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MP3 Louise Rogers - Bop Boo Day
10 MP3 Songs
KIDS/FAMILY: General Children''s Music, JAZZ: Jazz Vocals
Details:
Louise Rogers is a growing leader in the field of jazz education for children, as well as an accomplished performer. She and her husband, Rick Strong, have been performing for adults and children for over 15 years. They are active in the public schools doing workshops and
residencies, and perform in the public libraries and parks of NYC. At night they are often performing in one of the jazz clubs of the city such as Sweet Rhythm, The Triad, Cornelia Street Cafe, Kavehaz, etc. For more information about Louise and her work with jazz and children, please visit https://www.tradebit.com or https://www.tradebit.com
The most joyously encouraging way of expanding the audience for jazz I’ve heard of is the work of jazz singer-educator Louise Rogers. Louise works in the Medical Center Nursery School in Washington Heights, New York, where she and classroom teacher Susan Milligan have developed an exhilarating – and fun – jazz curriculum for pre-kindergarten.
On Bop Boo Day you can delight in the essence of jazz for the youngest crowd. The children who join in zestful interplay with Louise Rogers and her husband, bassist Rick Strong, are slightly older here. But the same joy permeates the pre-kindergarten class, too. I can imagine Louis Armstrong or Dizzy Gillespie enjoying this session and asking if they could sit in. Louise and Rick have performed with youngsters in various New York schools, in the city’s parks, at museums, and at the prestigious International Association for Jazz Educators Convention.
When Louise became a mother, she began to realize that like the magic dust of fairy tales, the sounds of jazz can reach and enliven the lives of even very young children. This can start as soon as they can hear. Louise’s discovery of the reach and potential of jazz started with observing her three-year old son connect to jazz. As she recalls:
“The simple arrangements were the ones that had the most impact. He responded to lyrics, not just melody. He liked funny lyrics, kazoos, scatting. Not only was scatting funny, but it was interesting and something that he could copy and create for himself.”
Scatting is a way of improvising using sounds – not words – to make the voice into a swinging jazz instrument. The first, and still matchless, jazz scat singer was Louis Armstrong. He was followed by the brilliant innovator Ella Fitzgerald.
Rogers also discovered that “books came alive for my son when rhythm and simple melody were added”. And, like all jazz players, her son “loved to tell his own stories,” in his own jazz language. Music became personal, very personal to her son. Rogers notes, “He enjoyed immensely these songs to sing on his own. They were challenging and yet singable. And he loves the bass.”
On this recording, the resilient flowing pulse of Rick Strong’s bass reminds me of how Freddie Green, Count Basie’s longtime guitarist, used to explain his job description: “I keep the rhythm wave going.” And the kids get their kicks in their call-and-response interaction with Louise’s singing – and then in their own solo flights of scatting.
Around the country, there are sounds of surprise – including self-surprise – as jazz becomes the educational foundation of what will be a lifelong involvement in music. Kids learn, by being in the music, why jazz has become an international common language. With me, jazz became a natural and essential part of my life when I was eleven years old. (We didn’t have swinging pre-kindergarten classes at the William Lloyd Garrison Elementary School in Boston.) From that age on, I could never get enough of the music – especially at those times when I was down and nothing else could lift me up.
Today’s kids also learn, over time, the stories of Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and the glorious range of other emphatically individual musicians. These jazz greats, who were so collectively attentive to one another, created the soul of the American experience. They created something so powerful that even dictators like Hitler and Stalin could not exterminate jazz in their own countries.
Telling what it’s like teaching kids jazz, Louise Rogers says, “The look of sheer joy when these children are scatting, improvising with kazoos, or singing the blues about cleaning up their room makes me realize exactly why I’m doing this.”
Louise Rogers and Rick Strong are making a vital contribution to the re-energizing of American education at its base. After all, who wouldn’t want to go to a school where there’s time and room to swing? The continual interaction between kids as they become part of the music are an education in democracy. The late Martin Williams, the premier American writer on jazz, spoke of this educational foundation:
“The high degree of individuality, together with the mutual respect and cooperation required in a jazz ensemble mean that it is as if jazz were saying to us that not only is far greater individuality possible... but that such individuality, far from being a threat to a cooperative social structure, can actually enhance society.”
And it’s also fun to find a common groove.
- Nat Hentoff, author of American Music Is (Da Capo Press)
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