Star Tribune from Minneapolis, Minnesota • Page 52

2E ThursdayOctober 6 1994 Star Tribune MODEL SEMH Southall She's glad Marsalis didn't 1 ban on boogie-woogie It was piano lessons given by her miss your chancs to be Interviewed one of tne tastesi growing ayciw KutN Modd MaMt -1 wHwal 1 faMrtflHiNCMqaCXnUCNU IP Don't phen flick Nichols 0 togcthtnwbtst look aid FtoMialMonimntagcoMluc ioi)itj of kMomfc i nedd, or I joo'w Uppointmeirtj made by rtsenitioo nj. (w-ritao) A October 11 and 12 only! Ann. tOnm -r siuJji Please bring one non-returnable Keaton Model Management, Inc. Minneapolis Da las Phoenix Three Cheers For The School j3 Bus Driver The kids on your route will appreciate you the school bus driver. The youthful laces you'll excited voices you'll what make driving part time for Ryder Student Transportation so rewarding.

I day care a problem? Bring your children to workl Call for details. Enter our certified training program today! Easy to Drive Automatic Transmissions Paid Training Physical listen to her Continued frompaga 1E Mozart, Chopin, Brahms and Debussy. And though she has lectured and written extensively on the origins of the blues, jazz, reggae and calypso, that isn't the ort of prj'c h9 would play in her dining room, either. -'See, growing up in those days, as I did in New Orleans, music meant Bach," she said. "Jazz 'was a no-no.

The black communi-ty didn't accept jazz because it was tied to the jazz life. That's why we listened to Marian Anderson, not Mahalia Jackson. Maha-lia was considered to be jazzing up the Negro spirituals. It was a generational thing." When she gave piano lessons in 1950 to Ellis Marsalis, father of Wynton and Branford, she told him to stick to the printed notes and to stop playing boogie-woogie. "I saw him years later, and I said to him, 'I'm so glad you didn't do what I told you to she said, laughing.

Perceptions have changed along with the times, however. "By the late '60s and early 70s, I began to realize that a lot of the influences on black composers, and even on some of the white composers, were tied to jazz and blues, and gradually, it all came into place, Southall said. Founder of BMETC In that same spirit, a concert Sat- uraay at nymoutn (Congregational Church honoring the 20th anniversary of the Black Music Educators of the Twin Cities (BMETC), an organization Southall helped form, will deliver a wide range of Afro-American musical expression, both sacred and secular, vernacular idioms as well art music. Southall will play the piano in a trio called Women of Class, along frith flutist Faye Washington and Oboist Diana Washington. Veteran gospel performer and composer Doris Akers will also perform, as will Donald Washington find the New Day Blues Band and tie Reginald Buckner Memorial Ensemble, a jazz quintet named to honor of the late jazz educator and pianist who was a colleague of Southall's at the university.

i4n October, 1974, Southall was approached by Margaret LaFleur and two other music teachers -with the idea of forming a support system for Afro-American stu- dents in the Twin Cities. Soon i thereafter, 17 music teachers met i in the office of the university's Afro-American Studies Depart-I ment, of which Southall had just been appointed chairwoman. 5 They formed the BMETC with I three major objectives: Provide a professional network with each other. Promote the performance of music by black Offer encouragement and mon-i etary assistance to African-Amer-( ican youths in their musical studies. In 1981 the BMETC became a branch of the National Associa- Ition of Negro Musicians which provides opportunities for students to participate in regional and national contests and to per- form with the National Youth Chorale and Youth Orchestra.

"See, this whole thing came about because these teachers were worried because in the Top Pay Co. Paid Life Insurance CollegeVo Tech Tuition Reimbarsement Routes available in your area MEDICA Health Plan 401K Savings Plan Pay for Experience Free ride to from work within our service area moiner mat gradually Drougnt Geneva out of her shell. She began to play for school assemblies and later for the church choir. She eventually took a degree in piano and theory at Dillard University in Mew CrJcsr.s ar.d received her teacher's certificate at the Gray Conservatory in Los Angeles. While in L.A., she met and married Patrick Rhone, then a student at UCLA.

When he died in 1954 of kidney disease, they and their daughter, Tish, had been living in Oklahoma City, where Southall ran her own piano studio. Though Rhone's insurance policy left her $10,000, Southall knew she would never be secure as a teacher without a graduate degree, so she boarded her daughter temporarily with her brother's family and moved to Chicago, where she lived at the YWCA while finishing a master's in music and theory at the American Conservatory of Music. A brief marriage to pianist Mitchell Southall ended in divorce. Prior to coming to the University of Minnesota in 1970, she taught at Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas; Knoxville College in Tennessee; South Carolina State in Orangeburg; the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and Grambling State University, Grambling, She received her Ph.D. in piano and musicology from the University of Iowa.

Other commitments While living in South Carolina at the height of the civil-rights movement, she did her share of picketing and jail time. "It was the kids that got to me, including my daughter, who was very involved," she said. "They were putting 16- and 17-year-olds in jail and on the chain gang for demonstrating. That got to me. I said, 'Gimme a picket I was on the line from then on, marching, going to jail and whatever." Her move to the Twin Cities brought two changes in her professional life.

She stopped teaching piano, and her own performance diminished greatly. She regrets both changes, she said, but as her classroom teaching and musicological research increased, there was less time for the other things. During her last year at the university, however, she resumed her own piano studies with Leonard Danek, a teacher at the MacPhail Center. Now, at 68, and with enough honors to fill many pages of small type, Southall doesn't fret much about politically correct terms: Negro vs. black vs.

Afro-American, for instance. "See, the BMETC is a branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians. The word Negro lets you know that we began some years ago. Now everything's Afro-American. I can take any one of them.

My father could never take the word black. He'd say, 'We are Remember, his generation fought to dignify the word Negro." Her major goal is to finish the third and final volume of her history of Blind Tom. "I've done all the research," she said. "I wrote four chapters before I retired, and I really need now to get on with it. I say to myself, 'You re not gonna live forever, girl.

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This was in the mid-70s, the period of 'black is and you had to be blacker-than-thou. Classical music was thought to be white-folks music. Black kids needed support if they wanted to play classical music." Dr. Geneva Handy Southall bands, orchestras and choirs, there were no black kids," Southall said. "This was in the mid-70s, the period of 'black is and you had to be blacker-than-thou.

Classical music was thought to be white-folks' music. Black kids needed support if they wanted to play classical music." The value of learning Her belief in the value of education, which is a hallmark of the BMETC, was instilled in Southall by her parents. "My father and mother would sacrifice anything to give us music lessons, she said. "They considered that part of our education." She recalled the day her father, a Methodist minister in New Orleans, sold his car to raise money to send her brother to college. The brother, W.T.

Handy recently retired as a Methodist bishop. Southall's sister, D. Antoinette Handy, a graduate of the New England Conservatory and the Paris Conservatory, retired this year as director of the music program of the National Endowment for the Arts. She is now a resident of Tennessee and completing a book on black conductors. A prior book on the femaie swing band the Sweethearts of Rhythm will soon be made into a film, for which Handy has agreed to be a consultant.

If fact, if it hadn't been for music education In the form of piano lessons, who knows what might have happened to little Geneva Handy? "I didn't talk until I was 6," Southall said. "I was put in the class for slow kids, and I had a bad inferiority complex because I had three very brilliant brothers and sisters." (A second brother died during World War II at age 19.) TRAVEL StarTribune Reading it rounds you out. t'JouIel eessEi hucli Groan vow utility company eiiiss fiottol nome contTosrti: use a plus? Hatln I Cooling Systems Since 1904 WENZEL HEATING AC EAGAN 452-2665 MINNESOTA HEATING AC MAPLE GROVE 424-5235 TOTAL BURNSVILLE 898-4045 RAPID AIR NEW AIR INC. HEATING CONDITIONING HOPE 535-8187 PETERSON BROS. SM INC.

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