Low-Profile Programs Give High Hopes to Young Talent

It’s one thing to moan and groan.

Another thing to hew and do.

So you count all the bodies that fell in just one year in Los Angeles and you could mourn until sunset: the multicultural Theatre Center, the Joffrey Ballet’s western home, the hilltop Dance Gallery, the youthful Philharmonic Institute orchestra, the audience-building Philharmonic Style concerts, the dismantled school music and arts programs, the exodus of downtown artists, dispersed as modern rent refugees.

You know it’s tough times when the bookkeepers outnumber the survivors.

But take it from Frank Capra (we lost the film director last year, too). He knew something about uplift and determination with this basic belief: “You cannot pigeonhole the human spirit.”

We identified a few spirited people, people who say that while jump-starts may be in short supply, life and its associated good things must keep on rolling.

These are people who are involved in small-scale operations that don’t always make the public prints but they are trying to make a difference in our public lives. These are people and programs on which futures might be built. They deal largely in four-figure grants and scholarships for young artists and carry such identifications as Spotlight Awards, Bravo Awards, Excellence in Action Awards.

Herb Alpert, brass player and business executive, through his foundation has developed the Excellence in Action program which operates on this simple premise: provide money to young minority musicians who need it for lessons, tuition or for better instruments. It’s into its second series of awards, providing grants ranging from $500 to $5,000 through a series of auditions.

Beside money, it provides two other services: contacts with established professional musicians and evaluations from the same.

The Bravo Awards program has been around somewhat longer, now entering its 11th year of arts support. It comes from a different direction. Its sponsor, the Jeffery Melamed Memorial Fund, honors teachers--both arts teachers for innovative, creative programs as well as non-arts instructors, teachers like Michael Monagan of Los Angeles’ Joseph Widney High School. He was singled out for his work with the young physically challenged last year. The musician-turned-teacher developed a number of musical programs to help his special high school students learn about urban survival--crossing streets, ordering food, remembering addresses--through invented songs, recordings and videos.

Then there’s the Spotlight Awards, perhaps the most energetic and ambitious of these good-hand projects. And this gets us to Fred Roberts, an investment banker--but don’t hold that against him.

Roberts wants to spend so that there will be something left to save.

What he and the Spotlight people think are worth saving are generations of young people in Southern California high schools who yearn to perform, to take their ability to sing and dance and rise above their schools’ inadequate or nonexistent music programs.

Roberts and television director Walter Grauman, who dreamed up the awards program, are teamed in the development of the 4-year-old Spotlight Awards through the Fraternity of Friends, an organization of business and professional men who combine Music Center fund raising with social outings. Roberts oversees the money side of the awards while Grauman looks after the musicians and dancers--the talent, as Hollywood would have it.

Each of the 300 Fraternity members contributes a once-a-year minimum $2,000 to the Music Center. The idea is to get hit only once and if someone wants to exceed the minimum they are free to write bigger checks. The Friends, in effect, have become additional financial muscle behind the Spotlight Awards.

The Awards are into their audition stage currently with young solo artists filing into the fourth floor rehearsal rooms of the Music Center each Sunday afternoon and going for a chance at cash scholarships totaling $45,000. They compete in a series of elimination rounds in six categories: classical dance, instrumental music and voice, and jazz/pop dance, music and voice. Last Sunday, it was semi-final time for high school opera singers from public and private schools throughout Southern California. Next Sunday, jazz dancers literally from everywhere will have their turn.

By next March 10, entrants will come down to the final 12 performing at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in front of an audience and before a panel of professional musicians that includes Paula Kelly, Henry Mancini and Joe Williams. The winners receive $5,000, runners-up $2,500. The scholarship money has been underwritten by Pacific Telesis Foundation, Johnny Carson, philanthropist Helen Bing and composer Jack Eliott. Expansion moneys and volunteer time come from the Fraternity.

The scope of the competition is multilayered. The program is promoted at the high schools, through teachers and at Music Plus stores. Judges go to the schools to evaluate the applicants, providing critiques while narrowing them down to a first round of 400. Then the various competitions are held tournament style: the quarters, the semifinals, the finals. Those who get to the semis also find themselves enrolled in master classes with professionals in their fields.

Roberts sees the Spotlight program filling great crevices in the schools. “Things like music and dance that add quality to life are now missing in so many places,” he says. “There is no enrichment. We are hoping to say to the kids that there is another way, there is another life. If you have a talent, the world does care. There are people in this community who will support your talent, whether you’re a rapper or a violinist.

“If you want to pursue your talent and if you’re good at it, we will try to help.”

There is some talk among the Spotlight sponsors about taking the awards to another level--a live television broadcast, for example, or tapings for classroom audiences, maybe videos.

But for now they’re sticking with the awards show. And in this town, awards shows do seem to flourish, taking on lives of their own.

And life is the hope.