Music Classes Add Positive Note to Prison

The subject of the day’s lecture was time.

The class already knew plenty about the topic. All 16 students in the dimly lit, concrete floor classroom are doing time at Peter Pitchess Honor Rancho, the huge prison complex near Saugus.

This was their daily music class.

“You can cut time up just like it’s a pie,” said teacher Kevin Johnsen, drawing a pie chart on the blackboard. He showed them how notes with different time values could fit together into a measure of music.

“Don’t be intimidated by learning to read rhythm,” Johnsen told the men. “You already know this stuff; some of you play it all the time.

“What we want to do now is to learn how to express it in writing.”

One of the men raised his hand. He said he was a disc jockey. “At a studio I could use a computer that showed all the rhythms,” he said. “It doesn’t look anything like that.”

From the back of the room, Arnell Cooper spoke up. “I play drums and I play sax and other instruments, and I know computers can do a lot,” said Cooper, 28.

“But in my opinion, everyone who works on a computer should know what the music symbols mean. The computer will not save you.”

The students were polite and attentive. Several took notes on everything Johnsen was saying as he stood near a traditional wooden school desk, American flag and map of the states.

If most of the students had not been wearing green outfits stamped “L.A. County Jail” in big letters on the backs, this would seem like a regular classroom.

For Cooper, in jail for writing bad checks, the class provided a chance to increase his training. “I could read notes, but I never knew how to put together chords,” he said.

Johnsen taught him the basics about chords, and Cooper, who is part of a rap group in Los Angeles, practiced on his own.

From under his desk Cooper pulled out the book “Chord Inversions and Chord Symbols” and several notebook sheets that showed chords he had worked out.

“I never really cared about learning this stuff before,” he said. “But I figured up here I had the time.”

Ron Grisom, 41, wrote music and played in a jazz group called the Afro-Mod Quintet in the 1960s. “That was back when everything was ‘mod,’ ” he said with a laugh.

Grisom, who has the huge arms and chest of a serious weightlifter, was in Peter Pitchess for trafficking in drugs. “When I get out,” he said, “I think I’ll be taking over my father’s gardening business in L.A. But I’ll do some music on the side.”

After the break came some performance time on an electronic keyboard and drum set.

Several took turns at the instruments and a couple of the inmates picked up the microphone and rapped.

“Some of the raps can be really interesting,” said Johnsen. That afternoon, Grisom caught the inmates’ attention when he took to the keyboard to play a jazzy “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess.” Applause broke out after Cooper and Johnsen improvised jazz on the keyboard.

“The class is valuable just because when they are here, they are not getting into problems with other inmates,” said Alice Johnson, a county employee in charge of the education programs at the prison. “It’s something positive in their lives.”

With that day’s class nearly over, several of the inmates called out for Walter Johnson to show his stuff at the microphone. Kevin Johnsen struck up a chord on keyboards and Johnson wailed a spiritual that began, “Down at the cross when my savior died . . .”

Even inmates who never left their seats to perform were tapping their feet and bobbing their heads as the singer, in prison for forging prescriptions, gave the song a bluesy edge.

He closed his eyes as he finished, singing over and over, “Glory to his name.”