Spotlight Band: Jam #1

For the past few months I have been swarmed by toddlers bustling in their dream time hive which oozes with the inebriating nectar of the honey that keeps my pooh belly full and my grizzly beard sticky. Midst their buzzing I have heard their tiny human hearts ticking much faster than my own lethargic muscle and it seems to resemble the rate of change I see in their development. Like beekeepers of a healthy hive, us pre-school parents and mentors, are blessed to see our little bees week to week growth: scissor cutting skills, pencil grip, clean up routines, their first words in their second and third language........ad infinitum.

But as the tick-tock of the heart slows down it seems that so does our rate of change. I look back at the 4 years that I spent in Esparza working with teenagers and although their transformation is now clear, there were months where it felt like nothing was happening. With teens one has to trust much more in the seeds being sown, one has to have much more patience to see the first sprouts. Studio lingo often tickled our ears with the simile of teens and bamboo:  For 5 years bamboo grows its root work before cracking through the soil in search of sunlight.

Last week, my boss asked me to sit in on a few of the older kids' classes to get a feel for the dynamic of the environment. As to be expected I walked into a sheepish sea of eye-contact-avoiding adolescents. I love those first encounters. 4 years of mentoring grants me the confidence that I will win them over sooner or later. With this hand-fold of geniuses it happened much quicker than I thought.

It started off with a little chat with the girl next to me, "Do you like music?". She glared at me with the inflated eyeballs of a toddler under his first firework lit sky on a cloudless fourth of July, before turning away in a giggle to ask her friend in Chinese what the hell I was saying. I insisted a bit and got an answer from the braver one in the pack. Little by little the rest of the group started drawing into our ESL chit chat and after about 5 minutes we had a band: 4 clapping hands, 2 stomping feet, 2 dizi's, 1 erhu, 1 pipa, my piano, and 9 -angelic voices.

Our first scheduled rehearsal was for 8am this morning. I was blessed to spend 15 minutes with a group of teens that have hearts that still beat at the 175bpm that newborn babies do. I hope my heart can sync up with theirs and stay on beat forever.

Click on the video to see what we jammed out!!

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