This American Life - 104: Music Lessons

Broadcast on: 05 Jun 1998

Here's my seventh grade teacher, Sad Fade. He trained as a classical musician, loved music, truly loved it. And then, every working day, he surrounded himself with 13-year-olds, who massacred the living guts out of it. Could not play it and did not care. It made him the angriest teacher I ever saw. He yelled all the time. This is what happens, if you believe that music means something is important, and you're surrounded all day long with 13 and 14-year-olds who demonstrate through their actions that maybe it's not. I talked about Daniels about him, and Drell understood immediately. Drell was once paid to teach band, but he had to quit because he looked at the facts at hand and came to the simple conclusion. I got out of band teaching because I noticed that all the band teachers I knew had went a little crazy. I mean, no disrespect intended, but you don't find too many, like, totally the same band teachers who have taught band for a long time. I saw myself going on the edge and I said, "Well, no, I don't want to be whistling to myself at a wall, looking at apples that are not there," or something like that, because it's sort of like, no instrument sounds good when it's not played well. Trumpet was a pain, saxophone was a pain, clarinet was hell. And another thing, the kids, when they get a trumpet, there's a difference between a kid singing to a kid getting a trumpet. You might can't sing and you might be a little shy. No kid is going to be shy by blowing that horn, no matter how bad they sound. As a professional musician, Drell played jazz and funk and soul, keyboards and vocals. He's toward Asia and Brazil and Canada. He's done gigs in Paris, but four years ago, with kids who supported his own, he returned to a music job in the Chicago public schools, in an elementary school. And we get these little records by out, Barney records, you know, and we get up and do a little Barney dance, I'm like, this sucks. And you had already at that point, you had toured. Damn. God, this should be a name for this, like for that moment. Misery, that's a name. Well, from WBEZ, Chicago and Public Radio International, it's just America. American life. I'm Ira Glass. Coming to you today from the yearbook one of Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California, thanks to Public Radio Station KQED in San Francisco. Today on our program, music lessons, what's frustrating about them, what's miraculous about them. Act one, Papa was not a rowing stone. David Sedaris tells what happens when a parent does not play an instrument and insisted his children take lessons. Act two, Tkadwin Fugue and me, a minor, Sarah Val recalls all the things that she's going to do in music class that had nothing to do with music. Act three, knock it on heaven's door in which ending a mod provides so much needed spiritual uplift to our program with an example of what we can learn from music. Now, all of us, stay with us.

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