Oregon Art Beat; #205; Coast Lab Band

When you see these kids coming in here, you know, a week after week, what do you hope that they're getting out of this? That's a really interesting question because we have found that through the years that we are no longer just teaching music, that these kids are looking to patty and eye and the other parents in the organization. We are setting examples for these students that we are involved in their private lives by answering questions and mentoring to them that we are looking at us for morals and character. An example I can give you is that the Roseburg Elk's Club had us come over and play for Christmas Party for them and part of the agreement of that Christmas Party was that the kids were given dinner and they had their choice of steak or chicken and so it came time to eat and all the boys got up and all the girls got up and the boys allowed the girls to go through the food line first and we're seeing the kids open doors for parents or for sisters or for ladies. The other thing that we have discovered is that

what we put into it is exactly what we get out of it. We don't raise our voice at the kids. The entire program is built on what word? Respect. Respect. It's the main word. It's the key to the entire program. You'll witness tonight that when we want the kids to be quiet we simply raise a hand in the air and all of a sudden the room just goes quiet and the kids have become self -policing. If a kid is another child is talking they'll just simply say, it's time to go ahead. And they also too, they've learned humor too because they've learned to laugh at themselves and it's okay to make mistakes and I don't have to be perfect and I think learning to laugh at your own mistakes or it's not like I make mistakes don't laugh. That's a really important part and they build confidence. It's a real confidence builder. There's a lot of kids that were very shy like Carol Ann. She

was so shy. I wouldn't do a trumpet solo just and Greg just let her take her time and when she was ready and now she has a whole different confidence when she's up there with her horn, wonderful girl. But it all falls back, I think, on respect. On respect. Yeah. Carol Ann. I'm going to, I embarrassed her a couple of weeks ago to perform and speak it. We played in her hometown so Carol Ann was, her first two rehearsals she ever came to. She stood out in the hall and cried because it's overwhelming, it's intimidating, yeah. To go from nine weeks of hot cross buns in school band to in the mood or rock around the clock. In sweet Georgia round. In sweet Georgia round. And she sat out in the hall and she just cried. She said, I just can't come in. So finally, we sent two younger students out there and they worked with her and coaxed her along and pretty soon she came in and she was having a great time and she's now one of our strongest players on our junior level.

Yeah. Sneaky. Well, you guys obviously care a lot about this, I mean, you put so much time and effort. I mean, what do you feel like you're getting out of it? Satisfaction. I can. Happiness, yeah. Joy. I can't put a value on what we do. There is. There is none. The rewards are absolutely amazing. Makes me feel good. Makes me feel happy. Our organization voted patty and I citizens of the year two years ago for our county. So that's a reward. That's an honor that we're just regular old people. We've, you know, we drive normal cars and we live out in the country and we're just I wish we could convince people that if they, if they want to predict the future, invest in the kids because that is our future that we feel that giving to the kids comes back to us tenfold and it has. Yeah, it has. And we watch, we watch a lot of the, our local

channel has a government channel and all the time we see our local governments sitting around saying, well, what do we do with the kids? What do we do with this? What do we do with that? And I know Greg says this and he's sitting at home and he yells at the TV, want to take him out for a soda pop and ask them what they want instead of telling them what they want. Why don't you find out what these kids want? And that's all you got to do is most kids are willing to talk if you just listen. Just got to listen. Just ask them. Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about what's the kind of range of music that you teach the kids and that you perform? Boy, the range, we start off very simply with scales and learning, teaching the kids how to be a team. We express to the students that teamwork is critical, that if one person fails, we all fail, that there's no eye in team. Cross -down rivalry is gone. Then we just work the kids through a half a dozen to a dozen beginning songs, encouraging them to work together to

improv and stand up and do solos. Then there's this little flowering point here where all of a sudden the students just bloom and they just start taking off. The number one complaint we get from parents is that how do I get my students to stop practicing? We have gotten many calls at 11 o 'clock at night saying, geez, we just got back from rehearsal and my students are in the bedroom and it's 11 o 'clock and I can't get them to stop practicing. We encourage the students to progress at their own rate and those are some of the things that we feel. We should explain that our junior beginning group might have a third grader in it but it also might have an 11th grader from high school. We don't do the bands by age level. We do it by commitment, dedication and loyalty so it doesn't matter whether you're an exceptional well player if I don't know how to say this. Everybody's equal? Yeah, everyone's equal. Everybody starts off at the same level. Exactly. Then you have the right to work your

way up through the ranks. So we have some students in our senior band that musically are not as talented as what they maybe should be but they're here every rehearsal and they give 100 % and they, the music mentor, they work with the younger students and they pass it on to us. That type of commitment means more than musical ability. Is there anything different you do? I mean, you have, I guess we're a big performance. I'm assuming the Arlington, is that a pretty big event for you guys to go to? Is there anything different you do to prepare for events like that? Arlington really isn't a big thing. That's a fun thing. That's our fun job and I know like do we prepare differently? No, I think we do them all the same, don't we? Well, you do a lot of prep work on overnight trips. Well, yeah, on overnight trips because we have, we take food and we try to cook. I do like a little grocery list where each child will bring like a gallon of sunny delight and a bag of

pancake mix and the next child might bring a bag of apples in the six pack of pop. So it's very economically, it's very cheap for the kids to go because that's all they have to bring and by the time we all get there, there's so much food that it's unreal. But Arlington is a fun thing. It's a fun thing. I mean, the kids really look forward to it. The plane is fun but I think it's afterwards when we're at the school, we play basketball and volleyball and we run around and we, they're just kids being kids and it's, the parents have a good time, the kids have a great time. He's out there playing basketball. Yeah, you show how to and we just have a really good time. Some of the local performances don't require, Patty and I used to go to, when we were doing this by ourselves, we would make six or eight trips to the red line with bandfolds and equipment to set up the band. Now we have a dedicated team of parents, we have a half a dozen band managers, Patty's and our responsibility is they just tell us what time to show up with the performance. They've got it set up. I have

student directors that tune the band and my student director team. We have six of those and they've taken the burden off of me. They have physically taken the band out and done performances without Patty or I and that's so that we can expand the program. And they learn a lot too, being a director. Absolutely. Well, is there, I mean, if you had a dream for the lab band, what would it be, what would your goal? My personal dream would, I'd like to see it be international. I'd like to see a lot of communities, a lot of countries. We're going to dream here. I'd really like to see it go international, have all kids have the opportunity. And that's one thing, another thing that we do is we have a thing called the repeat performance where parents have gone out and told parents, look in your attics for those old instruments and then they give them to us, we fix them up

and if a student can't afford an instrument, we've got one for them to use. And they can use it for as long as they want. If they want to use it all the way through school, fifth through twelfth grade, that's fine. They're welcome to it. And I'd like to see more kids get the opportunity to be able to play instruments, because like Greg said, it's something they can do the rest of their life. We also feel that there, a student should not be involved in the performing arts because of lack of money for whatever financial reasons. So we, I think this year, Patty and I and the program put out somewhere around 40 instruments to students who just couldn't afford it. And if they need reads or valve oils or creams or graces, we have a surplus of that that we give to the students. The one difference between how we do this is our agreement is not with the parents. Our agreement is that Patty and I sit down with the student and they're the ones that sign for the instrument and they're the ones that we have the agreement. It's their responsibility not to parents. We feel that there's somewhat pride in ownership when our agreement is with the students. And we try to eliminate the parents standing over the student

saying, you will do this and this and this. So it's very, very positive. My personal dream is to have just in the state of Oregon, just to have other programs started where we would meet maybe in a common place in Portland or Eugene and have a convention of all these kids involved. The other dream that we've realized so many dreams. We have our student directors, we have 12 vocalists now, so we have vocal ensembles that do solo work that do duos and trios. We have the Andrew sisters that we do with the dresses and the full blown outfits. So that's another division of getting kids involved. We are looking for swing dancers that will go out and go to performances. We have about 50 swing dance students in town here. They get together every other week that do swing dancing. That's almost unheard of in the junior high and high school age group. So we've realized, like I said earlier, we have

surpassed all visions, all dreams that we could have ever anticipated. And then we also have a scholarship fund that is open to all students. You don't have to be a part of lab band to get a scholarship, you just write us a letter. And most of them are for music camps or summer camps and we try to do it for all the performing arts. So if you want to go to a vocal camp or a drama camp, music, we do it for private lessons, dance, violin, anything that has to do with the performing arts. All you can do is write us a letter and we try really hard to honor scholarships to let the kids have them to experience different things in life. You guys are so involved. It's amazing. I liked what you told me earlier about your story of seeing those 65 -year -old football players. Can you tell me that story again? Well, Patty and I get asked a lot to just speak at Rotary or Kiwanis or Alliance. One thing that we have found out is that we always ask the people, how many people drive by a

football field on a Sunday afternoon and how many of you folks see 65 or older people out there practicing football. And generally speaking, there was one gentleman that raised his hand once in the five years I've been using this. He was an athletic director. He was an athletic director from the local high school. But the response we get is that nobody raises their hand and then I propose to them how many 65 -year -old musicians do you know that are still playing their instrument today. And generally everybody in the room raises their hand. And we simply say, that's our point. That music and the arts will last your entire lifetime. You can still do it. I have an older gentleman that used to be a real good customer of the store would come in. And his doctor prescribed to him, he had a breathing problem and prescribed him to play his alto saxophone. So here he was at 93 years old and his breathing is

coming back to him because he's playing his musical instrument. And so that happens to be an unusual circumstance, but I was impressed that his doctor had prescribed that. Is there anything else that we haven't talked about about the kids or the program, anything else you want to tell people about? I think we got scholarships, we got the repeat performance. We got the building. Yeah, at the building. Boy, that was just. Just the kids. Yeah, that's the amazing part. Is the kids. Tell them what the band writer said today to you, Mr. Lando. Oh, I didn't want to put that on the air. You don't have to mention names. Just say it. Well, I'm a band director today, he says he sees a lot of kids coming up the ranks that are excellent musicians, but they don't really have.

They want to be in jazz band at school, but they don't have the jazz, the symphonic band that has nothing to do with jazz. So he's been telling them, you want to learn about jazz, go lab band, that's where you learn about it. But you should talk about your theory classes. That's how you hold the theory classes, that's important, but the kids learn there. We've offered, again, the program has expanded so much that we try to fill the needs of the students. So we've offered classes in directing, we've offered, we had a rare opportunity about four years ago that the local jazz festival came to us and said, we'd like half a dozen of your musicians to sit in with the pro bands during our jazz festival. And this was six weeks before the jazz festival. So we got together 14 kids and we went through an intensive two night a week music theory class because these older advanced musicians, they don't use music. They all do it, they've been doing it their entire life. So we got

a whole bunch of these kids ready to sit in and they did a remarkable job and held their own. So that has been two or three times a year now we offer music theory classes. We also encourage the students to listen to, we have a maybe 50 CD collection of the old swing bands of Glen Miller and Tommy Dorsey and Buddy Rich and Tower of Power and Chicago and Earth Wind and Fire and Manor Ferguson and Chuck Mangione. So we've got the kids can check those out and take those home and listen and we've just started a library of history on jazz and musicians. We also encourage all the students to listen to country and rock and swing and bebop and classical because it's all relative. So we've, again, we, when we see a need we try to expand the program to serve that need. Do you think a lot of these kids are doing this because they want to become a professional

musician or is it more for the fun of it or do you get a mixture of that sort of attitude? It's a mixture. Yeah, I would say it's a mixture. We've had some that have stressed going on into a musical career. I don't know if they're going to be professional but maybe a band director or doing something musical in their life and then we have some that it's just a fun hobby, yeah. One of our lead trumpet players is playing lead trumpet in the Air Force Top Some Blue Band right now. Another one of our trumpet players is playing second trumpet at Mount Hood. And he got a scholarship to go there, yeah. And he got a scholarship to go there, yeah. One of our original bass players in the program is a layout artist for Billboard magazine back in New York. So we are seeing that the kids are getting into the performing arts more than what I feel they would have. We've had our first original member is going to go off to college and major in music. And then a member that

used to be in lab band but then they got so busy and other things is not. He wants to go to college and become a band director so that'll keep music alive in schools at least. We hope. Anything else you guys could think of, anything I missed? Dill? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, unless like I said, unless you guys think of anything else you want to talk about, I don't think so. I think we covered it all, didn't we? Yeah. Let's get out our notes now. Like I said, the magic is not us, the magic is the kids. That is the kids and the parents and the interaction. The other thing we do that, hard for some people to handle, is that when we take long trips, the parents don't have a saying discipline. The parents are welcome to go along with this. But when it comes down patty and I and our advisory board is responsible. So I will not tolerate a parent dressing down their own student. And it's really

hard because our own kids went on this trip and they had their own chaperones. They didn't report to us, they didn't see what they didn't ride with us. And as a parent, I can understand it's hard because you want to keep tabs on what your kid is doing. It was hard to let go, but we let go. That just creates responsibility and you know, kids be kids too. Kids can't be kids when their parents are around all the time, so parents got to be a chaperone of other people's kids instead of their own. That's about it, I guess that's it. I'm talking. Well great, thank you, bud, that was great. Cut out the notes thingy, I will. It's hard to ever hear this, I'm just like, alright, cut, it's just like, I've seen

it, I've seen it, I've seen it, I've seen it, I've seen it, I've seen it, I've seen it, we don't ever play that one, we don't play that one. I'm just showing some of them, you know in the mood. Okay well, that's not exactly like different courts structure. At least put on the wrist so we barely ever play. But vis -a -vis don't recognize our role but it's part of it. Yes. Is that

correct, honey? Is that gross? So, um, is that... Yes. Yes. And, um, you've already gone. It's gone. It's a bit rocky. Um, this one is... Are you still your wife? Are you still around? Oh. Yes. What's wrong with yourie, hehe, chop chop? Yes. What's wrong with you? Are you still around? Hey her. I have problems going on... I will, please. OK? But, babe, this... The big brother... How are you? You're bad. That's okay. Good to see

you. That's okay. My understanding. Good. Hi, kids. How are you? Good handshake. Sweet, sweet. Hey, Steve. Good. Doing good. Hey, buddy. How are you? Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good.

I think so. I think they're going to stay the whole night. One camera guy, one audio guy, and one production. Yep. Here comes the whole bunch more. Good, good, good, good. No. These are parents. Load. Yep. I know. I'm a seerhand. I broke your finger. I broke it. I broke it right there. Can you play? Can you hold a pick? He'll be okay. That's it. I will or I'll try. I suppose you don't want me to make you do a solo tonight. Who's your teacher tonight?

Nick. Nick, okay. How are you? Good. Good. We have a couple brand new clarinet players tonight. One of them doesn't play good. I think we both did. I think we were committed to you guys. Yeah. Check with her. She flew by me. I'm spending two days a week in Roseburg and three days a week here. We've got to see each other. 12 o 'clock at night. Are you nervous? Come on. Come on. We'll get you ready. Come on. Okay.

Okay. These students are going to help you. They're your music mentors. So if you have questions on fingerings or anything at all, you'll work with them. And their responsibility is to help you. You're important to us. So success. Any questions? Okay. Ignore these guys. They follow me everywhere. They don't exist, okay? I'm sure. Okay. Yeah. I don't look good on camera.