Playing in Time
with David Rojas
Turner Foundation Music and Imagination Program Uses Jazz and Blues to Teach Life
By Charles Donelan | January 6, 2022
Five afternoons a week, a group of teens converges on the 500 block of West Canon Perdido for band practice in a new open-air studio. Despite their musical apprenticeship — the stops and starts, the flubs and retakes — a curious listener might be surprised to recognize that the themes and flights of lyricism are from the great Black music canon: jazz.
Approximately 40 students from the Lighthouse and Village at Santa Barbara apartments are currently enrolled in the Turner Foundation Music and Imagination Program (TFMI), where they are learning to play classic jazz and blues compositions by mid-20th-century greats, such as Thad Jones, Herbie Hancock, Hazel Scott, and Sonny Rollins. Whether they are 14-year-old veterans or 9-year-old beginners, these Westside kids choose to spend their precious after-school hours practicing the chord changes of bebop and the intervals of the blues. What, in 2021, could be motivating them to do this?
The answer is the story of the Turner Foundation Music and Imagination program (TFMI) and how its director, David Rojas, is bringing the joy and the discipline of structured musical improvisation to the youth of the city’s Westside.
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