By Christian Howes, Guest Contributor

Jazz Violinist

I spent my 21st, 22nd, 23rd and 24th birthdays locked up in Ohio prisons. I was convicted of a drug-related felony and sentenced for 6 to 25 years. Committed the crime at 18, indicted at 19, and I was sent away when I was 20.

At age five, I began playing violin and received serious classical training. I started playing guitar and bass when I was a teenager. But when I went to prison, I felt like a late starter, learning for the first time new lessons about life and music.

During the first two weeks in the county jail, I remember trying to make music.  County jail is the worst place because it’s more temporary, and the food is disgusting. Everybody’s crammed in a small room–sometimes 12 beds in one holding cell.

After a few days, I tried to start composing some music. I got a piece of paper and made staff lines on it and just off the top of my head started writing music. I felt compelled to put my time to good use, and that seemed like one way to do it.

After county, I was shipped to the orientation facility. So you can imagine all the kind of cliché images: guards talking to you real mean, rouging you up, cutting your hair, making you get naked and poking at you. They re-dress you in a monkey suit, make you stand up straight and try to scare the crap out of you. And then they put you in solitary confinement for a couple of weeks, letting you out only for meals.

A couple days into solitary, I did not listen to anything.  I just laid in bed.  One day, to my surprise, I heard a sound coming from the cell a few doors down from me. Someone was singing. It struck me. I mean it really hit me. I had been in a conservatory prior to prison. I played music for hours every day. I was in rock bands and in the symphony, soloing and winning competitions. Music consumed my life. Classical music of the highest level surrounded me. But there was something about hearing the prisoner’s voice that really touched me. He was an African American man, and he was singing “Amazing Grace.” The way he sang it was poles apart from the classical music approach.

And that was one of the first times that I had begun to realize that music is not just something that is studied in school. It’s not just something that is a product of the hype of press releases, it’s not just about who plays on stage and who makes records and who’s the best but rather music is something human and spontaneous and organic. In that moment, the man had no other reason to sing other than that he was in solitary confinement; he’s not practicing, he’s not performing, he’s just singing because he wanted to sing.

When I arrived at my parent institution, I would have all kinds of opportunities to jam with other musicians and to teach and be taught. And that same revelation kept coming back to me that music when divorced from press releases and music halls (and Myspace pages—I don’t know about Myspace), and from everything commercial, music is this basic human thing. I saw people express and create music in prison in many different ways. It provided the entire community with a sense of humanity in an environment where people were dehumanized–alienated from their human nature.

And speaking of late starters, there were quite a few older guys that I ended up working with in prison. We would play music. Sometimes I would teach, and other times we would just jam. It amazed me how these people that had no formal training could be so expressive and have so much to say through music. It was quite humbling. A friend of mine who had been locked up for over 30 years at the time taught himself to play the trumpet out in the fields when nobody was awake but the cows. And another friend of mine who I helped to teach play the saxophone from nothing would come every day in the yard and practice his saxophone with me. I’d have my guitar, and we’d just sit there and play scales and try things. I would hear amazing things from these guys; things I knew I could never come up with. Part of that was cultural, but I also began to realize that anyone could make music.

Ultimately, it was these experiences during those four years that totally changed my path as a musician. Having once been on the road of a classical concert violinist, I reevaluated and determined that I wanted to be a jazz violinist. Jazz is music that emphasizes personal creativity and expression. That was something that I felt had been lacking in classical music and was a real challenge.  Music is organic, taking place in any community, regardless of whether there is sheet music, a concert hall, a formal audience or whatever.

Be sure to check out my annual Creative Strings Workshop, held each July in Columbus, Ohio. String players from all over the world come to Columbus to study and perform in 25 concerts, which I host all throughout the city.

“Christian Howes is an Associate Professor at the Berklee College of Music, a Yamaha and D’Addario Performing Artist and a recording artist for Resonance Records. He is widely established as one of the world’s preeminent young jazz violinists, working extensively with the likes of Les Paul, Bill Evans and many other jazz stars. He tours broadly as a performer, teacher and speaker. See his performance videos here.

His innovative production business provides affordable, Live String tracks for music productions to clients worldwide, from solo strings to large string sections,  via overdubbing real strings from remote location studios: more info.

His Creative Strings Workshop provides experiential learning opportunities to string players from around the world interested in studying improvisation in all styles as well as a performance festival for the city of Columbus.”

April 26, 2010in Features by guest-contributor 3 Comments »