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07/08/2015 08:00 AMWhat’s the first step in a professional jazz career? A club date? Jason Domnarski started out with a club date, but it was not a date to play music. Make that a date to wait tables. That’s what he was doing little more than a decade ago at the Jazz Standard club, in New York.
Now Jason, who grew up in Ivoryton and began his musical journey in Westbrook, is the owner of two music schools 3,500 miles apart, one in Park Slope, Brooklyn and the other in Paris. And if you think Mozart and Beethoven when you hear music school, think again. Jason is the proprietor of the Park Slope School of Rock, as both the American and French versions are called. As its name makes abundantly clear, Park Slope teaches young people from the ages of 8 to 18, to perform as members of rock bands, and just like the professionals, to write their own music and lyrics.
Jason does weeklong rock camps at both schools in the summer and he is doing the same camp at the Community Music School (CMS) in Ivoryton the week of July 13 to 17. The students spend three hours during the first four days, working on their music and lyric- writing skills and on the fifth day they go to Eric Lichter’s Dirt Floor Studio in Chester to make a professional-quality recording of their work. Jason puts all the songs online for the students to download themselves and also to share the link with friends.
When he came to New York after graduating as a music major from Skidmore College, Jason had no plans to start a music school of any kind. He wanted a career as a jazz pianist. He had started piano lessons with the late Karen Nelson in Westbrook, and switched to CMS as a teen so he could take jazz lessons with instructor Tom Briggs. He also studied with CMS piano teacher Marilyn Lazare.
While playing pick-up gigs and waiting tables in New York, a friend recommended him as a replacement for a job that he was leaving, as an instructor in an afterschool program on the creative arts for New York City Public School Children.
“I found myself in a room with 18 children and only seven guitars,” he recalls. “It was a nightmare at first, a brand new teacher, wrangling with classroom management.”
But something happened. Jason discovered he liked the process of creating a rock band from a roomful of squirming students—and that he had a talent for doing it. He put up a blog post that he was starting his own rock school; five youngsters enrolled, enough for his first student band. After that, he says, enrollment kept growing, even though the only publicity was word of mouth.
Then there was a change of venue. Jason married his college classmate Rachel Cavanaugh, a historian of design as well as a jazz singer. She had a job with the Parsons Institute of Design in Paris.
You can’t live midway between when midway is the middle of the Atlantic, so Jason moved to Paris. He started a rock school, once again calling it the Park Slope School of Rock, and once again finding students. In fact, now the Paris branch of the school has more students than the Brooklyn site. Jason has a manager in Brooklyn, with whom he talks weekly. He also visits the Brooklyn site several times a year.
Jason now knows things that all his years of music study never taught him.
“I took courses in music, but now I am both an artist and a businessman. I have to use Excel, I have to manage a business, things I never learned in college,” he says.
For the musical side of his existence, he is now picking dates with French groups.
Jason had spent a semester abroad in France while in college and says his French today is usable, though still a work in progress. Language isn’t a problem when he teaches—his classes are in English. That’s not a drawback, he adds, but an advantage. He says many French parents want their children to learn English and other students come from expatriate families in which English is the native language. In addition, he says, Brooklyn’s current reputation as the trendy spot for Millennials and Gen X-ers has spread to France.
“Parisians are obsessed with New York, and now Brooklyn, too,” he says.
The process of writing songs, as well as learning how to play and perform rock music gives his music students an important artistic outlet in Jason’s view.
“We’re tapping creativity, helping young people say what’s inside them, helping them to find ways to explore,” he says.
But exploration has its limits. Rock lyrics can be about sex and drugs, but not for Jason’s students. In fact, he says, it is extremely rare for those to be the topics of songs they write. In the few cases where he finds the taste questionable, Jason advises that while the student can finish the song on his own, it would not be suitable for the end-of-term recital. The recitals both in Paris and in New York take place in concert halls, sometimes with as many as 400 people in attendance.
Learning to write songs and play in a rock band, in Jason’s view, transcends the musical experience. It teaches the basic lessons of group participation and cooperation transferable to many other areas of life.
“The most important things they learn are about life skills in tandem with the music. I see positive effects in risk taking, in growing confidence, in learning how to work with a group,” he says.
Returning to Connecticut each summer gives Jason a chance not only to teach here, but to do what many vacationers do: Go to the beach. It is also a time to revisit his own musical memories.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in the waiting room at the Community Music School before my lessons with Tom Briggs,” he says.