Chico Perez and Stan Kipper were about halfway through the drum lesson when they paused for a life lesson.
"We heard there was some trash-talking," Kipper said to the nine young children gathered in the basement of the Meadowbrook Community Center on a recent Monday evening.
A few members of the group had been teasing one of the other members.
No, no, no, Kipper said. You're musicians now, you're in a band, that means you respect one another. Then it was back to the drums.
With a $1,500 grant from the city of St. Louis Park, Perez and Kipper are spending six weeks teaching African-based drumming to the racially diverse a! nd economically disadvantaged children of the Meadowbrook Collaborative -- and trying to instill some wisdom along the way.
The two professional musicians and teachers believe playing the drum can change a person's life, as it did theirs.
"We know these kids because we used to be them," said Kipper, recalling their childhood in South Minneapolis.
Perez lived in a low-income neighborhood for a few years as a child, a life he says consisted of "a bed, tomato soup, macaroni and cheese, and a half a box of corn flakes ... It's just total chaos, no real grounding, nothing to really come home to."Just going to the library was a huge thing in my life," he said.
"Going to this [workshop], I know what it does to them and I know I can touch their heart and make them better people."
The Meadowbrook Collaborative is
a partnership among the city, schools, Park Nicollet Health Services and the
Ridgedale YMCA aimed at providing health, edu! cation and safety to a diverse
working-class neighborhood that! often f eels isolated, physically and culturally,
from the surrounding community.
The residents often have come from inner cities, including Minneapolis, Detroit
and Chicago, according to outreach coordinator Linda Trummer.
"They know we have good schools and that our schools will educate their children, and they want a safe place to live," she said.
Like many of the kids at Meadowbrook, Perez and Kipper started out as unlikely allies. They met as teenagers when Kipper's band opened for Perez's at a gig in Robbinsdale in the 1960s.
"Chico is Mexican. I'm black. We had all that goofy neighborhood [stuff] going," said Kipper, who arrived at the gig to find Perez's new drum set already on stage. "At first we were giving each other screwy looks, but that drum set was so beautiful that what happened was we started talking about this drum set. We were both so knocked out, and we were just fronting anyway, you know what I mean, like kids huffing and pu! ffing," he said.
Perez offered to let Kipper play his drums during the gig, a gesture that sparked a friendship that has lasted to this day.
Today, the two teach extensively and perform in the New Primitives, which has won the Minnesota Music Academy award for best reggae group for four straight years.
"We're walking, talking proof that you can be from different backgrounds and have everything come together," Kipper said. "We start with that. We stand in front of the kids. They can see we're from different backgrounds, and we tell them the story that we have about how we met over the music and how the music was the common ground.
"It's important to get the kids into some programs where they can communicate with each other. It's a necessary thing ... it gives them a chance to work together in a different way, it gives them a chance to feel good about what they're doing," Kipper said.
"To me, that's more righteous than getting a! reggae award or myself playing on TV and everybody applauding! me," Perez said. "I feel just fantastic for all the little children that I took care of." .
Contact
us:
(952) 935-9239
trummer.linda@slpschools.org