Kwame Alexander on Bringing the Free Spirit of Jazz to Young Viewers
In 2010, the poet and novelist Kwame Alexander faced a challenge that is familiar to parents everywhere. His younger daughter, then a year old, wouldn't stop wailing.
Lullabies failed. Rocking didn't help, nor did a car ride. Finally, Alexander put on a few records and found the solution: It was jazz, Baby, jazz!
'So I would play her Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald,' he said in a video interview in mid-April. 'I would play her bossa nova, and she would stop crying. And I thought: Wow, this is kind of cool. Maybe I should write something about jazz for her.'
The result was 'Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band,' Alexander's first children's book. But an enterprising rooster doesn't crow only once, and the author's feathered, guitar-strumming character has lived on, in a 2021 Kennedy Center stage musical and in three more books. And now Rooster is making his television debut: On Thursday, PBS Kids is premiering 'Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band,' a one-hour animated special that Alexander created with the screenwriter Kay Donmyer. (The special is streaming on all PBS digital platforms; check local listings for broadcast times.)
Alexander, 56, is no stranger to TV: He was the showrunner of 'The Crossover,' the Disney+ 2023 adaptation of his Newbery Medal-winning middle-grade novel about basketball, which won an Emmy for best young teen series. In 'Acoustic Rooster,' he and Donmyer, who collaborated on the script and the lyrics, are presenting a, well, cockier version of the book's strutting hero.
In the special, Rooster wants to win a jazz band contest, but first he needs to be part of a group. He plans to join the famous Barnyard Band — which has members like 'Mules Davis,' 'Lil Herdin' and 'Ella Finchgerald' (voiced by the jazz singer Dee Daniels) — and help it win the competition by being its undisputed star.
But he has a few things to learn, as does the show's preschool audience. 'Acoustic Rooster,' which features original songs composed by the jazz musician Mark McLean (who also wrote additional lyrics) teaches young viewers not only about jazz but also about collaboration and compromise.
Produced by GBH, the special is accompanied by 'Acoustic Rooster: Jazzy Jams,' a series of 20 three-minute animated shorts, each including a song and often solving a problem, musical or emotional. Two jams from the series, which features guest artists like the pianist Herbie Hancock and the bassist Amy Shook, have been officially released already. Others will follow weekly, starting on May 9, and several can be previewed on YouTube. (Like the special, the shorts are being broadcast and streaming.) An interactive online game, Groovin' With Acoustic Rooster, will offer children opportunities to create their own music.
'They'll come away understanding what it means to improvise,' Alexander said. 'They'll come away with what scat is — Skip-it-a-bebop, boo! They'll learn a little bit about the history of jazz, which, in fact, is about the history of America. And really jazz is about the history of democracy, and how you have all these people onstage, and they've all got to work together to create this beautiful piece.'
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What is the origin story of the 'Acoustic Rooster' characters? You've said you were in Tuscany when you got the idea.
I was on a writer's fellowship, and every morning, on my walk to the local cafe to get tea and a croissant, I would pass by a farm. And on this farm were all these animals who were dancing. At least in my imagination, they were dancing and partying. And one thing led to another.
Acoustic Rooster was the first character I came up with. And then I had to sort of begin to give the rooster a community. And from there, I thought, Well, there's got to be a cousin, and maybe the cousin, if the cousin is related to the rooster, then the cousin might be a hen or a duck. And then it just hit me: Duck — Duke — Ellington. And once I got that [Duck Ellington], that was my first sort of jazz-inspired animal.
Why did you and your collaborators decide to give the TV adaptation this form — as opposed to, say, a series with half-hour episodes?
This is an introduction to jazz. And so the idea is, if you like it, if you love it, if you show us you love it by watching it, then absolutely, I think there are a lot more stories to tell in a full, fledged-out series.
What we're trying to do with the shorts is try to give people sort of a quick slice of what this universe, this rooster jazz universe, is like.
Does Acoustic Rooster represent you at all?
My advanced-creative-writing professor, sophomore year [at Virginia Tech], was Nikki Giovanni, may she rest in peace. And I thought I knew everything there was to know about poetry as a sophomore. And, of course, she's a legend, and I would challenge her nonstop, and she would give me Cs. And I remember having a conference with her during office hours, and she said to me, 'Kwame, I can teach you how to write, but I can't teach you how to be interesting.'
And I remember just being livid at that, like, 'What are you talking about?' And, of course, you know, she would end up becoming, besides my parents, the most influential person in my writerly life. And it took me a while to see it. I think part of our goal with Rooster is to follow him on this journey, so he can get to that point.
Why did you decide to use original songs instead of works from the jazz canon?
For the special, it was important for us to create, to really be highly original, and to really showcase our talents. And again, this is an introduction. I really view this as a way to engage kids into this brilliant, masterful music, American form of music, that we call jazz music. I think outside of that, perhaps it just may be a little too expensive at this stage to secure some of the rights.
Did you have a say in the look of the animation [by Global Mechanic Media]?
Part of my big thing was our show should not look like any other show. It should incorporate the jazz motif of albums from the '50s and the '60s. It should be electric. It should have a certain color palette that screams, 'Verve!'
Herbie Hancock is one of your guest musicians. Why did you think he was a good fit for the 'Acoustic Rooster' shorts?
Herbie Hancock likes to tell this story about how he was playing with Miles Davis's band in Germany. They were on tour [around 1963-64], and Miles was known to be a pretty ornery person, and if you did the wrong thing, you could get fired immediately. And Herbie Hancock talks about how he played a chord that was the wrong chord. He totally messed it up. In that moment, he knew that he was going to get fired, like it was over for him at the end of that show, and he said the note that Miles played next made Herbie's chord sound brilliant.
I feel like that's a big lesson that improvisation and jazz teaches, and something that I adhere to. We're going to do some things that we may not think are going to work, or we're going to be told 'no' in life, or we're going to have the blues. But the measure of our humanity is not how we succumb to that. It's how we overcome it. It's how we bounce back.
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