Comsewogue Jazz Band Battles For Music Programs

The students in the Jazz band at posted a music video complete with an original poem to introduce their performance in an attempt to garner enough votes to win a Battle of the Bands sponsored by music channel VH1’s Save the Music program.

Fred Wilbur, the high school music teacher came up with the idea while watching one of his favorite music channels, VH1 Classic.

“I saw the commercial for VH1’s Save the Music,” he said. “I never saw them do anything with it before but I was inspired by what’s going on in the papers.”

Wilbur said that his wife and brother are both music teachers too and he hears all about the pinch that the arts programs in schools are feeling nowadays.

While he says that Comsewogue supports the arts programs and he doesn’t feel that his music program is in any immediate danger, he still felt compelled to get his students involved.

The students had a lot of questions for Wilbur when he introduced the idea to them but he cited his own brush with fame in another contest as the reason he believed they had a chance to win it all.

“Four years ago I won a contest sponsored by Baby Ruth where I got to sing at Yankee Stadium,” he said.

So even though he felt that any one school might be a long shot at winning a national contest, because of his former success and his talented group of musicians, he said, “I figured we have a great shot.”

On the Battle of the Bands website hosted on dosomething.org, Simone Torres who is the lead singer of the Jazz group and an all-state vocalist writes that the students think that “the most important thing that needs to be saved is the music.”

“Now is the time to let everyone know that a school without music will lead to a life without music,” she said. “And without music life would be a mistake.”

Wilbur picked out one of the band’s rehearsals to record on video. The performance was of the hit R&B song that Smokey Robinson and The Miracles had made famous more than four decades ago, The Tears of a Clown.

“This is a great Motown song we have been performing all year that the audience always enjoys,” Torres said of the selection.

Before the band performs on the video the kids recite a poem that Wilbur and the students wrote together. The theme of the poem according to Wilbur is that as a culture “we’re told to save the whales and save the rainforests but a lot of them we can’t personally do anything about.”

“Some problems are so big but this problem is solvable,” he said of endangered music programs across the country.

He said his favorite thing about the video is that it begins by telling people how important the program is and then immediately “you get to see how much fun they have.”

"We wanted the video to share a serious message," said Torres. "But also show how much we love music and how much fun we have performing."

Torres–who will go on to attend the music program at Berklee in the fall–implores people “to do something and save the music.”

This is not the first time the Jazz band has performed to raise funds for the school. According to Wilbur the band played in between periods at two Islander games this year.

“We raised money for music, robotics, student drama, the high School PTA and other clubs,” he said. 

The band raised $7,500 in total playing sets of rock songs. At one game they were joined by the school choir and sold 250 tickets.

“Its great to be part of a band that’s part of the community,” Wilbur said.

The video is doing well so far with hundreds of Facebook likes and shares on Twitter already but they want more.

“The more shares we have the better,” said Wilbur.

The winner gets money for their school music program and a chance to send five students to perform at B.B. Kings in Manhattan.

The Jazz band is composed of 60 students but Wilbur thinks that because his school is so close to Manhattan he’d be able to work it so more kids could go and play when compared to other contestants across the country who have to fly in. Some kids may even be able to get transportation on their own if they win.

“And we can get there in just over an hour,” he said.

The competition is fierce. Many of the videos are slickly edited but Wilbur isn’t worried. He thinks the raw performance he captured can translate to the live performance they’d be able to put on at the venue.

“I feel like if we win, it’s a straight up performance,” he said. “It works in our favor.”

Voting for the contest will continue until midnight on Sunday. Head over to the Battle of the Bands website and hit the Facebook and Twitter buttons to cast your vote Comsewogue Jazz band’s video.