Traveling school of jazz is kid-friendly

“It’s a living music. We all come to it with what we have: That’s the beauty of jazz. I fall in love with it more and more,” says Hayes Greenfield, veteran jazz saxophonist and creator of the “Jazz-A-Ma-Tazz” traveling show for kids.

New York-based Greenfield brings his audience-participatory bebop show to Los Angeles for the first time on Sunday, in a 10 a.m. matinee at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills.

“It’s great for ages 3 to 13,” he says.

Greenfield, a composer for film and TV, music producer and longtime musician on New York’s jazz scene, is also an educator, heading the music department at the Door, an enrichment center for at-risk youth in New York City, from 1993 to 2000 and working with children and teenagers in residencies at schools on both coasts. In 1997, he created his internationally touring “Jazz-A-Ma-Tazz,” after his CD of the same name, to introduce children and teens -- and jazz-phobic adults -- to the joys of a genre that can seem intimidating or distant in a world of ubiquitous pop music.

Children respond to jazz because it’s about “the creative spirit,” Greenfield says. “It’s organic. It’s not electronic, it’s not slick, and there’s a way for them to have their own voice in it.”

With humor -- “a major factor” in the show -- adults and children alike are coaxed to move to a jazz beat and participate in basics of rhythm, scatting, blues-based call-and-response and conducting as Greenfield and his trio play familiar childhood tunes and excerpts of pieces by such jazz archetypes as Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker.

“If they don’t dance, we’ll have them stand up and shake,” Greenfield says. “It’s an equal opportunity to dance, be a butterfly, be silly and have fun.”