Students from Grover Washington Jr. Middle School Researching and Discussing Climate Change
I had been mulling over the elusive question the Kimmel Center had set forth to arts organizations citywide for the 2016 Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts for some time. They requested us to come up with something that explored the theme “We are what we make,” a dare that Jazz Bridge had some difficulty coming to terms with. What did “we are what we make” really mean? The call for proposals included a clarifier that helped— “how is our humanity shaped by, changed, inspired, and challenged by the world we create” — but it still stumped many in our small organization who needed to substantively link it to jazz music.
It wasn’t until my 13-year-old grandson Vincent and I were stuck in traffic near City Hall one rainy night. The rush hour downpour was probably going to make us late for a theater performance of Aladdin, so I thought I would talk to him about the future, his generation’s future. I’d recently been curious as to how his age group saw the specter of global warming encroaching on their adulthood. They hear the news, they feel the fear, but they don’t show it. The natural optimism of youth keeps the conversation light, I guessed. But do they really think about it? I asked. They do.
“The Earth will be brown and dying,” Vincent said. “It’s hard to imagine, though...like it’s not really real.” I asked him if he ever talked with his friends about climate change and he said no. And then I wondered if Jazz Bridge could modify the Kimmel challenge a bit. Who are the makers in the world who have already built the infrastructure for a future that is threatening our children and grandchildren — how has our humanity been shaped by that and could we ask these future adults to remake the world into one they could actually live in and grow? What would these kids say to us, their elders who have made a world that is choking their future?
So Jazz Bridge began a two-year journey with some very special kids from Grover Washington Jr. Middle School in Philadelphia and Need in Deed, a nonprofit that works with public school teachers on programs that prepare students for civic responsibility and service to others. PEW Arts and Heritage fellow, saxophonist and composer Bobby Zankel, jazz singer and retired middle school music teacher Wendy Simon came to the project with the award-winning jazz filmmaker Jason Fifield and together, with the kids, we would see what kind of art would manifest itself from these young “makers.”
Wendy Simon with David, Tiana, and Caitlyn
Public intellectual Henry Giroux, who holds McMaster University’s Chair for Scholarship and the Public Interest, has been intricately involved in pedagogy and the larger social, political, and economic forces that affect education — forces like the corporate grip on political systems, the corrosion of public faith in democracy, the reliance only on market values and no other, consumerism masquerading as citizenship, the abandonment of the public good for rampant privatization, and the failure of the “power of the civic imagination.”
In a powerful address, called “Where is the Outrage: Critical Pedagogy in Dark Times,” Giroux insisted that students need to be “critically engaged agents” in the formation of society. He very briefly referenced author James Baldwin’s 1962 essay “The Creative Process” in his lecture, but a fuller reading brings Baldwin’s point home in the context of our new work Vision Song: Our Hearts, Our Future, Our Voices that will be premiering this April 9th and 10th at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia.
Baldwin wrote,“The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
Giroux calls for a “critical pedagogy” to be developed in schools, which would then widen out into a “public pedagogy” in order to change the way people see things, how they understand their world — to change the “shared fears” of a demoralized society who feels helpless into the “shared responsibilities” of a confident people who embody an optimistic can-do spirit. Teaching to tests just leads to “dead zones of the imagination,” according to Giroux, which doesn’t allow the students (or humanity from generation to generation) to reinvent a world that desperately needs to be changed. The removal of arts curriculum in most public schools over the past three decades has only served to grow these dead zones into chasms filled with commodified minds only focused on the short term, never the big picture.
Right from the beginning, the students enthusiastically researched and discussed climate change, what is causing it and why the world has done little to stop it. Marquise, Caitlyn, and Michelle worked on consumerism and they found some interesting statistics — in 1959, Americans spent only 4% on nonessential goods like jewelry, alcohol, candy, big houses and big cars, but by 2011 it had risen to 11.2%, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Marquis laughed and talked about all the products people use on just their hair, and he created an impromptu TV commercial for people to rethink their purchases. “Have you ever felt your hair wasn't flawless enough? Well, get over yourself! You don’t need to buy any of that.” Caitlyn was astounded that the average American consumes 1.7 tons of pork in a lifetime (it’s in a short film that will serve as an overture to the performance).
David and Ernst worked on pollution, of all types, coming up with a rap song (which they improvised with panache) focusing on the plastic pollutionin the Northern Pacific Ocean, the connections between air pollution and childhood asthma (rates for black children have risen 50% since 2001), and water pollution, before the Flint, Michigan disgrace. Bobby Zankel took some of Ernst’s rap and turned them into lyrics for the song “The Solution.”
“Many living things die in the sea. You don’t want it on your conscience. Take it from me, Ernst. Protect the earth. Save the earth. It’s always been there, even at birth. This is pollution. We have one solution. Stop being lazy. Deal with your trash.” Ernst Celine
Makeira, Cornelia, and Christopher worked on global warming and they were surprised to find that for 650,000 years atmospheric carbon dioxide had never been above 300 parts per million and now it is over 380 parts per million.
Christopher slapped his head in amazement when he discovered that the pollution in China and India can be seen from space. All of the kids worried about the polar bears and their dwindling habitat creating a poster with the words “Too hot, please, please help,” which Zankel also used for a song the kids will sing.
Zankel told me, “I really wanted to express the feeling of the kids and connect with them. It was important to me to convey their positive attitudes toward changing the world. I wanted them to know that their contributions count.” Wendy Simon dubbed the kids a “voicestra,” saying to them in rehearsal, “You are part of the band, not separate.”
The jazz suite starts with “Ndura,” which is the sacred name the Twa people have given to the mountain forests of the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, a region becoming decimated by the encroachment of logging and agriculture. They see the forest as their mother and father, and they’ve been forced to leave their ancestral homes as it has been destroyed. The second and third sections of the suite feature the students singing “The Solution” and “So Hot.” The suite concludes with the composition “Recycle” with the emphasis on the first syllable to connote the natural cycles of the planet.
In Naomi Klein’s best-selling book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, she characterizes the fossil fuel industry as addicts jonesing for a fix.
“We are blasting the bedrock of our continents, pumping our water with toxins, lopping off mountain tops, scraping off boreal forests, endangering the deep ocean, and scrambling to exploit the melting Arctic — all to get the last drops and the final rocks . . .some very advanced technology is making this possible, but it’s not innovation; it’s madness.”
Hope is the belief that life can be different than it is now, and everyone who worked on Vision Song sees an alternative vision of the future, one that brings people together to discuss issues and solve difficult problems such as climate change. The pervasive feeling throughout this two-year project was the certainty that Americans of all ages need to hold power accountable for what it does and to get moving with people around the nation and around the world becoming active to protest against any more development of fossil fuel extraction— to “keep coal, oil, and gas in the ground.”
There is an urgency building throughout the world and by the power of music, these children are asking, “What will you do?”
The world premier of Vision Song will be at the Kimmel Center of the Performing Arts on April 9th and 10th as part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. Visit out Facebook page for more information about the project. #PIFA2016
Click Here to See a Promo Video of the Students
