Talking peppily about music to the Bowles School students this May, it was clear that Holmes could have made a go of it as a grade-school teacher. The support UMass has given has kept me from feeling discouraged. There is a touch of vestigial imperialism, claims Baki, in the idea that children must know their Bartok from their Brahms. I see my role as getting them excited about making sound in time, and making it with other people. Rap music, misunderstood and even loathed by many in the white mainstream, is an outgrowth of a long tradition of wedding word and beat, freestyle music that people without access to expensive instruments have always made.
Music is just something they can do wherever they are.
They don't even need a ball. Yet in our department, we routinely turn out graduates who will make a perfectly good living. If some of the kids squirming in delight at the sounds coming from Jeff Holmes' flugelhorn or Abdul Baki's bongos decide they want to join the 150 music education majors currently at UMass, they, too, may become maintainers of the loop that runs from Springfield to Amherst and back again.