'Trane Tunes and Teaching

The concert is only the beginning

This year, the John Coltrane Memorial Concert, the world's oldest annual performance tribute to the jazz legend, celebrated its 31st anniversary and 23rd consecutive year at Northeastern. Twenty-five students from each of the Stony Brook community schools attended free of charge. The featured act was Guru's Jazzmatazz. An internationally known hip-hop artist from Roxbury, Guru is the only rapper to have performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Using the concert as its point of departure, the John Coltrane Memorial Concert Educational Outreach Program (JCMCEOP) takes live performances of African-American improvisational music to inner-city schools; five are in the Stony Brook community. More than 10,000 students have participated since the 1992 inception of the program, under the leadership of Leonard Brown, associate professor of music, and Emmett Price, associate professor and chair, African-American Studies, Northeastern. "Few students are performers, but all are listeners," says Brown. "With proper exposure to live music, we help children develop to their full capacities.