Radiohead's National Anthem Project/Performance for Jazz Band

Two weeks ago from last Thursday, I had my first concert as a professional music educator. It was a chorus/jazz band concert, and our jazz band played a couple of tunes. They are pretty young, and if you'll recall, the group has a really odd instrumentation, including tenor sax, bari sax, flute, two guitars, one of whom has never really played a guitar before, two drummers who don't/can't read music, three trumpets, and one valve trombone. Yes, my school owns a valve trombone. No, I don't know why, but I'll take it!

Anyway, we played a very straightforward, fun arrangement of James Bond, even though we were missing a few parts. The other song that we played was an arrangement that I wrote of Radiohead's The National Anthem, from their landmark album Kid A. I introduced this song to the students on "National Anthem Day," which was September 14. My 7th grade bass player's mouth was agape when he heard the killer ostinato bassline, the drummers were excited about playing some rock 'n' roll, and kids just mostly all around dug it. So I thought I would write an arrangement that would play to our strengths and maybe even convince some students that improvisation, although dangerous and perhaps nausea inducing, can be an incredible experience.

Anyway, the arrangement was only part of the project. Also included was a recording session, CD releases, improvisation strategies, playing tests, rehearsals, and then the performance.

First, we did a lot of listening to the original and discussed what made the song "work" - lots of tension and release, as well as some insane soloing, including group improv. We then got the bare bones of the tune working so we could play it with reasonable facility, which in and of itself was an enormous challenge. Neither guitar player can read music, and the drummers don't care to. Also this is was challenging because classroom management is an enormous struggle in this class, but that's another post.

At that point, I brought in my Blue Yeti USB microphone and did a quick 'n' dirty recording session. We recorded the bass line and a drum beat so that every kid could take a CD home and practice improvising with it. This part of the whole project was really rushed and not well planned on my part. The recording was of poor quality and it didn't come together incredibly well, but it worked.

Anyway, I handed out the CD to all my kids and set a date for a playing test. The playing test had a very simple rubric - TRY hard, be a little creative, go for it and improvise, and you get a perfect score. Sit there and mope and you don't. Playing tests were to be administered in my office with our recording and were video taped.

In order to facilitate improvisation, I added in a new scale to our warm up regimen. I arranged the tune in Eb, so we had an "Eb Funky Scale," which was the Eb major scale with a flat 6 and 7, which has a very hip, eastern-y sound.

Play with it, and you'll see how well it lends itself to playing around and improvising. We memorized the scale, did lots of call and response, and encouraged a spirit of playfulness using this scale and the groove from National Anthem.

We rehearsed the tune a good deal (fighting behavior and focus issues the whole way - this is my first year, after all!). We played a lot with our Eb funky scale and talked about different improvisation strategies. I had students identify notes that had a lot of tension and notes that offered resolution. One strategy we used was to pick a few notes that felt tense and a few that felt relaxed, and make a melody that plays off of that tension-release. Another strategy was just to simply use the scale running up and down. Yet another approach we attempted was to play what you feel - I have a quote on the wall that says “music is what feelings sound like.” And for sections in the tune where there was a crescendo of multiple soloists going bonkers at the same time, we even worked on soloing by play random notes and sounds, which I believe has its place.

So there’s the narrative form of the lesson plan. Phew. It sounds great, doesn’t it? Heck, how many national standards did we address with this project? How much more did we do than just deficit style teaching? Even though the concert went well, the overall project had some very mixed results. Besides a few students, most were still mortified of improvising and I felt like I was pulling teeth. And I’m pretty certain that NOBODY took home their CD and actually played around with it to try and feel out some cool improv ideas. That’s what hurt the most - I tried to provide an extremely safe way for them to experiment with improvising to develop some self-confidence and nurture a healthy spirit of musical play. And that was a huge swingandamiss

This project mostly underscored for me the difference between a lesson plan on paper and the execution of a lesson plan. Sure, this lesson plan sounds glorious, like you might have read it out of Teaching Music or something, but in reality it was extremely messy and somewhat of a belly flop. My kids still have not bought into me at all, and it’s tough. To be fair, some kids really did well with the improv and you’ll see that on the recording. For now, though, I’m going to keep trying to do as much as I can to give these students great musical and personal experiences, with the idea that this will lead them to buy into what I’m selling.