Lighting the Torch

It’s a good feeling when you read something and think—“Damn! That’s good! I wish I had written it!” And then realize that you did! 

 

I stumbled onto the Preface to my All Blues book, first published 13 years ago and had that exact feeling. So why not share it here? Enjoy!

Just about everything we eat comes out of the dirt. Whether potato-buried or cornstalk-reaching, whether apple-hanging or grainwaving, the food that grows our bones and packs our muscles come from dirt. And what doesn’t come from soil lives in flowing rivers, placid lakes and salty seas. 

Just about everything we eat comes out of the dirt. Whether potato-buried or cornstalk-reaching, whether apple-hanging or grainwaving, the food that grows our bones and packs our muscles come from dirt. And what doesn’t come from soil lives in flowing rivers, placid lakes and salty seas. 

And so it is with American music. Teenagers rockin’ ‘round the clock, gyrating in joyful abandon to electric guitars and pounding drums, owe it all to the low-down, dirty blues. Grown in the Mississippi mud or Delta red clay, the blues came from the fields, from cotton-scratched hands plucking strings and sorrowful voices singing their story. Watered by blood, sweat and salty tears, it traveled upriver from the juke joint to the jazz club. There the jazz musicians wisely left the dirt on the roots, kept the notes salted and flowing,

The clean white pages that follow, written for children in classrooms with Smartboards, are far from those damp and dirty roots. But once you get the music off the page and into the young hands and hearts of your students, you can hear the distant echo of those dusty roads and front porches where the blues grew up.

 

It may seem strange to bring blues into grade school, where innocent kids know nothing of the heartaches and hardships that makes the blues blue. But if you believe, as I do, that schools are a place where kids learn about their cultural heritage, then shouldn’t every American school child rub shoulders with jazz and blues? 

 

And yet so many don’t. This book hopes to change that. It provides a step-by-step progression that guides you from the world of children’s games through the poetry of the vocal blues to the sophistication of jazz blues. All the material presented here has come through the mill of countless classes with kids and been ground to a fine flour with all the essential nutrients intact. In my 36 years (and still going strong) of teaching children from three years old to 8^th grade, I’ve learned one truth— no matter how clever you are at arranging or composing a piece, no matter how many hours you sit at home planning the perfect lesson, the music doesn’t become real until it has been dragged around, squeezed, hugged and generally worked over by the kids. Every piece in this book comes to these pages honestly from that work with kids and that will make a difference in how your own students receive it.

 

The other testing ground has been in the adult jazz training courses I give. The first such course took place in1988 with six curious teachers in St. Paul, Minnesota. Since then, I have taught it in San Francisco every year since 1991, and all over the world—from Sao Paolo to Sydney, from Barcelona to Bangkok and beyond. Now, over two thousand teachers have been trained in this dynamic approach to jazz education. We’ve raised the roof and gotten down in the dancing ring showing off our motion, stole Cookies from the Cookie Jar, Jumped at the Woodside in our Little Suede Shoes and ate some Chitlins con Carne with some hot Soul Sauce. 

 

And then we brought it all back to the kids. My drawer is filled with joyous testimonies from children whose teachers took the time to make this worthy music come alive for them. It is to all those teachers that I dedicate this book. The jazz/Orff connection is still a tiny match awaiting your efforts to light the torch.  I hope this book keeps it glowing and growing.

 

The clean white pages that follow, written for children in classrooms with Smartboards, are far from those damp and dirty roots. But once you get the music off the page and into the young hands and hearts of your students, you can hear the distant echo of those dusty roads and front porches where the blues grew up.

 

It may seem strange to bring blues into grade school, where innocent kids know nothing of the heartaches and hardships that makes the blues blue. But if you believe, as I do, that schools are a place where kids learn about their cultural heritage, then shouldn’t every American school child rub shoulders with jazz and blues? 

 

And yet so many don’t. This book hopes to change that. It provides a step-by-step progression that guides you from the world of children’s games through the poetry of the vocal blues to the sophistication of jazz blues. All the material presented here has come through the mill of countless classes with kids and been ground to a fine flour with all the essential nutrients intact. In my 36 years (and still going strong) of teaching children from three years old to 8^th grade, I’ve learned one truth— no matter how clever you are at arranging or composing a piece, no matter how many hours you sit at home planning the perfect lesson, the music doesn’t become real until it has been dragged around, squeezed, hugged and generally worked over by the kids. Every piece in this book comes to these pages honestly from that work with kids and that will make a difference in how your own students receive it.

 

The other testing ground has been in the adult jazz training courses I give. The first such course took place in1988 with six curious teachers in St. Paul, Minnesota. Since then, I have taught it in San Francisco every year since 1991, and all over the world—from Sao Paolo to Sydney, from Barcelona to Bangkok and beyond. Now, over two thousand teachers have been trained in this dynamic approach to jazz education. We’ve raised the roof and gotten down in the dancing ring showing off our motion, stole Cookies from the Cookie Jar, Jumped at the Woodside in our Little Suede Shoes and ate some Chitlins con Carne with some hot Soul Sauce. 

 

And then we brought it all back to the kids. My drawer is filled with joyous testimonies from children whose teachers took the time to make this worthy music come alive for them. It is to all those teachers that I dedicate this book. The jazz/Orff connection is still a tiny match awaiting your efforts to light the torch.  I hope this book keeps it glowing and growing.