"What's the root of
D-flat?" Bob Athayde asks the six middle-schoolers in front of him.
"What's the third? What's the fifth? What's the flatted seventh?"
That last one throws them, and Athayde writes the
notes on the whiteboard before gathering the students around his piano and
having them sing the chord.
"If you're playing jazz and you see a symbol and
you don't get it, but your ears guide you, you're cool," Athayde says.
Early jazz greats probably knew little about music theory, he tells them, but
they recognized a D-flat seven when they heard it.
"I think you should make theory practical,"
Athayde adds a few minutes later. "I think you should play it, make it come
alive. It's not on a board. That's just ink."
The six students are among nearly 200 who came to
Stanley Middle School in Lafayette for Athayde's annual Lafayette Summer Music
Jazz Workshop from July 31 to Aug. 5. For six days, musicians from middle school
through adulthood live and breath jazz, attending theory classes, jam sessions
and small group rehearsals in preparation for a six-hour jazz festival at the
end of the week.
This summer marks the 13th year Athayde, Stanley's
music teacher, has organized the workshop. Most participants are from the Bay
Area, but others travel farther. Some come from Southern California and the
Pacific Northwest. One year, a student came from Hong Kong. This year, two students are from New Orleans.
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