Empowering People to Play the Music They Love

By Josh Danson, BISS List Contributing Editor
(Photo Credit: Jay Blakesberg)

Interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity

Blue Bear School of Music is a San Francisco cultural icon akin to Beach Blanket Babylon and Karl the Fog, but it has outlasted one and predates the other. Blue Bear was a product of the 60’s counter-culture and like other familiar San Francisco institutions of that era, it has survived, thrived and evolved to take its place as part of the city’s underlying fabric. Blue Bear’s founding director, Dr. Steven Savage, has helped shepherd Blue Bear from its humble beginnings in a storefront in one of San Francisco’s backwater neighborhoods, to become an anchor tenant in Ft. Mason Center, along with the likes of Greens restaurant, The Long Now Foundation and other influential arts and cultural institutions. Blue Bear also takes pride in its outreach to underserved communities and its partnership with San Francisco Unified School District, where it helps provide much-needed arts education.

Above all, Blue Bear is about music. More specifically, it is about teaching music and encouraging musical collaboration. The kind of music that people love and want to play with others – Rock n roll, R&B, jazz, hip hop and funk. It is not a conservatory, not a Berklee or Julliard. Rather, it is a place where people can learn to play the songs they love and then play those songs with others and maybe even play in front of a crowd.

I recently spoke with Dr. Savage to help mark Blue Bear’s 50th Anniversary and to learn more about how Blue Bear has been shaped by, and helped to shape, the San Francisco music scene since its founding in 1971.

BISS List: Thanks again for making some time for me. 50 years of Blue Bear, that’s quite remarkable! Congratulations on the milestone.

Steven Savage: Well, thank you. It’s a little hard for me to believe. I can’t even believe I’m 50 years old. But so it goes.

BISS List: I can’t believe it either from looking at your picture. I am about to turn 50 myself this November, so it must be a good vintage. [Laughs]

Steven Savage: It’s a big one.

BISS List: Yep. So when you and a group of other young, idealistic musician-types founded Blue Bear back in 1971, what was the founding vision? Did you have a vision and if so, how has that vision been realized? Or how has it changed?

Steven Savage: We had a vision, and it really had nothing to do with what has happened. It was to be a rock band. I was a professional drummer, and I was playing in bands and a friend called me about joining this band in San Francisco. So, I went and auditioned, and it turned out that they also had this idea about starting a little music school just to stay alive until the band broke big. So, I joined the band and then we opened the school. We opened the school and for about two years we ran the school, which was fun and interesting, but really, we were working hard on the band. We took a bunch of our students and created this sort of big band experience with our students as part of our band. We played a bunch of clubs and we got Ed Denson, who had been Country Joe and The Fish’s manager and The Joy of Cooking’s manager, to become our manager. So, we were all poised to make it as a band. And we had a number of opportunities, but then… nothing happened. We couldn’t get signed and it kind of devolved, and the band broke up. But the school, which at that point was very small, continued. It continued for a very short time with Ed Denson running it, but that wasn’t working out. So, one of the students called me and said, “Do you want to come back and run the school with me?” This was a woman who was basically the finance person for the school, such as they were, our finances were tiny. So, I came back and we were still in a small storefront over by San Francisco State, in a small corner of the city. And we just managed to keep the school going. We were about $2000 in debt, which seemed like a huge amount of money at the time. And we had, I think we had 60 students, and we just sort of kept it going. I was still playing in bands and mostly being a musician. But then – and I wish I remembered from who or how I heard about it – but Fort Mason center, I’m not sure if you know San Francisco…

BISS List: Yep, I know where Ft. Mason is. I’ve lived in San Francisco for the last 20 years.

Steven Savage: There you go. So you know the geography. Somebody told me that Fort Mason Center was becoming a thing, it was just at its very beginning. This was around 1979. So, I went out there and they said, “Oh, a Rock n’ Roll school? Sure.” And we got a space there! They helped us figure out how to get it built with some government money. And we moved to Ft. Mason Center. We were one of the very first groups out there and that really changed everything for us. The student body started to grow very quickly and then the school just became more and more of the thing over its history, you know? To where we are now, with 800 students and 40 teachers and all of our community outreach. We’ve been a nonprofit from the very beginning, but we weren’t really doing that much outreach until about 20 years ago when we really started doing work in underserved communities and raising funds, doing grants and allowing us to offer free programs in the Bayview and the Tenderloin.

The upshot is the school was a much better idea than the band, but the initial motivation was all about the band.

BISS List: Got it. Turned out the school had more staying power.

Steven Savage: Absolutely.

BISS List: So, do you guys have a mission that you articulate today?

Steven Savage: Yeah, we do. Our mission is: Empowering people to play the music they love. And I like it. It’s a good description of what we do. We have always focused our attention, not on any set curriculum, not on any particular style or kind of music, but really letting people guide their own music education, their own musical passion, and we help them to play the music they love; whether it’s straight-ahead Rock N’ Roll or R&B or country music, or more recently we’ve gotten into a lot of rap and hip hop, especially from working in underserved communities. So, our agenda is music and helping you play the music that you want to play, you know?

BISS List: Yeah.

Steven Savage: That’s the driving force.

BISS List: Well, that’s very cool. And that dovetails perfectly with my next question, which was… Where does the curriculum for all that music education derive? Or is it up to the individual musicians/teachers to develop it themselves? Do you have an overarching teaching philosophy with lesson plans or templates for the teachers to follow? Or how does that all work?

Steven Savage: Yeah, well, you’re right. What I said sort of sets the stage for that question because for the most part, we have very little in terms of set curriculum. We have very little in terms of required pedagogy. We do help teachers if they want help, but to a large extent, we allow them to create their own curriculum and create and make their own lesson plans and classes. And we encourage them to do that really in conjunction with their students and to guide their teaching and their curriculum in line with what the student interests are and student desires are. We do have a Little Bears program – a toddler program that started about 15 years ago that’s become very popular and successful – that has more of a set, not really a curriculum, but it has more of a philosophy in terms of approach. And when we hire those teachers, we have them shadow several classes and spend some time with them in terms of how we want them to run the classes. Those are more guided in terms of early childhood music education. There’s a whole philosophical world around that, so we do conform to some of those ideas. We’ve also gotten to be very close to the people who run the arts programing at San Francisco Unified, and we run several classes in San Francisco public schools – elementary, middle, and high school – and those programs tend to also have a little more of a set curriculum. There’s a whole set of so-called VAPA standards [visual and performing arts], so there are standards in the arts in public schools and our programs conform to those standards. But there’s still quite a bit of variety and we have rock bands and we have ‘make your own beats’ kind of rap and hip hop classes in the schools. They still are oriented, or partly oriented, toward popular music and probably really oriented to what the kids are passionate about, while still conforming to certain standards. I should backtrack on one thing, in terms of playing the music you love. We don’t really do classical music. We are a popular music school. We’re good friends with Community Music Center, and if we get somebody inquiring about classical music, we usually send them there.

BISS List: Got it. There’s plenty of places for classical music education, we need more rock education! [Laughs]

Steven Savage: I totally agree. So that’s us.

BISS List: Full disclosure here. I’ve played guitar, fair to middling, for the last of 35 years of my life. So, I’m still in learning mode myself.

Steven Savage: Do you play in any bands?

BISS List: I played in the band in college, but now mostly I just noodle around on my acoustic.

Steven Savage: Yeah. Understood. But that’s great.

BISS List: Yep, so I’m always learning, always trying to learn new songs, new techniques. And I’ve toyed with the idea of coming to check you guys out. I know you put people together with other musicians and help them to form bands. So that’s something I’ve been interested in checking out.

Steven Savage: We DO do that and of course we would love to have you. There are rock bands we put together and there’s also acoustic jam session kinds of things that we do. But you know, that’s another thing about the school, which is, we’re really 100% amateurs. We are not Berklee School of Music. We are not trying to create professional musicians. I think some of the kids in our Teen All-Star band program for middle and high school kids, some of those kids have professional aspirations, and some of them will definitely be professional musicians. We have some really awesome kids playing in those bands. But the adult programing is really all about what you do, which is to play music for fun. And just to have it in your life is such a wonderful thing.

BISS List: Yeah, totally. Well, talk to me a little bit about Blue Bear’s relationship with the Bay Area. It’s really become a beloved institution here, and I wonder if you think it would have thrived as much as it has elsewhere, or if there’s something special about the Bay Area – and San Francisco in particular – that’s allowed Blue Bear to grow and become so enmeshed with the community?

Steven Savage: Yeah, I think definitely. We feel so identified with San Francisco. We have toyed with the idea of opening franchises in other places. We have hopes of opening in the East Bay and maybe in Marin. But in terms of being in other parts of the world… I’ve thought about this. You know, going back to our founding in 1971, we were The Blue Bear Waltzes School of Music, and there’s a story behind that name, but it’s definitely a name from the counterculture era. And although we do a lot of contemporary music – we do rap and hip hop, we have a deejay class, we have an electronic music class – our culture is still very steeped in the 60s counterculture. A lot of the music that gets played in the workshops [is rock from the classic era]… That’s partly because we’re here in San Francisco, and it’s partly, of course, how powerful the music was in the 60s. And it’s still with us, you know? Witness the popularity of the Beatles 3-part documentary that just came out.

BISS List: For sure.

Steven Savage: But we strongly identify with San Francisco, and I think our identity, our persona, and who we are very much feels like San Francisco and would likely not work in other places. So, yeah, we pride ourselves on being a San Francisco cultural institution, and I think it’s a critical part of our identity.

BISS List: Yeah, I remember hearing about you guys or at least being aware of Blue Bear from the earliest days of my being out here, whether it be attending a fundraiser or knowing someone who took lessons with you. We actually have a framed photograph of Trombone Shorty that has pride of place on our living room wall that we bought at one of your fundraising auctions at Bimbos, 10 years ago, or something like that.

Steven Savage: That time that Trombone Shorty played? We were so lucky to have him. That was an incredible show. Just such a great night.

BISS List: Yeah, for sure. He’s amazing. Speaking of amazing performers, I saw that Jack Black just recorded a version of “Suffragette City” with your All-Star Teen Band in honor of the big anniversary and gave a nice shout-out to you guys as, “the original School of Rock.” I was wondering if he reached out to you guys during the making of that movie. And is that where the relationship stems from or did you connect with him after the fact, after that movie came out?

Steven Savage: It was definitely after the fact, and it was recently. I recently rewatched that movie, by the way, and it definitely holds up. It’s awesome. But that movie was quite a while ago. We had this idea because we were coming up to our 50th anniversary and we were trying to figure out what could we do that would be really special? Who might we involve? And of course, Jack Black came up immediately as the perfect person if we could get him engaged to help us celebrate 50th anniversary. And we happened to have a board member who is closely connected – and this is an odd story, or maybe just a little surprising – to Jack’s high school principal, who happens to have remained a very good friend of Jack’s. They apparently developed a real bond and have remained friends ever since Jack’s high school days. So, our board member contacted this person and he contacted Jack and told him about the school and said, “Would you be interested in doing something with them?” And Jack said, “Absolutely!” And he’s been so gracious and generous and fun. So, we feel very fortunate. It was so perfect. The thing he did with the band and the shout-out to us. I mean, it really couldn’t have been better in terms of celebrating the 50th and part of our legacy and we’re very grateful for that.

BISS List: Yeah, that was wonderful. So cool that you were able to make that happen. That’s great.

Steven Savage: Yeah.

BISS List: So, what’s up next for Blue Bear and how do you continue to build on the foundation you’ve laid to ensure that it’ll be around for another 50 years?

Steven Savage: Yes, of course that’s very much on my mind. Obviously, I won’t be around for another 50 years, but that’s okay. We have some great young, late 20s, early 30s staffers who could make it another 50. And I think a lot about our legacy and our future. Unfortunately, the pandemic has been a difficult time for us. I mean, we will survive it, certainly, and we’re hanging in there well. But right before the pandemic we had plans for an East Bay campus and had even identified a location and had started to fundraise. And that’s what I see as the future for Blue Bear. Its expansion. Its Bay Area expansion. Music education is a localized phenomenon. If you look at Blue Bear’s demographics, from where we are in Fort Mason you could create a chart where if you had dots for all the people that come to the school, they would be most dense within half a mile of a school. And then a mile away it’s a little less dense, and a couple of miles away even sparser, you know, so the closer you are to the school, the more likely you are to come there.

BISS List: Right.

Steven Savage: So, our best path to longevity is to have a school in the East Bay and a school in Marin, and even possibly a school on the Peninsula ultimately, to serve those folks. We do some programing in the East Bay now and we’ve done things off and on there. I know we would do well there, but getting established… We don’t operate under the usual capitalistic economic ideal. I don’t leverage the school. I don’t go out and take a big loan in order to build a campus in the East Bay. I guess we have pretty low-risk tolerance, and that’s part of our mission. So, we can build in the East Bay, and I’m confident that we will be successful there, but the initial build-out, building the school, is expensive – to build audio and music rooms and facilities. So, we still need to raise that money. I was confident about that when we were starting it, but then it totally got upended by the pandemic, understandably. And the reality now is that funders for the last couple of years and probably for the next couple of years, are really focused on survival, helping institutions survive, not on expansion.

BISS List: Right.

Steven Savage: In fact, some of our best funders, a couple of our best funders just came to us and gave us more money than they had ever given us because they said, “We know this is a tough time for everybody and we’re giving you,” what one of them called, “solidarity money.” And we’ve needed it. Our revenue from our fee-for-service, earned revenue, as they call it, from tuition and stuff is considerably down. But our philanthropy, our donations, are considerably up because our supporters have really stepped up to help us. But in terms of finding new money or finding expansion money, that really has been impossible in this current environment. So, I plan to get back to that notion of expanding, and I do think that’s the future. 50 years from now, I would love to see four or five or six Blue Bear campuses all around the Bay Area. That is the future for us, but it has been stalled here in the pandemic, I’m afraid.

BISS List: Yeah. Well, we’re ALL ready to turn the page on that, for sure.

Steven Savage: Yeah, that’s for sure. Just waiting.

BISS List: Well, I very much look forward to seeing what’s next for you guys and supporting it in whatever way I can – supporting your expansion or just spreading the word.

Steven Savage: Well, that would be great.

BISS List: And I think I’m going to be speaking with Jay Lane next week, your former student, and hopefully he can give me a little perspective as well, from a musician’s standpoint. I know you’re a musician as well, but from a former student, turned professional musician’s standpoint.

Steven Savage: Jay Lane, I think it was the late 70s, mid to late 70s, that Jay came to Blue Bear as a student. It was when we were still out on Ocean Avenue in the little storefront. He was my student before we made the move to Fort Mason Center. I was the drummer in the band, so he was my drum student. And he was, as I recall, 13 years old at the time. And he was definitely the best student I had ever had to that point, as a 13-year-old, even though I had taught a bunch of adults. But he was clearly very talented. It’s funny because he was a very quiet kid. I think it was, you know, being a 13-year-old teenager in a drum lesson with an adult. He was a really good student, I enjoyed having him, but he was super quiet. Having gotten to know him more recently, he’s a very effusive, affable, funny, outgoing guy who’s very different than he was as a 13-year-old. But, I’ve followed his career and he and I have stayed in touch, especially more recently. And he’s come back to teach at the school and we’re going to get him set up with some more students whenever he has the time to do some teaching. So that’s been very gratifying, very fun. I had another drum student, Kevin Hayes [longtime drummer with the Robert Cray Band], who has also had a very successful career. And it’s really gratifying to see, especially those two guys, to feel like I had a very small part at the beginning of their lives as drummers. A little part of it. But it’s really gratifying to see them go on to have such wonderful careers, and Jay is just doing awesome.

BISS List: I’m sure that must be amazing as a teacher.

Steven Savage: Yeah, it is. It feels good.

BISS List: Well, thank you so much for your time. Dr. Savage. It was great to speak with you. And hopefully I’ll get to meet you in person one of these days at the next fundraiser, or maybe at a jam session.

Steven Savage: Yes, definitely. We’ve been waiting and planning and waiting and planning… Matt Nathanson has agreed to play for us right before the pandemic hit and still wants to play for us. So eventually, we’re going to have a Matt Nathanson show, which will be super awesome. We’ve got some other things planned as well, but you know, we can’t plan too much yet.

BISS List: Nope, everything’s still up in the air. But fingers crossed!

Steven Savage: Thank you so much, Josh. We love the BISS List and we’re really happy for the support from you guys and I appreciate your time as well.

BISS List: Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Take care.

Steven Savage: Bye.

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You can find more about Blue Bear School of Music, sign up for classes, join a band or donate to help them empower people to play the music they love at: https://bluebearmusic.org/