Sharing the Art of Enlightenment : Education: Grammy-winning producer Andre Fischer tells Inglewood teen-agers that success isn’t just about material things.

If Andre Fischer, a two-time Grammy Award-winning music producer, needed proof that his visit with Inglewood youngsters Wednesday was a success, he got it when a 16-year-old girl approached him, shook his hand and said simply, “I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

What Fischer talked about in Morningside High School’s auditorium was “enlightenment”--not the kind, he insisted, that makes for material gains such as the cellular phone in his briefcase, the publicist trailing him or his double-breasted suit, silk tie and expensive Italian loafers.

“I’m here,” Fischer told the youths, all from poor families and part of the city’s federally funded summer jobs program, “because I owe everyone. Because my parents and my elders taught me and told me things . . . with that one stipulation that whatever they told me and taught me I had to pass on.”

Enlightenment, Fischer told the youths, is learning to accept responsibility for their actions and to use every experience--painful or thrilling--as an excuse to learn something that might help in the future.

Fischer was the eighth in a series of speakers from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences to visit Morningside this summer, where 50 youths ages 14 to 18 are staging a presentation of the Broadway musical “The Wiz.”

The teen-agers are being paid $4.25 an hour to learn to dance, sing, act, paint props and handle the lighting for the show, which will be presented next week in four free performances for city residents.

None of the young cast members has had training in live performing, which Fischer, a musician himself, likened to “standing naked in the wind.”

Stressing that he has made mistakes himself (the cocaine use he has ended, the three broken marriages before his current one to singer Natalie Cole), Fischer urged the youths to “blow up” their heads, meaning develop a sense of self-esteem. That’s something no one can take away from you, said Fischer, a 43-year-old father of four.

“If you need 10 people to justify your existence, you may be in the hands of fools,” he told the youths, urging them not to make excuses for themselves though they may have come from broken or troubled homes.

When he was a teen-ager in inner-city Los Angeles, Fischer said, people’s lives there were not much different than they are today. “Brothers were standing on street corners with signs saying they needed money. They’d wash your car windows.”

Today, there’s just more of everything--the poverty, the joblessness, the homelessness--said Fischer, a vice president in the black music division of MCA (Music Corporation of America), where a youngster can be turned into a recording sensation over night.

As for police brutality, Fischer said, he knew about that too. He was swept off the streets during the Watts riots and kept in jail without cause for two weeks, he said.

“I know how it feels to run with homeys,” Fischer said, turning only briefly to the gang warfare that has decimated the young black male and Latino populations in inner-city neighborhoods. “But not the kind of homeys that make me die and bring disfavor on my family.”

The recording artists and musicians who are truly successful, Fischer stressed, are those who give back to the neighborhoods where they were raised. “The answer is not to (make) a record,” he said. “Everybody wants to leave the neighborhood. How many want to come back?”

Fischer brought with him Damien Hall, a founding member of Guy, a rhythm and blues group he formed with brothers and friends. Hall has since struck out on his own, recording his own music, forming his own record company and hoping to launch young artists.

Fischer pointed to Hall as an example of a talented artist who can tackle various projects because he knows his self-worth and can nurture talent in others.

“That’s why he’s standing here,” said Fischer, who was once the drummer and producer for the rhythm and blues group Rufus and its lead singer, Chaka Khan. “That’s why his rent is paid. He’s not on drugs. He doesn’t treat women bad.”

Asked by one member of the audience what kept them focused on their professional goals, Hall said it was his father, a strong parent who served as a role model for Hall and his brothers.

Fischer was more blunt, saying poverty or fear of it kept him focused on the tasks needed to make him a professional success.

“I didn’t want to stand on a corner with a sign saying I was a Vietnam vet, can you give me some money,” he said.

Among the other recording and music luminaries who have talked to the youngsters this summer are Mark (Aldo) Miceli, who won a Grammy for a Madonna video he co-directed; vocal coaches Elisabeth Howard and Howard Austin; Nik Venet, a music director and producer; and recording engineer Taavi Motet, who has worked with such stars as Gladys Knight, Bobby Brown, Teddy Pendergrass, Patti LaBelle, 2 Live Crew and Jody Watley.

Cities in Schools, a nationwide, nonprofit group with an office in Inglewood, helped NARAS set up the visits by the entertainers and recording artists this summer. Cities in Schools gets its funding from corporations and foundations and aims to bring private support and enrichment programs into public schools.

Its executive director, Elaine Parker-Gills, said the music industry visitors have done more than serve as role models for the young people.

The youths, she said, need “to know somebody is interested in them.” To keep teen-agers from dropping out of school, she said, “you have to build their self-esteem. Arts is a vehicle for that.”