These Kids Rock!

http://sanmateo.schoolofrock.com

These kids rock: San Mateo’s School of Rock immerses young artists in musicApril 04, 2015, 05:00 AM By Joseph Jaafari Daily Journal

Joseph Jaafari/Daily Journal
Aldo Noboa, left, instructs one of the School of Rock bands through practice with Charlie Dowden, 17, on guitar. Dowden is one of the more advanced students at School of Rock and will be leaving and graduating within the next year.

Gibson Phillips, 12, strums along to other bandmates performing on stage.

Before the drums started, Ben Kaufman keyed out a few notes on the electric keyboard at the front of the room. After a few measures, a small chorus of his bandmates, lining a stage with a mural of Led Zeppelin behind them, broke out in song.

“Live and let die,” they chimed in, singing the lyrics to the iconic Paul McCartney and Wings song.

“OK. Stop,” said Aldo Noboa, the music director, trying to get the group back on track.

It was a completely impromptu moment, not specifically staged for this rehearsal. Today, Kaufman, who is 13 years old, along with a room of about 20 other teenagers, were practicing for their April 18 concert dedicated to a band most of them had never heard of before a few months ago — The Who.

The band of teenagers is a part of an international program called School of Rock, guided to help kids learn and appreciate music through classic rock ’n’ roll.

The program has 150 locations across the world and over the years pulled in thousands of teens learning the likes of Led Zeppelin, Radiohead and Guns n’ Roses. And a lot of the push is coming from parents.

“Over here, the culture’s different. The parents are really into rock out here,” Noboa said. “After a while the kids get into it, but it’s the parents that come in and say ‘I want my kid to play Sabbath.’”

Teenage wasteland

Noboa, who helped found the School of Rock, grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, and was surrounded by music growing up.

“I grew up doing this, playing in bands and such. Music, electric guitars, drums and having a band setup in your house was typical,” said Noboa, adding that it was his growing up during the ’70s when suburban flight had given birth to bored teens with too many instruments in their garages.

Noboa went on to live in Philadelphia, where the South Street American-punk culture of leather jackets and mohawks exploded during the ’80s and had given birth to bands like The Dead Milkmen and later Green Day. Noboa had started playing in a few bands, most notably his band The True Detectives.

However, after being in rock culture for a few years, Noboa started to notice that one by one, as if it were right out of a Jim Carroll song, all of his friends started to die off.

“Our scene kind of died out in the ’90s and a lot of our peers left music and some OD’d,” said Noboa. “The realities of a rock ’n’ roll scene hit, and it takes its toll. You know, we’re standing around and looking around and there’s nobody left.”

It was out of that realization that Noboa partnered up with a local band rival and acquaintance, Paul Green, to start an after-school rock program for kids, originally called the Paul Green School of Rock Music.

“We took this idea that ‘well, it’s too late for me but based on the mistakes we all made, maybe I can do something to change that. Maybe catch some young people before they get the wrong ideas,’” said Noboa. “In an urban setting, there’s a lot of great brilliance brewing about, but it gets shut down pretty quickly.”

The “school” opened up in 1996, playing out of a garage and inviting whomever to join. In one instance, dozens of kids were showing up to jam out with Green and Noboa. He called those kids his “Army” who were “out on a different mission.”

Soon after, in 1998, they had established their first brick-and-mortar building together on Race Street, which now houses a Scientology church.

The school exploded into multiple franchises across the nation, even making it into CNN’s Five Hot Franchises segment. When Noboa moved out to San Francisco in 2004, he brought the school along with him until he opened another location in downtown San Mateo in 2008.

“The initial motivation to start this program was because in Philadelphia, there wasn’t anything like this for kids,” said Noboa. “It was about kids at risk, to some degree, but San Mateo is a very different picture than Philadelphia for a teenager or for someone about to be a teenager.”

But that hasn’t stopped the suburban kids of San Mateo from ramping up the distortion. In fact, the program has been embraced across the Peninsula. A School of Rock recently opened in Palo Alto and the city of San Mateo has asked the school to do acoustic sets on Sundays starting in April.

We don’t need no education

Out of the teens in the rehearsal that Saturday, only a handful had been classically trained before coming into School of Rock.

Kaufman was trained on the piano. And even though he appreciates the sound and the prominence that a grand piano has to offer, nothing compares to the fun that rock ’n’ roll gives.

“You have sheets of paper in front of you and they just tell you to ‘Play this. Nope. Start over,’” said Kaufman. “Here it’s more ‘Play these three chords. Play it in this pattern and switch at this point.’”

Christina Wunderlich, 13, also was trained on the piano prior to coming to School of Rock, but has now taken an interest in electric and acoustic guitar.

And despite the difference in experience when walking into the school, ultimately all of their experiences are the same for the first few weeks.

“We just say for kids to come on in and we’ll teach you to play music, but not the boring route. We know the boring route, we’re going to do it the way we learned,” Noboa said. “The only difference is there’s going to be a coach.”

And School of Rock sticks to its guns when it comes to their teaching methods. Noboa doesn’t go by the typical and drab styles of classical teachings. Rather than staring down a piece of sheet music and keeping time, during rehearsals he forces his students to listen to each other just as much as they listen to themselves, much like a regular band would in a professional educational music setting.

He bangs his drumsticks together in time, like a rock ’n’ roll Debbie Allen from “Fame,” and sings along harmonies with the songs.

And occasionally he’s stern. When one bandmate played out of turn, he told the student to unplug their guitar and sit down.

“Nobody comes in a from-birth prodigy. I make you work, but I make it go by quick and along the way the kid actually learns some discipline,” he said.

Noboa also prides School of Rock on the fact that where schools are failing in the arts, they are succeeding.

“We take music seriously, and not that the schools don’t, but they’re not prioritizing it,” he said. “We know that we have a fun service here, but we go pretty deep. Our students tend to walk out of here knowing how to play music.”

Which rings true for 16-year-old Kevin Kelleher, who has had no classical training but feels that the experience he’s gained at School of Rock have helped him dramatically in applying for music schools across the country.

“I’ve been doing this rock ’n’ roll thing for a while now, and now that I’m applying to colleges they don’t care about the rock ’n’ roll. All they want is jazz,” he said. “Because I know it, it’s opened up so many doors.”

It’s the same for Stephanie D’Arcy, 17, who was recently admitted to the California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts, for music. She recognized that, without School of Rock, her musical tastes and experience would have been vastly subpar to where she’s at now.

But where the students lack in classical training, they get in soul. Most of these kids had never heard of bands like KISS before they walked through the doors on South B Street. Now, they each sport a classic rock T-shirt during brand practice: Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, Rush.

“We did Queen almost a year ago and at the name people were like ‘who’s Queen?’” he laughed. “Believe me I get resistance. But then I play for them the playlist and they just go — whoa! — yeah. That’s Queen.”

The students will be putting on a concert dedicated to The Who 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. April 18 and 19 at the school, located at 711 S. B St. in downtown San Mateo.