Music

Bop 'Til You Drop

EC native to facilitate early jazz experience for kids

Eric Christenson |

THIS IS HOW WEBOP. Jazz musician and Eau Claire Memorial grad Tim Sullivan facillitates a New York-based early childhood jazz class called WeBop, which gets kids as young as eight months old learning the basics of jazz. Image: Tim Sullivan
THIS IS HOW WEBOP. Jazz musician and Eau Claire Memorial grad Tim Sullivan facillitates a New York-based early childhood jazz class called WeBop, which gets kids as young as eight months old learning the basics of jazz. Image: Tim Sullivan

There’s a room full of people and instruments buzzing. A rhythm section taps out a basic tune while kids, their parents, and other musicians alike are dancing, moving, and singing together. These kids are learning to improvise, engage in call and response, feel the music, and all the while have tons of fun with the genre of jazz.

At the center of the room is Tim Sullivan, a jazz saxophonist from Eau Claire, laughing and leading the group through songs and exercises. Sullivan’s the type of jazz expert who could roll with the best of them, but in this environment he’s presenting kids with a real deal jazz experience, but making it so approachable and open, it’s less of a jazz lesson and more like a jam session.

“There’s a difference between jazz in school and jazz in the real world,” Sullivan told me. “Jazz is a music that has to live and breathe.”

“Sometimes, the way that we teach jazz in schools is totally antithetical to what it actually is. So I’m very interested in pedagogical curriculum for this setting. You can’t just teach a baby to read. You talk to it.” – Jazz musician Tim Sullivan on the ethos behind early childhood jazz class WeBop

After graduating from Eau Claire Memorial High School and their lauded local jazz program, Sullivan studied jazz saxophone at the Chicago College of Performing Arts. In the Windy City, he started gigging around, playing live jazz as often as possible, sometimes with his friends, sometimes with legends. After graduation, he headed south to New Orleans to get his master’s degree from the University of New Orleans. That’s where jazz, for him, became something else entirely.

“That just opened up everything for me – musically, humanistically…” he said. “There were two-year-olds clapping on two and four. I was kind of a jazz-head when I moved down there, but it was just like, ‘Woah, this is so more important than just jazz; this is a social process.’”

Soon after, Sullivan became a New Yorker, where he attended Columbia University for a spell and got involved with Jazz at Lincoln Center, a facility in Manhattan that holds jazz performances, promotes advocacy, and has an impressive slate of forward-thinking educational programs. For years, Sullivan headed up an educational program called WeBop, a class that invites families to stomp, strut, and swing to the joyous rhythms of jazz as they learn about the core concepts, instruments, and great jazz performers.

Now, Sullivan finds himself back in Eau Claire, where jazz is in the water. We’ve got the stunning Eau Claire Jazz Festival, tons of award-winning jazz ensembles on the high school and collegiate level, a new jazz-focused music venue in The Lakely, and now we can add WeBop to that list. There are tons of benefits of having early childhood jazz immersion that are big for development. At its heart, jazz is entirely expressive. With WeBop, kids are learning to express themselves in a unique way very early on, while bolstering creativity, imagination, teamwork, and listening – rather than just learning notes and reading music.

“Sometimes, the way that we teach jazz in schools is totally antithetical to what it actually is. So I’m very interested in pedagogical curriculum for this setting,” Sullivan said. “You can’t just teach a baby to read. You talk to it.”

The first steps of launching WeBop in Eau Claire are already underway with a partnership with UW-Eau Claire and the Children’s Nature Academy at The Priory. The program won’t start actual classes until January, but the first WeBop Family Jazz Party is 6pm on Nov. 10 as part of the Nature Academy’s Family, Health and Wellness open house event. Sullivan is bringing together a bevy of Eau Claire’s best jazz musicians – Josh Gallagher on piano, Jeremy Boettcher on keys, Sean Carey on drums, and Sullivan himself on sax – to jam with kids and their families.

Sullivan designed a large portion of the WeBop curriculum himself, and come January, local families can start enrolling and kids can start playing. Meanwhile, when UWEC students or other jazz musicians want to get involved, they can sit in on a class, or even start to learn how to facilitate WeBop themselves. Sullivan’s taking the lead for now, but hopes that other artists will step up and join him, so WeBop can be a long-withstanding part of our city’s evolving jazz community.

“As artists, I think we have an obligation to ask ourselves, ‘how are we helping?’” Sullivan said. “The idea to me of just leading a career as an artist, as a self-promoting, self-employed hustler, I’m kinda over that. I want do something more.”

Get your kid stompin’, struttin’, and swingin’ at the “ABC of Jazz” term every Saturday beginning January 7-February 25.

Hipsters – 8-16 months – 10am
Scatters – Walking to 23 months – 11am
Stompers – 2 to 3 years – 12pm
Syncopators – 4 to 5 years – 1pm
Gumbo (siblings class) – 3 to 5 years – 2pm

Where can you catch the rhythm?  

UWEC Haas Fine Arts Center
121 Water Street
Eau Claire, WI 54702

How many bones?

$150 per term per family (one child, one adult)
20% discount for families enrolling multiple children

To register for the upcoming “ABC’s of Jazz” term or to learn more about WeBop After-School classes, please contact:

Gweni Smith of Eau Claire Jazz, Inc.
Phone: 715-836-4092
Email: gweni.smith@eauclairejazz.com
Website: www.eauclairejazz.com/webop