Spreading the Blues Around

Dane Gillebrand knew zilch about the blues and even less about philanthropy when he left South Africa for college in America at 18. That was 1993, when Gillebrand’s life plan seemed so simple: He would graduate from film school at Florida State University, move to Hollywood and make great movies to entertain humanity.

Of course, real life intervened. The lanky young man, whose South African accent is still as broad as Brooklynese, couldn’t have known he’d be lonely at Florida State. Or that a blind blues musician would become a kind of surrogate father. Or that he would come to love the blues as much as his mentor. He could not have predicted that his greatest goals would be fulfilled--graduation magna cum laude, a job in L.A. helping produce films--and he would suddenly find it all meaningless.

He had no idea, he says, that a river of giving ran deep within him. Or that the tumult and gloss of movies would seem dull compared with helping kids find meaningful lives through the music that inspired the likes of Elvis and the Rolling Stones. And the thought certainly never occurred to him, he says, that by the age of 25, which he is this year, he would be the founding father of the Sir Charles Blues Lab--and would qualify as one of America’s new-wave volunteers.

When history is written decades from now about the revolution in American giving, it will feature hundreds of eccentric personal tales like Gillebrand’s--stories of young and old who surmounted obstacles and then formed nonprofit groups to help others do the same.

Gillebrand drives an ’86 Buick Skylark, lives in a small space near La Brea and Sunset, and no, Regis, he doesn’t want to be a millionaire. Not this year, anyway. His mission is to “enrich the lives and minds of young people by providing them with musical instruments and helping them participate in the great cultural tradition of blues.”

Why blues?

“Because you can learn to play by just listening to it. You don’t have to read music,” Gillebrand says. “Once you master about three chords, you can transpose them to any key. Basically, that’s all you need. You can jam with professionals, with any blues group anywhere. Imagine sitting up there and being a part of that.” It makes kids want to practice, he says. “They find talent they never knew they had. It changes lives.”

Gillebrand ought to know. He experienced it all, firsthand, under the tutelage of “Sir Charles” Atkins in Florida. The experience changed his life, his goals and his feelings of competence, he says. So he’s trying to pass it on to kids who probably need it more than he ever did.

A Bright Spot in the Inner City

Take the Harbor Freeway to 110th and San Pedro on any Tuesday. Hang a few lefts, and you arrive at Locke High School, where you can see what Gillebrand is really all about. Locke is in the heart of L.A.’s “inner city”--a euphemism that somehow deadens all hope of finding loveliness there. Even the school’s soft drink machine is so heavily caged that the $1 colas can barely be extricated by human hands. But wander down the dingy hall to the cavernous music room (actually four bare walls and a floor, until gleaming new instruments emerge from a locked closet), and you are suddenly in blues heaven.

On this day, DeShawn Edmond, 15, is on drums; Norman Jackson, 18, expertly tickles the ivories; Moises Rosales, 15, plays bass guitar--all of them backing a petite Locke senior, Safiya Baidi, who sings of lost love like some kind of earthbound angel. The atmosphere is electric.

Soon, you notice others in the room, quietly practicing on the sidelines, sharing techniques and taking turns in the ensemble. This loose collaboration turns out to be what the Blues Lab is all about. A place where kids who never thought they had musical talent can discover that they do. Where kids who can’t read music can learn to make it anyway. A place where master musicians drop in to show novice kids the basics of the blues. Until the lab began, most kids in the room had never heard of this music so indigenous to America--music that historians say began as field hollers on plantations, with a “call and response” style that eventually matured into the sound known worldwide as the blues.

Lester Chambers, a revered bluesman-about-town, is in the room this day, informally showing kids what he does best: play harmonica and sing. Gillebrand phoned Chambers a few months back after hearing one of his recordings on “The Geezer Show” on the Pacifica radio network.

“Dane asked me to come see what the Blues Lab is all about. I got so involved I couldn’t stop,” Chambers says. “It was just so right, like my prayer to God being answered--to find something beautiful to do, and beautiful people to do it with.”

K.K. Martin, a Delta blues guitarist who won the L.A. House of Blues Outstanding Artist award for 1999, drives up from Orange County for the lab, held each week from 3 to 6 p.m. Martin is so keen on the project that his record company is a sponsor. He hopes to “spread this idea throughout L.A.--and then the whole United States.”

The kids are blessed. Their high school music teacher for the last two years has been bassist Harvey Estrada of Otis Day and the Nights. Estrada heard what Gillebrand was doing and decided to incorporate the lab into the school’s music curriculum.

“Blues attracts young people,” Estrada says. “It’s not complicated to play, like classical or jazz. It doesn’t use programmed music. It’s a pure form of self-expression, and the kids feel close to it. Blues have been out of musical fashion for decades, ‘and so for today’s kids, blues is brand new.”

Watching Kids Come Alive to Music

The lab has been open at Locke since September, and Estrada sees it “changing lives. When the kids realize they can play, they start to identify with the music, they go home and practice so they can perform well.”

Gillebrand gets them gigs. They performed at the recent National Assn. of Music Manufacturers show in L.A., and at the Martin Luther King Day celebration at House of Blues.

“You know what a great feeling that is? Being good enough to perform?” Gillebrand asks. “Kids are starting to come from all over the Los Angeles area--Gardena, Hollywood, San Fernando Valley--to join the lab.”

Moises, a 10th grader at Locke, is a big fan of the lab and what he’s learned there. “The blues helps me out. It’s the basis of all music. If you don’t know the blues, you don’t know nothin’.”

So far, Gillebrand has provided some top-flight new equipment (donated by musician Jackson Browne and such music firms as Sam Ash, Roland, Pignose and Samick) to three other schools as well: Henry Clay Middle School in Watts, Hollywood High School and Washington Prep in South Central. He selected those schools because he found they have “excellent and dedicated music teachers who go beyond the call of duty to promote music,” even with limited resources.

“First I investigated schools in the L.A. area. I found there were no guitars, which is the most-played instrument kids hear today,” Gillebrand says. “So much music is guitar-driven, but there are no guitars. No P.A. systems, either. And Hollywood High’s worn-out piano was unplayable, with sharp-edged keys that could almost stab your fingers. Imagine that, in the recording and musical capital of the world!”

For now, music teachers at the three other schools use the donated instruments for classes, and Gillebrand plans to open full-fledged labs there soon. “We’re finally getting enough volunteers--great musicians eager to participate,” Gillebrand says. So he will expand, offering more top-of-the-line guitars, amps, drums, keyboards and other instruments donated by firms eager to help the program and, perhaps, imprint their names on the minds of young wannabe musicians, who may come back to buy some day.

How did a white South African film student get so hooked on American blues--and what does Sir Charles have to do with it?

Gillebrand’s own story has a plot line worthy of a movie of the week. He was a rich little boy who went to private schools in Johannesburg. His father owned property and businesses, designed race cars and dabbled in music in his spare time. His mother is a direct descendant of Johannes Pretorius, for whom the South African cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria were named. Gillebrand was a loner from the start, he says. A boy who made friends easily but didn’t “belong” in any group.

Growing up under apartheid, he worried about the neighbors down the road from his family’s luxury home, neighbors who had no plumbing or heat, “who basically lived in shacks.” His father apparently worried about them too. At one point, Gillebrand Senior tried to invent a new kind of low-cost housing that would afford South African blacks some of the same amenities as whites. His father then declared bankruptcy when Gillebrand was 13.

This put a crimp in the family’s spending habits. Still, they managed to send him off to college in America, to follow his movie-making dream. Gillebrand brought with him a guitar he’d gotten as a teen but had never learned to play very well.

“I never even knew how to tune it properly,” he says.

Life so far from his family was problematic.

“I missed them a lot, but we had no money for me to fly back and forth, even at Christmas.” He was still a loner, he says, making friends but searching for something he couldn’t define. “Then I heard about Sir Charles Atkins. He is a blind blues artist, who plays piano, sings, writes his own songs--kind of a living legend around Tallahassee and northern Florida. He’s an FSU graduate with a doctorate and is a music professor at the school. An amazing man who created something called the Blues Lab to which everyone is welcome, whether you’re a music student or not.”

Gillebrand was not. But he went to check it out.

“I was a novice with a guitar,” he says. “I stumbled in, and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Five guitar players, all teaching each other how to play. Piano players, drummers, bass players . . . everybody trading off, showing each other licks, giving each other space. The music wasn’t too loud, anyone could play or sing. Sir Charles taught how to discover the music for ourselves, to listen and try to emulate. He’d play records and say, ‘Now listen for that note,’ or, ‘Can you hear that chord? It’s a G flat major 7.’ ”

Atkins was blinded at age 4 in an accident, and Gillebrand thinks his teaching method is a refinement of the way he taught himself to play--by listening and duplicating what he heard. Gillebrand’s usually languid tone is animated here, as if recalling the rapture of learning to play, of four college years in which he stayed with the lab (“even though it was only a one-credit course”) and became the musician’s disciple and good friend.

“There were so many cool things, such total treats: We’d jam for the student body, and if Charles thought we were passionate and had tried real hard, he’d invite individuals to come and jam with him at clubs around town, sometimes even take a solo. As long as you’re in the right key with this music, you really can’t go wrong.”

When Gillebrand arrived in L.A. he took a job with “a very dynamic, independent producer. I learned about the film business in the year I was an apprentice.” But he didn’t play much music that year, he recalls. He had rented space in a house where the landlord prohibited musical instruments because previous tenants had been too noisy.

“I had a 9 to 5 existence, driving to Century City every day,” he says. “In the back of my mind, I was always thinking about the Blues Lab, the music and the things Charles and I had often talked about: how this kind of lab should be in every school.

“Charles wanted kids to be free to come and jam with their instructors, not an elitist kind of program where music is too advanced and too structured.”

Gillebrand says he saved money all that year, developed a business plan and applied for status as a nonprofit organization.

“I didn’t tell Charles; I wanted to wait and see what would happen,” he says. But he named his music program for the man who’d invented it and who earned the moniker “Sir” from Florida State students who used it as a mark of respect.

The Sir Charles Blues Lab was incorporated as a nonprofit group in August 1998. Kurt Kunert, a friend who believed in the project, liquidated his small 401(k) plan to help Gillebrand get a start. Gillebrand spent it on guitars, drums, keyboards and the like. Then manufacturers heard about the idea and started donating other essential musical equipment. Gillebrand is hopeful that Sir Charles labs will open in schools around the city.

Sir Charles Atkins hopes so too. He’s willing to fly here, he says, when Gillebrand sends the ticket. But that won’t happen any time soon. Gillebrand works only part-time jobs and doesn’t draw a salary from the lab--there are no funds to draw it from, he says. And, if money did come in, he’d put it all toward the kids and the program.

“Sir Charles and I used to talk about that a lot. The only thing that matters is helping kids make music. So many kids have no entry into a world where they feel cool, competent, where they can participate in something totally good and awesome. The Blues Lab is for kids to find a way into the world of people who feel good about themselves.”

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* To contact the Sir Charles Blues Lab, call (323) 512-2977 or e-mail Gillebrand at info@blueslab.com. The lab’s Web site is at https://www.blueslab.com.

* Bettijane Levine can be reached at bettijane.levine@latimes.com.