The IENE Creativity Workshop was hired to perform, teach and inspire at the Applewild School in Fitchburg, MA this March 3rd, 4th and 5th, 2015.
Six of our personnel worked with 217 students from grades 4 – 8 and rubbed elbows with K – 3, the youngest of Applewild’s budding musicians, artists and scholars. On Tuesday at 11am we unloaded and set up for our opening performance before the entire student body and faculty. Our set list was carefully chosen and crafted to reflect the school’s focus on the Harlem Renaissance. Included in our performance were Duke Ellington’s composition Jump for Joy, the title song from his musical of the same name (1939), Langston Hughes’ poem Dig and Be Dug, the gritty and poignant poem Satchmo by Melvin B. Tolson, and the traditional Negro spiritual Motherless Child.
Dig and Be Dug
“I stay cool, and dig all jive,
“I stay cool, and dig all jive,
That’s the way I stay alive.
My motto,
as I live and learn,
is
Dig and be dug
In return.”
by Langston Hughes
Applewild sixth graders were split into two groups; musicians and artists, to be taught to create conversations between jazz and expressionist painting.
Fourth graders painting duets as they build upon the idea of collaboration
Applewild horn players get their collaborative jazz on while classmates collaborate in the conversations at their easels
Exciting visual jazz expressionist paintings begin to grow before our eyes (and ears)
Satchmo
King Oliver of New Orleans
has kicked the bucket, but he left behind
old Satchmo with his red-hot horn
to syncopate the heart and mind.
The honky-tonks in Storyville
have turned to ashes, have turned to dust,
but old Satchmo is still around
like Uncle Sam’s IN GOD WE TRUST.
Where, oh, where is Bessie Smith,
with her heart as big as the blues of truth?
Where, oh, where is Mister Jelly Roll,
with his Cadillac and diamond tooth?
Where, oh, where is Papa Handy
With his blue notes a-dragging from bar to bar?
Where, oh where is bulletproof Leadbelly
with his tall tales and 12-string guitar?
Old Hip Cats,
when you sang and played the blues
the night Satchmo was born,
did you know hypodermic needles in Rome
couldn’t hoodoo him away from his horn?
Wyatt Earp’s legend, John Henry’s, too,
is a dare and a bet to old Satchmo
when his groovy blues put headlines in the news
from the Gold Coast to cold Moscow.
Old Satchmo’s
gravelly voice and tapping foot and crazy notes
set my soul on fire.
If I climbed
the seventy-seven steps of the Seventh
Heaven, Satchmo’s high C would carry me higher!
Are you hip to this, Harlem? Are you hip?
On Judgment Day, Gabriel will say
after he blows his horn:
“I’d be the greatest trumpeter in the Universe
if old Satchmo had never been born!”
This young bass player listens intently as we compose a tune and prepare to converse in music and paint
Applewild Seventh grader takes her turn in a collaborative visual jazz painting while classmates and IENE personnel perform some improvised jazz
An Applewild student collaborative visual musical jazz masterpiece is born!
