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Echoes set the beat for Stax's Willis

By Leanne Kleinmann
kleinman@commercialappeal.com

When Marc Willis walks through the '70s-funky halls of the Stax Music Academy on McLemore, he hears echoes.

Sometimes, especially when he listens to the trumpet players, the academy director remembers himself playing trumpet in high school in Memphis and later studying music at Berklee College of Music and Indiana University. He ponders ways to teach the Stax Academy kids that kind of commitment, and why it's important to practice every day.

Sometimes he hears echoes of the success of this summer's SNAP! camp, where 226 kids from the surrounding Soulsville neighborhood and across the city learned from and rehearsed with the legendary Mavis Staples in preparation for an end-of-camp performance at the Orpheum.

"Things are going very well here now," Willis, 40, says, "and a lot has to do with what happened this year."

Academy programs have moved from startup mode (the Stax Academy of Music opened in summer 2002 and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music opened in May 2003) to a more stable place. New projects have been launched, like the FedEx International Student Exchange, which sent 11th-grade singer Tiffany Gray to London to study this past summer, while an English musician came to Stax.

It's not just inside the academy that Willis hears those echoes. Having the museum across the courtyard helps as well.

"The museum feeds a critical piece of our overall goal," he says.

For example, the academy kids were able to ponder the original, handwritten arrangement of a Soul Children song, holding the sheet music from the museum's archives in their carefully gloved hands. And they've taken numerous tours of the place to support various parts of the academy curriculum.

"It helps the kids understand the legacy," says Willis, "so they can be prideful of it."

Leanne Kleinmann is assistant managing editor at The Commercial Appeal. Contact her at 529-2535.