
>
>
> Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
>