Steve Snelling

A few years ago my friend, Victor Cervantes, a terrific vocalist and great voice teacher, invited me to help him get his new business off the ground by teaching a few lessons at his studio in San Francisco. A little more than three years down the road, Inspire Music Learning Center (in the Sunset) has about 400 students ranging in age from about 4-70 years, and employs around 35 teachers, ranging in experience from college students just getting started, to a handful of career musicians, competition-level performers, and professionals.

One of Vic’s young vocal students, “A”, has a nine-year-old autistic brother, that his mother was hoping could get some exposure to music at the studio. Vic knew I had some experience working with autistic kids (listen to the cut “Daniel” on Perfect Strangers), and he asked me if I could help. So I’ve been working with “B” for about a year. It started out quite slowly, as B is mostly non-verbal, didn’t respond well to direction/redirection, and could only sit still for about five minutes. We persisted.

Early in our interaction, B exhibited some remarkable traits. He would sit at the keyboard, playing vigorously, high and low, soft and loud, approximating the motions of a classical virtuoso – kind of like Bugs doing Shostakovich. Though lacking in harmonic or melodic cohesion, his compositions have a musical grammar and the shape of musical phrases. After a flurry of notes and a thunderous cadence, he sometimes delicately plays notes as low and as high as he can reach, then abruptly throws his hands in the air, as if in victory. Hilarious, and a little eerie: where did he learn this vocabulary? These gestures?

From my own journeys, I have come to appreciate the possibility that we bring into this life experiences beyond the womb, and so it is, I believe, with B. In the months before the holidays, we were learning Jingle Bells. For fun, I played a few minor variations in the middle of demonstrating the tune. B cracked up every time a new variation occurred. He seemed to be getting the musical jokes! That is not a musical awareness typical of nine-year-olds. If I take a musical tangent, maybe swing Long Ago for a few bars, B will push my hands aside and try to imitate my riffs. He ‘gets’ what a tri-tone is.

Today was a mind blower. It’s time to learn a new tune, and on a hunch I started playing a much simplified version of the vamp to “Take Five,” the Paul Desmond tune. Positioning his hands over the keys, I helped him get started (it’s going to take a while), and after a few minutes, he blurted out in a whisper, “Take Five.” I never said it was “Take Five.” Did not mention it at all. A’s piano lesson is right after B’s (B is up to about 20 minutes now), and I played the vamp for him. “Do you recognize this?” I asked him. A said no. B does not read, I don’t think I’ve heard him utter a sentence of more than two words since I’ve known him, and yet, he identifies a vamp from a tune – not even the melody – from a different era altogether. Cue the theremin.

We don’t know what karmic imprints ride with us on our journey from nest to nest. We don’t know what karmic ties we have created in the past, and we don’t know what karmic ripening awaits us at our next destination. Watching these musical urges in B struggle to gain the sunlight has been a humbling experience, and strengthens my belief in the universal law of cause and effect. May I not waste one precious moment of whatever time I have left in this life. (Next week I’ll pull out some Ellington tunes and see how B reacts.)