“Say it with me now, doo wah-wah,” professional trumpet player Terrell Stafford told his blushing teenage audience.
The acclaimed musician came to Red Mountain High School on Wednesday to instruct students in the 15-piece big band. But he spent much of his time encouraging students to put their horns down and sing out loud.
Visiting Mesa from New York City’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, Stafford spent two hours with students in the band, holding a clinic as part of a project started at ASU to bring jazz into the classroom.
The project, called “Jazz from A to Z: Bringing Jazz to Mesa Schools,” is run by ASU history instructor Marcie Hutchinson, who wanted to see a program focused on integrating American Jazz history into high school history, music and dance classrooms.
Hutchinson and students in her fall history class helped coordinate the program through funding from the Helios Education Foundation grant, which gives money to programs to enrich education.
Eli Yamin, the director of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Middle School Jazz Academy, helped shape the program during its first workshops with students and teachers in October at the Mesa Arts Center.
There are currently 50 high school students participating in the program, which helps give teachers knowledge and confidence to teach about the role of music and culture in history, Hutchinson said.
“[American history] is not just about presidents and wars, it’s about what kept us going as a people,” Hutchinson said.
Next year, Hutchinson hopes to expand the program to other schools in Mesa through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She hopes to eventually affect every student taking an American history class in Mesa.
Jazz at Lincoln Center would also like to expand its presence in the Southwest, Stafford said after the Wednesday clinic. There aren’t as many opportunities for students to get exposed to jazz in Phoenix as there are in New York City and other cities on the East Coast, he said.
“This is the first of many workshops in the Southwest,” Stafford said.
Students and teachers will participate in full-day workshops Thursday and Friday to help build a curriculum that incorporates music and dance into history classes.
Brad Kaufman, a history teacher at Red Mountain High School, said he has been teaching music in his history classroom since he worked with Hutchinson five years ago. He personally assigns students to learn and perform a historical American song and dance as part of their grade.
“The study of art and music gives students a better understanding of people’s emotions at the time,” Kaufman said.
Red Mountain High School senior Jon Woodmansee, who took Kaufman’s class, said the program gave him a better understanding of the social and cultural aspects of history.
“If you just take a social history class or a politics class, you miss the big picture,” Woodmansee said. “Nothing is one dimensional.”
Reach the reporter at mshinn@asu.edu
