At Free Music School, Hope Is Instrumental

By all rights, the little school with the ungainly name We the Music should be dead.

It survives, though, even if it’s hanging by a broken chord.

Started about a year ago by an ex-entertainment promoter named Bette Lou Tracy, We the Music caught on immediately. That was no great surprise, considering Tracy’s astonishing credo: Music lessons, like the sun in the morning and the stars at night, should be free. As in: no obligation, no salesman will call--absolutely free.

Retired teachers, old musicians and aspiring rock stars volunteered to give lessons. An elderly man on the verge of blindness and deafness shuffled in to donate the violin he had played for 50 years. A woman in mourning contributed a flute--the first love of a daughter who recently had died.

Three dozen students--mostly poor, mostly excited--trooped in and out of the storefront a few doors from Ventura’s mission. A truck driver for the thrift shop next door signed up his daughter. A homeless mother enrolled her 11-year-old daughter, who stayed long after her flute lessons to chat, to spruce the place up, to help out in any way she could.

“She was so bright, so talented,” Tracy said. “I felt very attached to her.”

A couple of months ago, things fell apart.

Expensive plumbing problems forced We the Music out of its 1,000-square-foot storefront.

Skyrocketing rents made it impossible to find another place. The school’s original benefactor--a jazz guitarist living in the Bay Area--had already thrown in $60,000, and Tracy said she didn’t want to tap him for more.

“He’s a great lover of music and children,” said Tracy, who used to produce convention shows in San Diego. “I felt, though, that at some point the community had to make this its own.”

That hasn’t happened. But some ideas are too good for quick and graceful deaths.

Three of We the Music’s teachers give free lessons in their students’ homes.

Clara Jackson, a retired teacher, drives once a week from Ventura to south Oxnard, where she gives individual piano lessons to two boys as well as to their mother.

“One of the little guys has a beautiful touch, and the other has broken the speed barrier,” she says. “It’s just a gorgeous family.”

Meanwhile, Tracy tries to round up cheap office space, locate grant money, pin down musicians for a benefit. To support herself, she’s looking for a bookkeeping job--part time, so she’ll have the time to call another celebrity or rush out and dicker over another storefront.

“It’s my destiny, if you will,” she says. “I’ve been given this opportunity to do what I consider great work. What am I supposed to do about that--say no?”

Of course, there have been those days. In the competition for charity dollars, music instruction for the poor does not resound with life-or-death urgency. Public schools have gutted their music programs, but local donors have not raced to fill the void. And big-name musicians lend their efforts to big-name organizations, not struggling idealists with only a letterhead to their name.

So far, Tracy has approached Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, David Crosby and many others for help. None has been forthcoming.

But she did persuade Adelphia, the cable TV system, and Ventura’s Moby Dick studios, to finance a CD of Christmas music performed by her school’s students and teachers. “Christmas Music 2000” hasn’t been a hot seller, but every $8 disc helps. (They’re available from We the Music, 110 N. Olive St., #E313, Ventura 93001.)

Tracy also has been talking with an arts group about renting a couple of rooms at the Laurel Theatre starting next spring. If that comes to pass, she said she might be forced to charge $5 a lesson, but scholarship money could be available.

Meanwhile, three pianos, two saxophones, two clarinets, two flutes, three guitars, an electric bass, a trombone, a recorder, two violins and a keyboard sit in storage, awaiting students.

“It can happen,” Tracy says. “I’m continuing in the faith that we can pull this thing together.”

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.