The real school of rock

There’s some serious instrumental tonnage being shifted on this Friday evening in the Silverlake Music Conservatory. A teenage girl lugs a barrel-like conga drum out of one of the eight small rooms. As she closes the door behind her, another girl wrestles with a cello. Meanwhile, in the dusk-darkened lobby -- with jazz and classical music alternating on the stereo and the walls decorated with photos of musicians from Billie Holiday to the Beatles -- a preteen girl stands with a guitar case as big as she is strapped to her back.

Another lesson is about to begin, but there’ll be nothing ordinary about it. This music school, in a cozy Sunset Junction storefront, was co-founded by one Michael Balzary. Who also happens to be the bass player of the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- a guy better known by his nom de rock, Flea.

Into this unlikely scene, a reedy, bespectacled young man strolls, an even bigger case on his back, brushing up against his sandy, shoulder-length hair. He deposits the case, then heads up a narrow stairway to a cramped loft.

Moving past a Fender Stratocaster perched on a stand, then between rows of cases holding violins, trumpets, saxes and such that line shelves on either side of the room, he finally wiggles out a mass of pounded brass -- 40 pounds to be exact.

Tuba is what Dean Tambling is studying. That’s tuba, the upright oval instrument, not sousaphone, the round coil worn around the player. And it’s not just any tuba he’s grabbed to use for his lesson today. It’s a particularly fine pre-World War II, B-flat model that belongs to Flea himself. Tambling gets to the bottom of the stairs, and heads for the closet-sized room where he’ll be joined for an hour of instruction by Keith Barry, the school’s dean and other founder.

“This is the hardest part of the lesson,” he sighs.

Tambling took up the rather impractical instrument for rather practical reasons. When starting in junior high school band nearly four years ago, he heard that tuba scholarships to college music programs were more readily available than for many other pursuits. He took to the tuba instantly, but by the time he hit high school found the outlets for his playing somewhat stifled by lack of resources. That’s when his mother read about the Silver Lake school.

“There it’s run-of-the-mill high school band,” the North Hollywood High student says. “Here, as a beautifully refreshing change, every week it’s something different.”

In Tambling’s lesson it was something different every few minutes, but that was just from Barry, a master of nearly every instrument but seemingly unable to settle on just one this day. Duetting with his student on a classical exercise -- an unfamiliar piece on a page blindly selected in a book -- he starts on violin, then for a second run tries a chromatic harmonica out of his pocket, and then switches again, this time to trumpet.

Throughout, Barry tries to keep Tambling from tripping up and to instead get a feel for the piece itself.

“You don’t have to worry about playing the notes,” Barry says. “You have those down.”

For Tambling, the approach works.

“With my school experience, it was, ‘Here’s music. Play it,’ ” he says. “Now, rather than playing music, I think music.”

Flea and Barry know what Tambling has experienced. Close friends since band days at Bancroft Junior High and then Fairfax High, they experienced what they see as a diminishing focus on arts education firsthand and were lucky to find some way to transcend the limitations.

“I went to L.A. public schools,” says Flea, a trumpet prodigy back in those days and a trumpet instructor at the conservatory now when he’s not on the road. “There was a National Orchestra Award I won -- I went and auditioned for it. I got scholarships for lessons, private instruction. Not only was it great for me to get the lessons, but a real big boost, like I’m on the path, doing the right thing.”

Barry, 40, sees the conservatory as filling a similar role for kids while making at least a small dent in what he views as an ongoing move deeper into cultural illiteracy.

Currently there are more than 400 students enrolled, the largest portion of them taking guitar -- though not at the overwhelming 60% rate that Barry says is represented in music students nationally. Many are helped out with the fees ($20 per half-hour) by scholarships set up from several corporate sponsors and benefits such as a concert last year featuring Jane’s Addiction and the Chili Peppers. Flea and Barry are hoping to increase scholarship availability with more donations.

Together, their mission is to rehabilitate the image of a musical education while maintaining a sense of discipline and studiousness. On site, Barry, with his casual demeanor, is a constant cheerleader for the students.

“Once upon a time an old lady rapped you across the knuckles and said, ‘You will learn all 12 scales!’ ” Barry says. “The point of music is not to be able to arpeggiate all 12 scales. But music is good for a person’s development.”

Tambling has discovered he is part of a large social community.

“In December I went to the Tuba Christmas in Glendale,” he says. “There were 300 baritones, tubas and sousaphones playing Christmas music. The highest number I’d played alongside had been three!”

Surprisingly, his choice of instrument hasn’t even brought the grief of teasing that normally lies in wait for the slightest eccentricity in high school culture.

“It’s like I get respect, if anything,” he says. “It takes quite a person to haul a 40-pound instrument day after day.”

He’s playing the tough-guy role to the hilt. “The other week Keith said it’s not unheard of to use a tuba stand,” Tambling says, with a disdainful sneer. “ ‘Guys do and aren’t looked down upon.’ I said, ‘They’d better be looked down upon! I wouldn’t be caught dead using a tuba stand!’ ”

*

Silverlake Conservatory of Music

Where: 3920 Sunset Blvd., L.A.

Info: (323) 665-3363 or www.silverlakeconservatory.com.