This weeks AFP Art Ed blog entry features student, drummer and musician Jansen Bennett. Jansen was already an accomplished musician and world music enthusiast before we even met at the beginning of the school year. Having traveled to India with his mother, an accomplished actress, on a number of occasions, he developed a keen ear for the music of that region and a comprehensive knowledge of the instrumentation, musical concepts, and reverential spiritual focus that characterize and differentiate it from our own. Jansen plays percussion, including tabla (two drums, played with the fingertips, tuned to high and low pitches that are used in traditional Indian classical music), ghatam (a clay pot with three different tones), mridangam (a two sided drum from southern India), dholak (a northern Indian double sided barrel drum), and drum set; kemenche (a Turkish bowed instrument from the Black Sea region), guitar and bass. He also plays a variety of mouth harps (yes, like Snoopy), which come primarily from different regions in India, but some are from Italy or Hungary. An avid participant in the after school program, Jansen brings an openness and enthusiasm to Humanities’ music program that are rare in a high school student.
Interestingly, Jansen was also born 26 weeks premature. That’s not a typo, and makes him a miracle of modern medicine. He also lost his birth mother early in life. He sometimes is frustrated by the superficiality of high school social dynamics as a result of his deeper perspective on life and his slight physical differences, but I feel that if more of the students at school would take cues from Jansen about what is really important, they would learn a lot about how to be a more completely realized person in adulthood rather than focusing on the priorities usually held in highest regard in high school like popularity, fashion and acting cool.
