Changing kids

The music that would change Justin Wilson's life wafted through a second-story stained-glass window and carried to the sidewalk. It was a delicate violin solo, faint, but just loud enough to make the passing boy and his mother stop and listen.

A dignified looking man with graying hair saw the smile on the boy's face, and whisked mother and son into the church center where the music played. He'd seen that spark of interest before, and knew just what to do: Give the boy a violin, some lessons and an introduction to classical music, and wait for it to change him for the better.

For more than two decades, Leo Harris, 82, has cast lilting melodies out like lifelines across the city's South Side, bringing classical music to black children who might otherwise miss out on Mozart, Bach or Beethoven.

"The music, it brings them up to another level--that's what it does," Harris said. "I've seen it work out that way too."

Since the late 1970s, Harris' organization, the South Side Family Chamber Orchestra, has quietly given hundreds of youths direction, providing a musical alternative to the gangs and drugs that plague some of the city's poorest neighborhoods.

"He has moved mountains," said Holly Hudak, senior director of education, community relations and diversity for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. "The work that he's doing is so intimate. A young person looks to Leo Harris and people who've been involved in that orchestra for a long time and they say, `I can do that. I can do that.'"

More than 40 kids learn to play flutes and violins, pianos and saxophones through Harris' non-profit organization at the Grant Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church on South Drexel Boulevard. Undaunted by age and unwilling to slow down, the man everyone calls "Mr. Harris" envisions a day when he can set up classical music instructors in day-care centers across the city and reach children as young as possible.

"It can make a difference," he said. "I know it can. It's a discipline. You have to stick to the beat, and you have to practice. That discipline pulls them out of the gang culture and away from other problems."

Harris ensnares youngsters such as Justin with the peaceful sounds of strings, brass and woodwinds--music that can be a stark contrast to the noise and stress of city life.

"Justin won't listen to rap now," said his mother, Marcella Jackson. "He listens to gospel, jazz and classical. We go to the store, he gets his own little classical cassettes. It's weird."

Weird but wonderful, Harris says. Before starting lessons a little more than a year ago, Justin, 12, lacked focus and was easily distracted.

"If you looked away, he'd just run off and climb a tree or something," Harris said.

Now the boy is more relaxed, his grades have improved and he's not upset as easily.

"This has really calmed him down," Harris said. "The music has done its job."

It even has given Justin a lofty goal.

"I just want to be so good," he said, "that I'll give autographs to everyone."

Harris smiles at such enthusiasm, remembering his own introduction to classical music.

It was 1926, and Harris was 6 years old when he first heard Mozart. The sound came pouring from the tinny speaker of his uncle's battery-powered radio, a tidal wave of notes and melody that lifted him and made him never want to come down.

"I heard this classical music, and something just came over me," he said, struggling to explain his passion. "It's something you hear and it just hits you. You just love it, you love it."

Growing up on the South Side, Harris spent any money he earned on concerts. When he was 14, an orchestra of black musicians played at his church, and he became enamored with the cello.

After the performance he approached the cellist, who agreed to give him lessons. Harris spent two days a week working at a grocery store so he could pay $1 per lesson.

He played in his high school orchestra and also began playing with a minority orchestra on the South Side. Before long he was married and had started a family, making a living as an air conditioning and heating engineer, but never straying far from music.

Harris' children absorbed his love of symphonies and concertos. All four started on piano, then two specialized--one playing the violin and one the viola. The South Side Family Chamber Orchestra was born.

They played regularly in Grant Memorial church, and before long other musicians were joining in.

Harris saw the potential of this group, so he started learning about grants and how to set up a non-profit. The group began performing at schools and in housing projects. He offered lessons to kids who showed a passion for learning, and found ways to round up used instruments.

That was more than two decades ago.

Harris is a little slower these days, but he's a constant presence around the church center, moving about with a beat-up burgundy bag full of papers and sheet music tucked under his arm. He still plays the cello in the orchestra, and always greets young students with a smile and a reassuring, "All right, then."

The group operates on about a $20,000-a-year budget, but Harris said this year it's even smaller as the economy has made it harder to win grants. He's regularly up past midnight hunched over a typewriter, filling out forms and trying to get any funding he can find.

It's obvious he worries about the money more than he lets on, but he won't let it dampen his enthusiasm. On a recent Monday evening, the center's gymnasium echoed with the sounds of plunking piano keys, high-pitched flutes and violin strings tuning up.

"There's nothing like the atmosphere of good music," Harris said, watching the door so he could stand up to greet students and instructors as they arrived.

Although programs like Harris' have made strides in turning members of the black community on to classical music, experts say a significant cultural disconnect remains, both in terms of the audience and the players.

"Classical music has always been a mostly white cultural realm, not only in the sense of who creates it but also in the sense of who listens to it and who is exposed to it in school," said Gary Burns, editor of the academic journal Popular Music and Society. "If [black people] are exposed to it, and they don't see many black faces in the orchestra or in the audience, then that's often a turnoff."

Many members of Harris' orchestra have dealt firsthand with the racial and socioeconomic barriers that have long kept classical music homogenous.

When Samuel Williams, 30, took up the violin as a child, he had to go into the suburbs to get lessons because there were no teachers in his South Side neighborhood. Now he plays in the orchestra and considers it one of relatively few opportunities black musicians in Chicago have to perform in a professional ensemble.

"There's a camaraderie," said Williams, who makes his living playing music. "You realize you're not alone. For many years, I felt like I was the only black violinist in the city."

David Howard, an orchestra member and violin instructor for the program, is hopeful the classical music world will continue to diversify.

"It's happening in tennis, it's happening in golf, it can also happen in classical music," Howard said. "I think that it could become a trend. But without efforts like Mr. Harris', it would be hard to establish that trend."

Kaliq Woods, 26, a clarinet player, might never have known classical music without Harris.

When he was 10, his mother heard about Harris' program from a friend. She took her son to Grant Memorial church, where Harris met them and showed Woods a table arrayed with different instruments.

"He looked at me and said, `What instrument would you like to play?'" recalled Woods, who now plays with jazz bands across the city. "I picked the clarinet. As soon as I got into it, I loved it. I guess the music just was in me."

Woods is one of many success stories, though Harris acknowledges they don't all stick with the program.

Some never take to the music, or lack focus and let their instruments gather dust.

But that's fine, Harris says. He remains driven by the moments a child finally hits the right note, or an adult first hears a minuet, and a passion like his own flares in their eyes.

"You feel a real sense of accomplishment," he said, almost in a whisper. "It's sort of like a miracle."