Beth Skogen
East High School Jazz Ensemble students Aaron Frieson, Mac Doherty, Mandell Mathis, Juan Munoz, Lydia Getman, Anna Hestad, Rose Caplan, and Spencer Halberg (l. to r.).
If you spend much time at Madison East High School, you’ll hear the phrase “east-side pride” tossed around pretty liberally. It’s the defiant mantra of a community that sees itself as the perennial underdog — a shared narrative about succeeding in the face of significant social and economic challenges; doing the best with what you’ve got and not crowing too much about whatever modest successes you might achieve in the process.
That ethos — which might sound familiar to fans of UW-Madison basketball — definitely applies to the jazz program at East. There are other high schools in the area with stronger jazz programs. There are places where music education is better funded and more kids take private lessons. But in spite of some significant economic and cultural obstacles, the jazz ensembles are coming out of the practice room and playing in the community, the school’s Black Music Ensemble is attracting students of color, and jazz seems to be making a difference in East’s behavior climate. Overall, enthusiasm is running hot, and the tunes are sounding pretty cool.
While the Badgers basketball analogy isn’t perfect (the Jazz Orchestra won’t be a contender for a national championship any time soon), East band director Mark Saltzman doesn’t shy away from the Bo Ryan hook. Like Ryan, he has no use for excessive praise.
“We’re not better than anybody else,” Saltzman is quick to say. “I’d hate for people at other schools to think we’re going around telling people how great we are. But it’s not about being better than somebody else. It’s about being better than you used to be. That’s what I preach to the kids, and I feel like they get it.”
Saltzman’s humility about the program is not phony. Several outstanding high school jazz bands play in the area, and East’s is not at that elite level. Sun Prairie’s jazz ensemble has competed at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington festival, which showcases the nation’s top high school jazz groups. Middleton High School also has a historically excellent jazz tradition. Jazz is also doing fine at La Follette, Memorial and West. How East stacks up against other schools is irrelevant to Saltzman.
“We can’t compare ourselves to what’s happening at some of those suburban schools,” says Saltzman. “Sun Prairie has lessons in middle school on a regular basis. They have lessons in Waunakee, McFarland and other places too. I wish we could do that. But that’s just not what the Madison Metropolitan School District does. So we meet the kids where they are. Like Bo Ryan, we don’t have the blue chippers, so we take them where they are and try to coach them up as best we can.”
Mark Saltzman is the East High band director.
One obstacle for many students at East is obvious: dollars and cents. Instruments and private lessons cost money, and a little more than half of the student’s 1,600 students come from families categorized by the district as “low-income.” That challenge is not unique among Madison high schools; La Follette has a similar percentage of low-income students. But poverty is considerably lower at West and Memorial, where about one-third of students are from low-income households.
Some resources are available at East to help families with the cost of participating — including money for instruments and music camp scholarships raised by the parents’ group. And community-minded musicians have chipped in where they can. For example, the Greater Madison Jazz Consortium has been running a Saturday morning jazz education program at the Goodman Center called Live Soundz on Saturday. But the need for assistance far exceeds the supply, and for some kids in lower-income families, the barriers go beyond the ability to afford an instrument — family issues, transportation challenges and housing instability are big ones.
Another challenge is the late start most East students get. The majority of students arrive at East with only a couple of years of experience on their instruments. Chronic funding woes have meant that band teachers are shared among the middle schools, so band class only happens a couple of times a week. As a result, most of the focus during the first years of high school has to be on getting students proficient on their instruments before much instruction on the subtleties of jazz style can take place.
While school funding is not likely to improve any time soon, there is a bright spot: a renewed focus on racial and economic disparities in arts programming at elementary and middle schools. In July 2013, Madison was selected to be part of a Kennedy Center initiative called Any Given Child. The city of Madison, the school district and Overture Center convened a team to develop strategies for improving access. The team's initial report, published in September, contains a number of recommendations ranging from better coordination between the schools and the professional arts community to enhanced professional development for teachers. It’s a start, but it’s hard to say whether dramatic improvement can take place in the absence of more money for school music programs.
Schools Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham is convinced that investing in music education is crucial, and an abundance of research backs her up. Multiple studies have shown that studying music during childhood improves language development and spatial-temporal skills. The College Board even says that kids with experience in music performance score on average 56 points higher on the verbal portion of the SAT and 39 points higher on the math portion than students with no coursework or experience in the arts. In 2012, the Journal of Neuroscience published a study showing that music training in childhood “fundamentally alters the nervous system such that neural changes persist in adulthood after auditory training has ceased.” In short, music lessons just make your brain work better, and the improvement sticks.
Playing music might be good for your brain, but that doesn’t mean teenagers will necessarily choose to do it. But since Saltzman left his previous post at Whitehorse Middle School to take over as band director at East four years ago, East’s musical offerings have diversified, creating more opportunities for playing and instruction.
When Saltzman began his new job, East already had a jazz band, a giant one that was open to everyone, no matter what instrument they played. He heard from some students that they wanted a “real” jazz band with standard instrumentation. He created the Jazz Orchestra, enlisting Jim Doherty — a professional trumpeter and former UW Jazz Orchestra director — to lead the new group. Students need to audition to get in.
“Having a jazz band open to kids who play flute or oboe is great, and that’s why we still do that with Jazz Band, but playing in a standard ensemble is a completely different experience,” Saltzman explains. “It makes everybody accountable. Nobody else is playing the same part as you, so you better know your stuff.”
The jazz ensembles don’t play at the school’s regular band concerts; those events are already more than long enough for most parents to sit through in East High’s decidedly uncomfortable auditorium seats (though thanks to the recent school funding referendum, a long overdue renovation of the auditorium is finally looking like a reality). But the groups have been performing regularly out in the community, and audiences are digging it.
In April, the Jazz Orchestra played at at MMoCA for the reception celebrating the Young at Art exhibit of student work. The large and appreciative audience included Cheatham. “I was wowed by the sophistication of East’s jazz band performance at MMoCA,” Cheatham said in an email.
The jazz program’s showcase event is a spring Jazz Dinner Dance that takes place downtown at the Masonic Center. The annual parent-organized event, now 11 years old, is the band program’s biggest fundraiser. It’s a gala dress-up affair, and all of the school’s jazz bands get to show their stuff in front of a big and enthusiastic audience of students, parents and jazz lovers. Professional musicians with connections to East usually sit in as well; this year, saxophonist Hanah Jon Taylor and guitarist Mel Ford, both of whom have kids at East, played along.
This year’s event drew a crowd of some 250 and netted approximately $7,000 for East’s bands. This was in spite of a last-minute time change made necessary when East’s basketball team got into the state basketball tournament (the same night), and the jazz players had to rush over to the Kohl Center to musically support their Purgolder classmates.
“This is like a real gig, out at a non-school location, on a big stage in front of 250 people,” says Jeff Spitzer-Resnick, head of the parent group that organizes the event.
Saltzman agrees that there’s a special vibe at the Jazz Dinner Dance. “To me, there’s nothing better than the feeling of having people want to dance to your music,” he says. “They feel like rock stars for a night.”
Wilder Dietz (in black T-shirt) is the director of East High's Black Music Ensemble.
The Black Music Ensemble is one musical offering at East that doesn’t exist in Waunakee or Middleton or any of the other Madison high schools. The group will appear at Strollin’ Schenk’s Corners, an all-day event on May 22 organized by the Greater Madison Jazz Consortium.
The ensemble is the brainchild of Wilder Deitz, a January 2012 East graduate, performing pianist and current member of UW-Madison’s Black Music Ensemble, led by bass professor and jazz legend Richard Davis. Davis, who recently turned 85 years old, is known locally these days almost as much for his work on diversity and racial equity as he is for his storied music career.
At the end of Deitz’s spring 2014 semester with the UW ensemble, the class used some time after its final concert to discuss issues of diversity. They pondered what they, as members of the university community, could do to create a welcoming space for students of all backgrounds. And they addressed the question of why there aren’t more students of color in the UW School of Music. Deitz quickly connected the conversation to his high school experience.
“It really got me thinking about the face of music as I remember it at East,” Deitz says. “And I remember it being disproportionately white and middle class compared to what the student body looked like. I knew there were other kids doing music independently. Certain kids weren’t getting hooked up with each other in the right way, or maybe weren’t hooked up with resources. The musicians I was spending a lot of time with and playing with disproportionately looked like me and came from a similar background and neighborhood.”
Deitz landed on the idea of starting a version of Davis’ Black Music Ensemble as an after-school club at East. Both Davis and Saltzman liked the idea and provided their support, and the ensemble launched in October. About 15 players participate, and Deitz says they’ve lucked out with instrumentation: “We’ve had two drummers, three trumpet players, three or four sax players, a guitarist, a bassist, a cellist who later started playing upright bass as well, three singers, two pianists and a violinist. It’s a pretty sweet setup.”
The Jazz Orchestra and the Jazz Band apply a fairly broad conception of “jazz,” including Latin, blues and other related genres in their repertoires. While they do play a lot of jazz, the Black Music Ensemble does not label itself a jazz outfit. A tune is fair game as long as it was composed by an African American composer, played or made popular by African American musicians, or simply falls within a genre that’s generally credited to African Americans. To date, funk and jazz have made up the biggest share of the repertoire, along with smatterings of R&B, blues, hip-hop, and one (non-American) African piece.
The racial makeup of the Black Music Ensemble closely mirrors the racial diversity of the overall student body, which is about a quarter black and 15% Hispanic. The small group makes it easier to retain members, and Deitz has the time to give the students the attention they need — not just musically but also logistically.
“I like to think of myself more as a facilitator than a teacher,” he says. “My main role is just to provide a space for them to meet, and then about 30% of my job is just hounding the kids to make sure they have rides to the gigs, to make sure they’re helping each other out where help is needed with the logistical things.”
The inclusivity Deitz has achieved with the Black Music Ensemble is laudable, but for the jazz program and the band program as a whole, it remains more an aspiration than a reality. The jazz bands — and the band program in general — at East remain disproportionately white and disproportionately middle class. The jazz program is also short on gender diversity; senior Lydia Getman is currently the only girl in the Jazz Orchestra.
But she is a dedicated student. The jazz orchestra’s guitarist, Getman practices about two hours a day — an hour during school as part of an independent study class and then another hour after school. Getman takes private lessons on classical guitar, but finds that playing jazz stretches her chops and expands her understanding of music theory.
“Being in jazz band makes you so much better as a musician,” Getman says. “On some instruments, like guitar with all those complicated jazz chords, it’s a totally different experience from other genres. It’s challenging, but it really forces you to improve.”
All that improvement is paying off for Getman. After she graduates, she’s going on to study music composition at Northern Illinois University next year, where she’ll have the opportunity to work with guitar virtuoso Fareed Haque.
Not all students are as focused on their music as Getman, though.
“Students at East enjoy being in jazz band, and I think they get a lot out of it, but it’s not really a priority for a lot of them,” Doherty says. “When I was in high school, even the kids who weren’t as serious as I was took their instruments home and practiced, because their parents made them practice, but also because band was a big deal to them. At East, most kids don’t take their instrument home. They have to do their calculus homework, but they don’t feel they have to practice their instrument. It’s more like a hobby.”
Beth Skogen
Guitarist Lydia Getman plans to study music composition in college.
A hobby perhaps, but one that has some legs. Officials at East are seeing a connection between music and behavior — and not just for the players.
Earlier this school year, the School Culture and Climate team looked at the data and found that Thursdays were the worst day for disruptive behavior problems, and most of those problems were taking place in the morning. Rob Mueller-Owens, the positive behavior support coach (yes, that’s a real job title at MMSD) for East High School, thought some music might help. He approached Saltzman and asked him to recruit a few kids to play music on Thursday mornings as students entered the building. As it happened, one of the jazz combos practiced on Thursday mornings, so they started setting up in the Forum, one of the school’s common areas, entertaining their peers and staff as they came in. An article on the district's website says the number of Thursday morning behavior issues has shrunk.
For Saltzman, that’s the kind of story that’s worth telling — much more so than comparing schools or speculating about how many kids will become professional musicians. And the students did it all themselves.
“I had virtually nothing to do with it; they set up, and they play,” says Saltzman. “And apparently it’s made some difference, which is amazing to me.... There’s the power of music right there.”
