Creating Community

Richie Goldstein's dedication to Portland's youth

by Cameron Jones

As founder of RePercussions, Richie Goldstein spends most of his time teaching drumming to groups of disadvantaged children. He says he's seen twelve year-old crack dealers turn into dedicated musicians after getting involved in his drum workshops. His goal is to set up a music-based community center in East Portland so that local kids will always have something productive to do.

Richie's a fountain of energy and quite the talker; just minutes after stepping into his SE Portland home, and before even asking him any questions, I realize that our interview is already underway. Watching Goldstein jump from explaining the myriad wooden drums sprawled across his floor, to stirring the beans he's cooking for dinner, to taking me downstairs to show off his impressive collection of "junk percussion", it becomes apparent that this man is extremely passionate about what he does. In fact, while demonstrating his array of homemade percussion instruments for me, I can't help but pick up on a little of the mad scientist vibe. His basement is littered with gadgets, from huge plastic bass drums to coffee can quikas to shakers that he's made out of vitamin bottles and shotgun shells. His enthusiasm is palpable and highly contagious, and as he cycles through explanations of all his different projects, telling me that he's made and given away hundreds of drums, I'm struck by his level of dedication to something that he actually loses money doing.

Richie first started this work in Boston, where he says he had much success in community organizing, so I asked him how Portland compares.

RG:  To tell you the truth, it's easier here, because people are smart here. There's a lot of people here that just jump on the opportunity to do stuff with me.

MLP:  You've been in a few different cities, right?

Basically Boston, a little bit in New York, and some in Indiana, but mainly Boston and here.

How do you initiate a relationship with schools? That's something that seems like it might be kind of difficult if you move here and nobody knows who you are. How do you approach that?

The beginning of my working with kids started with-I moved here in '94 originally, and I'd been drumming for dance classes for kids in Cambridge public schools. And I really got into-this was in '93'-I just really got into relationships with kids. A lot of kids I was working with were from single-parent families. A lot of times the father was gone, they were sad about that. They didn't have good, positive relationships with adults. I realized the power of my words and my caring attention with a kid. Listening to what they had to say and responding and interacting with them in a way that was helpful to them was huge. You can turn a kid's life around totally by just complimenting them or encouraging them or whatever. And that just turned me on.

So I came here and I figured a good way to meet people would be to start a drumming class. I went over to Matt Dishman [Community Center] and I told them I wanted a drumming class with kids, and they said, "Yeah, that'd be cool. We don't have any money, but you can do it." So I started doing it and they put me in their brochure and it became wildly popular. I had a ton of kids in the classes.

So was it a weekly thing?

Yeah, every Saturday morning. And at that point I was still using traditional drums, so I'd lug congas and djembes and big dunduns, big metal bodied drums with two heads, and I was breaking my back carrying this stuff around. That's also kind of a side story about how I got started with junk percussion, because I was breaking my back carrying all this traditional stuff around and it was making me crazy.

So I was teaching at Matt Dishman and people just started hearing. That's what I mean about Portland. When you have something cool like that going on, people will jump on it, they'll respond. So I basically haven't had to do any advertising or anything to do close to the level of stuff I wanted to do. The only thing that's been hard is getting paid to do it.

I figure it's better for me to be working with kids as much as possible because they took music out of the schools for the most part. I mean a lot of the schools don't have music.

Have you gotten a bigger response since that happened?

Yeah, 'cause there's actually groups who are in the city that are attuned to that and they're trying to make up the difference. There's people that specifically have donated money to the music programs in the schools because the music teachers were let go and they realized it's important to have music in schools. So they have programs to bring artists into the schools, and kids end up actually getting a more diverse musical education than if they didn't, if they had one music teacher that taught everything.

Last year my friend Miguel was doing a separate class with a bunch of kids at this public school for kids who have had a lot of problems and couldn't stay in public school because they were always getting thrown out or failed-there's a lot of these little schools around Portland people don't even know about. They're in church basements and wherever they can have them. So this particular one, I went with my friend Miguel to work with him in his class and I sensed that the place was a really cool place and they really had good intentions, and it seemed like the teachers were all really cool people and the kids were receptive. So I got a grant from Mentor Graphics because they heard about the kind of stuff I was doing and they just sent me $1,000. So I used that to pay for a whole semester of teaching at this school because they didn't have any money. So I ended up doing a work with a bunch of kids there at the school, and Miguel had another group, and my friend Rebecca Martinez had a group, and my other friend Donna, a dance teacher, had a group going on. So we all did this big show and each of our groups performed and it was totally cool. It was like pulling teeth with the kids. My group was particularly afflicted; the kids had horrible home lives and all kinds of problems and low self-esteem, and I worked really closely with the teacher about those issues, to figure out ways to let them initiate and let them decide what the show was going to be about instead of me just telling them. That was really cool, because these are all kids that didn't want to perform, because they were afraid of looking foolish.

How did you convince the school to let you do that?

Well, free is good, you know? They knew about me. All these places these days, they all make me go through a criminal background check with some police agency or something like that, so they check you out. But they also made some calls and they had heard about me.

When I work with kids, I try to immediately set a goal for a performance. I try to get them to perform as much as possible, because then they take the music more seriously. And that works really nicely, because I can start teaching right away and they'll start listening. I have little musical breaks that I play to get them to stop talking and stop misbehaving. I'll go on the drum, I'll go like, "keh da da ka keh", and they all go, "kuh kuh". They all know, that's one of the first things I say. I say, "when I go 'keh da da ka keh', you go, 'kuh kuh'". And then it's quiet.

That actually works?

It works great. It's like a game, but being quiet after I do that is part of the game. I teach a lot of call and response breaks that make it more fun. "Let's see if we can all get it right this time together." And they do, and they feel really good and they look at each other and they all smile. So, you have to… [pauses to give me a cup to put my teabag in] …you gotta figure out ways to make it fun for them but also make it challenging and make them want to succeed in a performance. You have to be careful too because you don't want to undermine their self-confidence.

By being too hard on them?

Yeah, I mean I used to see it happen all the time in the adult world. I don't know if you know much about drumming and Afro-Cuban drumming or samba or any of this stuff, but when you study with a master in the African diaspora music you usually get kicked around a lot. I wouldn't call it abuse, but it's extremely difficult, because a lot of the people who have been my teachers-their parents were into it, and their grandparents were into it. I mean I've met people whose great grandfathers were slaves from Nigeria that came over carrying the musical traditions of the Uruba people.

So it's really, really important?

Oh yeah. They grew up in it.

I'm totally good-natured with the kids though, I never yell at anybody unless somebody's attacking somebody or something like that. I never raise my voice. I'm always encouraging and I make a game out of it, so that they are having fun while they're learning. But at the same time, they feel the same thing as adults. They want to do well. They feel peer pressure.

Well, I think kids can be easily hard enough on themselves without somebody slapping their wrists every time they make a mistake.

I was inspired by this Spontaneous Celebrations Community Center. This was in Boston. It started out with this woman from Holland name Femke Rosenbaum. She was a real community activist and really into festival arts. She's been doing this Wake Up the Earth Festival for twenty-five years in Boston. They always have a big parade and then an all day festival. But people work for weeks beforehand, getting ready for the festival, and kids in the neighborhood come in. It's in the Dominica/Puerto Rican section, and a lot of Blacks too, right in this neighborhood in Boston. And it's this huge, huge, giant, sprawling projects. So within a square mile of this community center there's 10,000 children under the age of twelve.

So we used to go into the projects and do special programs to get the kids interested in the festival, we'd get all kinds of groups of people-churches, community centers-who would join in this festival, it was fabulous. I'm trying to do things like that here.

I'd been teaching at the Alder school, this after school program called the Sun Program. That's a school that's at 174th & Alder, and it's primarily Mexican, and all the teachers speak Spanish. There's also a lot of Russian kids, and for the most case, a lot of the parents, Russian or Mexican, don't speak any English. So whenever you send notices home you have to do them in Russian, Spanish, and English. But I fell in love with the place. Two of my friends from the samba group actually are teachers there and I got invited up to do an after school program last year. So I started working with these kids and I just totally fell in love with the kids and the whole neighborhood. I loved the fact that I had Mexican and Russian and Brazilian and White and Black kids all playing music together, because when they get a little older there's a lot of problems; there's a lot of gang problems right now, there's a lot of violence between the Russians and the Mexicans, just based on ignorance of culture. So I'm in a position where I'm playing music with the kids from all these different cultures, and it's really cool.

Is that what first drew you to working with kids like this, or how did you initially get into it?

No, not necessarily. I just wanted to play music with kids, because I was so in love with drumming and Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian-based music. It does everything for you, it organizes your mind, it gets your brain working in ways that allow you to do math and science better, and it just makes you think better; it allows people to clear out all the bullshit. You really get a sense of what's really happening.

One of the first things I noticed was that I'd play a real simple beat and have kids play it back, and some kids could play it back and some kids couldn't. So that made me think about, "Well why can't they play it back?" And then I realized that there are certain things in music that I can't play back-there's stone walls I run into too, even now. But I know what I have to do, I know that I have to do whatever it takes to learn that one rhythm or that one part in order to progress. So you make the commitment to do whatever it takes. I love learning that way and I love teaching that way too. It forced me to be more creative when I would meet all these different kids and they all are different, they all think differently, they all learn differently, just like we do. So it forced me to teach in different ways, to do whatever it took to teach a kid a rhythm, so I have many, many different techniques and styles and tricks to pull out of the bag because basically that was what was done with me. I learn differently than so and so… So I use my body, I use tapping the foot. Even kids as young as three, I'm teaching them about chunks of time, about measures and bars, and how to count and how to subdivide and what's a downbeat what's an upbeat. All these things that were even a mystery to me before I started drumming, I can teach these kids, and they're so much more receptive to it, their minds are so open to it. They can learn this stuff; it's amazing.

That was one of the things people were amazed by in Boston. I'd go to these big festivals-half the time I wasn't paid, we'd just go-and sometimes we'd be invited and sometimes we wouldn't, but they always love it. People would come by and see these little kids in diapers with pacifiers in their mouths sitting there beating on a drum but playing good rhythms, and it just blew people away. Parents would be so inspired that they'd follow up and get their kids music lessons or they'd buy them a drum or they'd bring them back to me. I had a class going on. People who didn't even know their child had musical ability would see it because it was just happening in front of their eyes and it was unmistakable for what it was, and it would inspire parents to further their kids' musical education.

Why do you think it is that kids seem to be so much more receptive to that kind of basic-level creativity? It seems like you reach an age and you get a little bit more cut off from that part of yourself.

I think it's just because they don't know that they can't do it, they don't think that they can't do it, nobody's told them that they can't do it. But it's a natural thing too, rhythm is a very natural thing. For instance, I'll play this rhythm called bimbay, it's got a very complicated bell pattern, a 6/8 pattern. And there's all these shaker parts and wood block parts, they're strict subdivisions. I'll start playing the bell, playing, "ding, dong, ding, dong", like a samba, and kids will start playing perfect subdivisions or playing a perfect shaker part or even playing a drum part that's part of the rhythm that's played in Cuba by master drummers, and I didn't even show it to them. A lot of the stuff-I don't really want to get too much into this part of it, but I feel like it comes from a celestial force that has been given to human beings in order to heal themselves of the bullshit, the daily bullshit.

But anyway, I was working with these kids at the Alder school and I fell in love with the area so I decided that I wanted to start a music community center up in that area, because there's tremendous economic blight going on between 122nd all the way up to 230th St. There's all these empty storefronts and businesses that have gone out of business. So I'm looking for a storefront now, right up around 190th & Stark because it's right on the MAX line so I can get musicians to come and volunteer. They can just take the train up, they don't have to drive, come for an hour, two hours, once a month, whatever. Kids can get there easily all the way from 82nd to 240th St., they can all jump on the MAX. I'm really excited about that whole aspect.

If you found a storefront, would you be financing that out of your own pocket or would you have some sponsorship?

Well I can't finance it out of my own pocket but I'm willing to take it down to the bone to make things happen. At one point, about a year ago, I said "I really have to back off on carpentry and focus on kids' music, and I'm probably going to suffer a lot because of it, because I know I'm going to take a big income drop." You get into these patterns where you're working and working and working, and you're too tired when you get home at night to do anything. And if you're working all day, you can't go play music with kids in the afternoon in the after school program.

So I realized that was going to take a huge bite, so I've been basically living day to day ever since I moved back here, but I really believe in it and I'm willing to stick it out, make it happen.

Richie Goldstein is looking for musicians to help him in his work with children. If you're interested, or if you'd like to get your children involved, you can contact him at 503-232-8364 or 503-381-2485.