Hopefully, for Black History Month, you spent some quality time teaching your kids about Black musicians, and the fact that Black American Music is the root of everything we value. Sure, I enjoy & have spent a lot of time with music by long-dead European white guys, but the stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning is all resultant of Black American Music.

You should also teach it beyond February.

This goes for every demographic you might teach. Every child needs to learn about Black American Music. Jazz is a huge base of our music history standards, and a cornerstone within our improvisation standards as well. But teaching about Black American Music goes beyond just teaching standards. Students need to understand the cultural context of the music they appreciate. Black American Music should be taught for the betterment of society. Learning about the importance of Black American Music itself might not directly reduce racism, but at least it will teach children the truth.

One of the lessons I taught in my classroom this year was a lesson based on Gang Starr’s “Jazz Thing”. I wrote about this song years ago, as it had been brought to my attention as a wonderful & particularly creative example of jazz sampling. In the early 90s, it seemed that lots of hip-hop artists were sampling from jazz artists & almost remixing their way into a new bebop era. NWA had put in a foothold in the late 80s, but after Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Tupac, and Biggie took over a few years into the 90s, gangster rap dominated the airwaves for years, and jazz-based samples took a cultural & commercial backseat.

My oldest current students were born in 2009. This definitely affects the way they perceive older popular music. I did a lesson plan featuring a Lady Gaga song with them in December and many of them had never heard of Lady Gaga. Some of these kids seem to indicate that they had never interacted with hip-hop at all. I mentioned Kendrick Lamar to them, and while some of them knew the name, they all nodded knowingly when I told them that he’d done all of the music for Black Panther.

For the full lesson, here’s a basic outline:

• Put together a slideshow that preceded a guided listening & discussion of “Jazz Thing”. This was a large portion of a single class, after warm-up, body percussion, individual assessments of other items, and some other start of class items.

• I will say that my students had amazing questions about copyright & sampling, and many of them I could not fully answer. They have such curiosity, and I was really grateful to hear from them.

• In the second class I spent on this lesson, I split them up into larger groups (3-4 per class) and asked that they create “combos”. I had made “trading cards” for the 14 jazz musicians mentioned by Gang Starr in the song. The cards each had the musician’s black & white photo on the front, along with two small bits of biographical information on the back. I asked that the kids create a combo with a good variety of musicians — not just a saxophone quartet.

• I played “Jazz Thing” again during the formation of combos, and then I played for them short snippets of the artists they’d chosen for the combos.

• Based on a Spotify playlist I created, I played for them what their “combo” might sound like, giving them short snippets of each of these artists playing or singing. They loved this part. I made sure if it came up, however, to play “Salt Peanuts” (with a famed intro by Max Roach) as they were leaving class. It got them kind of riled up & laughing. I told them frankly — some artists, like Charles Mingus, took the music they wrote very seriously, while other pieces, like “Salt Peanuts”, were intended to be more fun.

They really responded to the activity, and in one class, we ran out of time and did not get to listen to a group’s “combo.” This happened nearly two weeks ago, and those kids have been complaining non-stop about not listening to their combo.

Overall, they loved the lesson, they loved the incorporation of hip-hop (although I had to prep them for “Jazz Thing” — the opening minute is a quick moving pastiche of samples). While our school news talked about a famous Black American each morning on the announcements, the day they discussed Louis Armstrong, that particular class of 5th grades knew what was up.

So the lesson plan is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iqI8eHv7cVRAc9l6wcUhPW9Px9dxcmeJym59QWwNmuA/edit?usp=sharing

The slideshow (which I’m kind of proud of) is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15woskTeI93CSQtvTwNkigRJbdUg2MrX_/view?usp=sharing

And the info I printed out (with all “labeled for reuse” photos, I think) & made into trading cards is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iqI8eHv7cVRAc9l6wcUhPW9Px9dxcmeJym59QWwNmuA/edit?usp=sharing

BONUS! I’m not going to give away things on her behalf, but my pal Sarah Joncas has a template for making your OWN composer trading cards. You can find her at her twitter account, where she posts lots of great things in general.