everyday heroes
The Music Man
Feb 1, 2007 11:33 AM
Seventy-six trombones led the big parade. Well, not 76. One, pre-owned.
And there was no big parade, actually. Just a handful of talented Brooklyn kids with big dreams and no uniforms.
Today, they’re singing a different tune. The McKinney High Marching Band is taking the streets by storm with 70 players in plumed hats doing amazing things with 70 shiny instruments and a lot of heart and soul.
It’s not your father’s marching band. No tara-boom-de-ay. “March King” John Phillip Sousa, whose compositions evoke ticker tape and homecoming heroes, must be hip-hopping in his grave.
The kids are disciplined but not regimented. They march, but they also glide, sway, dance, jump — their entire beings alive with music by the likes of the Isley Brothers, Michael Jackson, Beyonce and yes, with the beat of classic stadium songs, played with their own stamp on them. Their bodies are extensions of their instruments as they march to the beat of a different drummer.
The man behind the big sound is Michael Walker, musician, music teacher, band director at the McKinney Secondary School of the Arts in Fort Greene, chair of its visual and performing arts department and former chapter leader. He’s a lover of big sound, a virtuoso on the jazz tuba.
“You can’t take any credit away from Sousa,” says Walker, former lead vocalist of the R&B/funk recording group called The Fatback Band. “He was a great composer of songs appropriate for his time. But as musical styles change, so should a marching band’s repertoire, to show not only the virtuosity of the players but to reflect the genres that people are listening to, unless you have a core sound, do all the military and patriotic things, and don’t venture over into R&B or other contemporary stuff.”
With more than a little Brooklyn pride, he recalled the day when his kids marched in the Veterans Day Parade. “A lot of bands were from places like Wisconsin, and the most up-to-date thing they did was ‘Louie Louie.’ In those bands there’s a whole lot of them, but they don’t play with heart. In New York, our bands don’t have to be big in number because our kids play with everything they’ve got.”
Due largely to Walker’s diehard efforts, the band is one of just a few full-time school marching bands in the entire city run by the school itself instead of by a community-based organization.
At McKinney “since dirt,” he laughs, recalling the formative years nearly two decades ago when the struggling institution was growing from the ground up into an arts school, Walker started small. A few kids and instruments, a few more, some modest performances in school lobbies.
“You’ve got to show something before you can get something,” Walker said of the fund-raising process. After he captured the hearts and minds of VH1 and now 21st Century Project Arts, the big band is on the map.
To hear him describe it, running a marching band is like being mayor of a small city. With the invaluable help of assistant Peter Wilhelm, Walker serves as arranger of events, trouble shooter, fund-raiser, overseer of the drum lines and of purchasing and repairing instruments, and organizer of meetings, flag units, uniforms and rehearsals. He is recruiter, auditioner, conductor and music arranger.
He also oversees the majorettes, a group of 15 girls who do a tight, mind-blowing mix of modern, hip-hop, African and Middle Eastern dance with Broadway chorus line thrown in. Their talent is nurtured and honed by dance teacher Zakiya Harris.
It’s not just a love of music that keeps Walker at full-time boogie. “I’ll keep whacking my head up against the wall like this as long as I get kids into college every year,” he said.
With the school’s “no-pass, no-play” policy, the practice of all arts teachers to review every report card and collaborate with academic teachers, student outcome has greatly improved. A scholarship program enables graduates to attend a number of colleges throughout the country.
“As long as there’s breath in my body, I will keep doing this until student outcomes are raised high,” Walker said from the podium at a training conference for after-school program directors, held at the Brooklyn Marriott in December.
Walker has a democratic teaching style that gives students artistic freedom along with responsibility and accountability for everything from score arrangements to the leadership, organizational and business skills required to get their music out into the community.
His long love affair with music and teaching, however, has not been without the blues — the heartbreak when a promising student is lost to the streets. “You realize you can’t save them all. You just save the ones in front of you,” he said.
And so he keeps his eyes on the big picture and his ears on the big sound of the marching band, which was the star of an afternoon performance at the training conference. The next night, Walker’s 20-piece jazz band, The McKinney All-Stars, stole the show with its smooth professional sound and sophistication. Later, the rich, many-voiced McKinney HS Mass Choir, conducted by vocal director Clifford Smith, captivated everyone within hearing distance, wait staff included.
You could see and hear the incredible rapport when, the official concert over, Walker added his tenor/baritone voice to the mix, Smith his heavy bass, then students and teachers sang together and back and forth to one another. Long after the candles were snuffed out in the hotel ballroom and the florescent lighting was switched on, long after the waiters whipped off the elegant white linen from plain gray tables and people started to go home, they carried on.
They simply wanted to sing.
