The Rural We: Richard Boulger
"I believe that each child and human being has at least one original song inside of them — if not many, many more," says Richard Boulger, a trumpeter and music educator who has studied with Freddie Hubbard and toured with the Gregg Allman band, among many other renowned musicians. After years of playing and teaching, primarily in Brooklyn and in particular Brownsville, one of New York's most underserved communities, he had a calling to return to North Adams, where he grew up. Along with his partner Jane Forrestal and local Bill Kolis, Boulger created the nonprofit Berkshires’ Academy for Advanced Musical Studies (BAAMS), and recruited world-class faculty to teach students from ages 12-18.
I was introduced to music as a child, hearing sounds from a distance that intrigued me. Later in life I learned that they came from my father, Richard Boulger, Sr., who was playing trumpet by candlelight in the basement. I fell in love with this sound; it was almost like an angel singing. As I grew older, my father introduced me to the trumpet. Every Friday night, it was our ritual: playing our trumpets together in the candlelit basement.
After high school I went to the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, and after I graduated worked on cruise ships, where I realized that would not be a lifetime of the experiences I wanted. I went on to get my masters at Rutgers.
I met Freddie Hubbard in Connecticut and studied privately with him for 15 years. He was like a musical father to me. I moved to New York in 1999 and toured with the Gregg Allman band, but there was something about being on the road that didn’t feel right. Back in New York I started teaching inner-city kids and worked as a consultant at 30 schools. I ended up at PS178 in Brownsville, where we got kids off the street and got them playing musical instruments. Kids that were in gangs are now ministers, CPA's…successful members of their communities.
I met Bill Kolis, who had been a student of my father’s at Hoosac Valley High School, on an Amtrak ride back to the Berkshires. He had an interest in music and art and we talked about creating a jazz camp. Bill, Jane and I started the Berkshires Summer Jazz-Band Day Camps in 2018. We thought it would be great to expand that out into a music academy with world-class music faculty, and started BAAMS. We have now been based in the Berkshires since the fall of 2020 and taught all of our classes online via our online learning portal eBAAMS, We’ve also been teaching our kids how to create, record, and produce a song remotely.
Through my years of searching and study, I’ve developed a teaching methodology called HTF that helps musicians express what it is they are Hearing, Thinking, and ultimately Feeling. One of my students, Braden Collins, shared that he was having a hard time being confined during the pandemic. I asked him, what would that sound like, musically? Over a period of months, we worked on his lyrics, added melody and tracks, recorded the actual tracks of “These Four Walls” with other students and faculty involvement, and then recorded the video. We are also in process of developing other students' songs, including one being written by a 12-year-old female trumpeter and rapper who is developing a song about kids and dealing with bullies, and an 18-year-old bass player who is writing a song about his transformation during the pandemic.
Like everyone else, we are hoping this fall to have in-person classes, but we will always have a live broadcast element. It allows us to work with students from anywhere in the world. Children everywhere deserve to have access to music education.
BAAMS music video: "These Four Walls" created by Braden Collins and other students
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