The High School Band May Not Be Beat After All

Rap music pulsates from the line of buses in front of University High School on the Westside. Just inside the main entrance, two students josh with the school cop in singsong cadence. The janitor sways to the beat spilling from his earphones. It’s 1:40 on a sunlit afternoon and the first dismissal bell has rung.

Follow the blue-jeaned girl blowing a long trail of soap bubbles; follow the bubbles down the long stairway from the main building, past the blooming roses, to the grassy field below, and back about 30 years.

At the bottom of those stairs, in Room M-1, John Magruder is still hanging out where he’s been since 1964, with the hip cats. He has spent some long, dispiriting years there, amid the music stands and dusty instrument cases. Now, like his counterparts, Magruder, 72, is hoping Los Angeles Unified School District officials will make good on their promise of earlier this spring to revive music and arts instruction.

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When I was John Magruder’s student, from 1966 to 1969, daylight filtered into that bungalow through a high row of windows. There were more than 100 of us in the Uni High Marching Band then; every seat in M-1 was filled and then some. Our band uniforms, brilliant orange with navy braid and trim, were scratchy and hot as blazes when the Santa Anas blew, but we looked sharp and we knew it. If Uni’s football team stank on the field, we in the bandstand were hot.

M-1’s high windows were boarded up years ago to keep out vandals who ripped off $40,000 worth of instruments during the 1980s. The band and the orange uniforms: gone.

Magruder once directed a band deep enough to form a map of California during halftime, and facile enough to belt out a song for each major city in the state. We who took music fairly casually (I played French horn) were impressed to have a real musician for a teacher. Magruder’s professional gigs as a clarinet and sax player earned him an entry in the Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Seventies.

The trademark red goatee is now mostly white, but he still has some of that wiry energy I remember. His paying work now tends toward bar mitzvahs and weddings, but on Wednesday nights in M-1, after the kids are gone, Magruder’s musical contemporaries drop by to visit and shake the walls with the big-band sound.

Uni High hasn’t had a proper marching band for eight years. Magruder conducts a small jazz ensemble and an orchestra that’s only slightly bigger.

It’s been like that across many school districts in Southern California. Where most every high school in the L.A. district had a full orchestra during the ‘50s and ‘60s, by the late ‘80s many had just a handful of kids in performing groups. Others had none at all.

Proposition 13-driven budget cuts launched the slide, zeroing out money for the beginning music classes traditionally taught in middle school and for high school performing groups. Tougher UC requirements left college-bound students with fewer elective slots in which to take music, and creation of music magnet programs in some high schools attracted some of the best players from around the city, sometimes leaving schools like Uni with less proficient or less interested musicians.

The size of Uni’s band dropped from a peak of 110 to 30, then 24 and then just four before it folded in 1990. The orchestra dwindled from 60 to 14 and then nothing for two years.

“I just don’t get a lot of kids who can play anymore,” Magruder says sadly.

He brags easily about former students who made it big. But they graduated before Uni’s orchestra and band began to implode--before Magruder, hanging onto a few jazz students, was reassigned to remedial math and English classes.

“It was grim,” he remembers.

In March, the Board of Education signaled its desire to reverse the drift and decline, adopting standards designed to give every student knowledge of music, dance, drama and visual art. Instruction will begin in elementary school, and high school graduates will be required to demonstrate an ability to interpret and create art. Where the money will come from and how the standards will be implemented are still undetermined.

At some high schools, such as Granada Hills, Fremont and Garfield, music programs have already rebounded. But for Uni, it will be a steep, uphill climb.

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Kids such as 11th-grader Derrick Wells and 12th-grader Berzelius “Bert” Baker, who drop by M-1 to shoot the breeze with Magruder, are Uni’s musical present and its future.

Derrick comes from a large family in which “everyone plays something.” He drums for a Crenshaw-area drill team on the weekends along with Bert. At Uni, he plays in the jazz ensemble--trombone, drums, whatever part Magruder misses most that day--and helps keep the instruments in repair.

“Mr. Magruder needs me for the Christmas concerts,” Derrick says shyly, sitting amid the many empty chairs in M-1. “I like music.”

I liked music too during those years. It wasn’t so much the music-making itself, although the memory of those swirling melodies and the squeaks of missed notes fusing into a rich, grand sound still gives me pleasure. Mostly, though, to be part of the Uni High Warrior Marching Band was to be part of a special club, to experience camaraderie and attention of a sort rare in high school.

I see that still in this worn bungalow with these students: a chance to stand out, to be noticed and valued by a teacher, even when the academic thing isn’t working so well.

“Hey, Mr. Magruder, do you still have that card I gave you for your 70th birthday?” Bert asks. “Sure do,” Magruder smiles. Bert grins back.

“Look, man,” Derrick nudges Bert as they find Magruder’s picture in my old yearbook.

“Mr. Magruder!” Bert says. “You had hair!”

Hair and a big band that just might be coming back.