Thunder Soul: Creating a love for music and performing

The role of a band teacher is to pass on the joy of playing music to students by giving them opportunities to play and express themselves. Music director of the Kashmere high school stage band, Conrad “Prof” Johnson gave his students just that. In the movie Thunder Soul we are given the backstory of this amazing high school band from Texas in the 70s that played funk music on a professional level.

Prof created love for music in his band program by tailoring the music selections to the group; playing funk tunes instead of old fashioned jazz. The Kashmere stage band started out playing the typical repertoire of high school bands at that time which consisted of jazz standards and ballads like “Summertime.” Prof noticed that his students were becoming bored with the tune selection of the group and would watch them start to jam on funk grooves after rehearsals ended. The popular music artists during this time period were James Brown, Earth Wind and Fire, Parliament Funkadelic, and Sly and the Family Stone. Prof intuitively changed the band's’ repertoire to all funk tunes that he either wrote or arranged himself. Once the high schoolers had music that they could connect to, they became self motivated and evolved into a professional level ensemble.

Not only was this band program a music learning vehicle, but Prof also taught his students how to become hard working men and women. The impression that this man had on his students was so strong that thirty years later they reassembled the band to put on a show in his honor.

Thunder Soul is an inspiring movie for all audiences, but especially music teachers. Prof created a successful band out of 16 year olds by making the music that they performed relevant to them and the audience. Instead of picking the usual jazz selections for stage bands, Prof gave his band something that they could latch onto and make their own. Playing funk was used to educate the students in playing as an ensemble, being good showmen, and working hard towards a goal. This film motivates me as a music teacher to one day build a strong band program by picking the music that the kids really want to play. I hope that i can create an inspirational learning environment in my classroom that resembles that of the Kashmere high school band room.

Audition Lesson Reflection

Recently I taught a ten minute general music lesson on copyright to my music methods class. The lesson went better than I expected, but overall it needs some work. Some of the main issues that I think my lesson had were that I didn’t have the class play or sing, I started the class with a slow pace, and I jumped from one important topic to a totally different one.

I started my class by passing out a questionare that would serve as a class conversation starter. I like the idea of having the class do a worksheet, but the contents of the questionare didn’t really have anything to do with the listening examples that I played later in the lesson. The questions that were on the worksheet dealt with artists losing income because of free online access to music. If I use this questionare in the future, I will gear the remainder of the lesson towards piracy and getting music for free.

After the class discussion, I played the song “My Lord” by George Harrison and compared it to “He’s so fine” by the Chiffons. I like the listening comparison, but I needed to do more research about the court case. I also need to plan the use of technolgy in my lesson and some playing. Overall, I liked the way that I led the class. I want to make a better lesson unit that is more focused on specific topics and has more playing built into it.

Some questions that I need to investigate are: Can chord progressions be copyrighted? How do you protect yourself against copyright infringement? I would like to incorporate those topics into my unit better. I have to remember that my job is to teach the class about copyright laws - how am i going to do that? I want to teach the class how to copyright their own ideas - how do I teach that? I will try to fix these issues in my next shot at teaching this lesson.