Adopt the Arts Brings Music Education to PSUSD Elementaries | Palm Springs Life
Adopt the Arts, a nonprofit organization working to provide music education curriculum for underserved elementary schools, is coming to the Palm Springs Unified School District. Co-founded by Grammy-winning musician and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Matt Sorum, and Golden Globe– and Emmy Award–winning actor Jane Lynch, Adopt the Arts has brought music education to several schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and they are excited to launch their pilot program with PSUSD at the start of the 2024–2025 school year.
Sorum hosted an open house at his Good Noise Music Studio in downtown Palm Springs. Averal PSUSD officials and Adopt the Arts 2024–2025 music teachers came to mingle, talk about the program, and jam out with Sorum.
Growing up in a household centered around music, Sorum says his mother and grandfather were both music educators. He was fortunate enough to be playing instruments and learning about music at a very young age. “When I formed Adopt the Arts, all those memories of what I experienced as a kid really became part of this equation,” Sorum explains. His goal is to give children the opportunity to fall in love with music and learn from it the way he did.
Sorum poses with students.
Adopt the Arts is not only providing PSUSD schools with a music program but also “providing quality enrichment through music,” says PSUSD superintendent Tony Signoret. “They’re not just donating instruments or bringing in some resources, they’re bringing in professional mentors and curriculum. It is a program designed to be sustained over the years, and it is definitely an opportunity we were not going to pass up,” Signoret says.
Commencing with the upcoming school semester, Adopt the Arts will be coming to Agua Caliente, Bubbling Wells, Della S. Lindley, and Vista Del Monte elementary schools, with plans to expand to Cabot Yerxa and Cathedral City elementary schools at the start of the second semester.
A resident of Palm Springs, Sorum believes this is the perfect place to grow the Adopt the Arts program due to the strong sense of community throughout the desert and the area’s ties to influential performers in the music industry.
“We’re all in collaboration,” Sorum says. “The teachers all have their own way of teaching, but we’re giving them the opportunity to expand, and we’re doing it with them — all of us are in this together.”
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www.palmspringslife.com/adopt-the-arts-brings-music-education-to-psusd-elementaries/
Matt Sorum, Ace Harper Create Hard-Rock Haven in Vistas Las Palmas
Matt Sorum’s 1962 Ford Galaxie is a transplant from Iowa. Like the Grammy-winning drummer, songwriter, and entrepreneur who originally hails from Long Beach, it’s soaking up the good life in Palm Springs, ready to embark on the next ride.
“It doesn’t have seatbelts?”
The words slip out before I can stop them, as Sorum gives the passenger door a strong push. A metallic click in the doorframe calls to mind the lock of a safety bar on an old Coney Island roller coaster.
“Is that legal?”
“Seatbelts were an option back in those days,” Sorum says, shrugging and evading the question in a way you might expect of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame royalty.
His daily driver departs slowly from the light and airy, mountain-view home by architect Charles Du Bois, where Sorum lives with his professional dancer–turned–fashion designer wife, Ace Harper, and their daughter, Lou Ellington, who will be 2 in June. We’re headed to Sorum’s newly finished private music studio, a dark den shrouded like a sleeping bat in an unmarked commercial space off Palm Canyon Drive.
The Galaxie glides along, topless — a sleek, chestnut beast of a road machine. It looks and coasts like the perfect set of throwback wheels for someone who has set aside their sordid past in a tell-all memoir (Double Talkin’ Jive, Rare Bird Books, 2022) and is genuinely thrilled to be penning a kinder, gentler chapter. It’s also instantly recognizable wherever Sorum and Harper go: Bar Cecil, Tropicale, events at the Palm Springs Art Museum. “The cat’s out of the bag,” as they like to say. The rocker parents are bona fide locals now, active in the community and at peace with surrendering their anonymity as poolside part-timers.
En route to the studio, Sorum tosses out a well-researched nugget about almost every property we pass. Sure, he toured the globe as a hit-’em-hard drummer for Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver, and The Cult, collecting major awards that fill more than one studio wall and a shelf in his home, but he also happens to relish midcentury cars, homes, and history.
“You know the Kaufmann House? That was Barry Manilow’s,” he points out. “Everyone pulls up and takes pictures. The pink house, that was Jack Benny’s. The one with the piano mailbox is Liberace’s. Did you know Liberace had four houses?”
No. I actually had no idea.
“And the bass player for Jane’s Addiction just moved in over there. See? They’re coming,” he says.
The musicians are coming.
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www.palmspringslife.com/matt-sorum-ace-harper-create-hard-rock-haven-in-vistas-las-palmas
Former Guns N' Roses drummer partners with PSUSD on music education
When Palm Springs Unified School District Superintendent Tony Signoret was in college during the '80s in Los Angeles, he saw Guns N' Roses perform a concert before the iconic rock band signed a record contract. He was surprised last year during a cabinet meeting when he came across a proposal by the band's former drummer Matt Sorum.
Signoret said he was "thrilled" when he saw that proposal from Sorum's music education nonprofit, Adopt the Arts, which is going into effect in four of the district's elementary schools during the 2024-25 school year with plans to expand the program to two more during the second semester. Funding is being provided entirely by Adopt the Arts and will not cost the district any money.
On Monday, GoodNoise studio in Palm Springs, which is owned by Sorum and musician Jason Mendelson, hosted an open house to celebrate the launch of the program.
"There's enough funding now that ensures the arts are not cut from budgets, even as we're coming into tighter fiscal times over the next couple of years," Signoret said. "There's a lot of state support for that, and we're blessed our school board has always prioritized the visual and performing arts. That's been a big priority for us over many years. It's not just about donating and bringing in instruments, it's providing mentorship from professional musicians."
Former Guns N' Roses drummer Matt Sorum at his Good Noise Studio in Palm Springs.
The curriculum includes expanded music education fundamentals and lessons, but it also places an emphasis on cultural understanding, creativity and expression, emotional and social development, integration with other school subjects, and body awareness and movement.
"(Students) can go home to their parents and say 'I learned about Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 and the rhythms of Brazil," Sorum said. "Culturally, they're going to learn the mathematics and the connection of playing music together. And then not only that, but mindfulness. When I feel anxiety, I get on the drums and it makes me feel better."
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Kings of Chaos in Ultimate Classic Rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C8gBAr1XKU&feature=emb_title
New Song and Music Video "Desert High"
https://youtu.be/7gvdgiZWg18
Video Directed by: Harry Reese
Produced by: Matt Sorum
“Desert High” is one of the more idiosyncratic and evocative tracks from Hardware, Billy F Gibbons’ third solo album, out June 4 from Concord. The song, available now, takes the form of a narrative tone poem with mysterious instrumental accompaniment. It clearly derives inspiration from the high desert location of Escape Studios where the Hardware recording sessions happened last summer. The album was recorded by Gibbons along with drummer Matt Sorum and guitarist Austin Hanks. Both Sorum and Hanks, it should be mentioned, are based in the California desert these days with Gibbons front and center.
The song, which is recited by Gibbons with his gruff, yet lyrical, delivery cites desert imagery that is specific to the area around Joshua Tree, California. The companion video for “Desert High” finds BFG cruising a dusty desert landscape in a clapped out ’65 Dodge and was directed by Harry Reese and produced by Matt Sorum who also brought “West Coast Junkie,” the album’s previously released track, to the screen.
Listen: https://found.ee/BillyFGibbons-DesertHigh
Apart from scorpions, cacti, snakes and eagles, the song makes reference to three illustrious musical souls, two of whom are long departed and the other still very much with us. In the song, Billy says/sings:
“The desert toad takes me for a ride
The Lizard King’s always by my side”
The Lizard King is, of course the alter ego of the late Jim Morrison of the Doors. It should be noted the venom of Bufo Alvarius, species of desert toad is a powerful natural psychedelic. The Moving Sidewalks, Billy’s pre-ZZ Top band, shared concert bills with the Doors in the late ‘60s as they did with the Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Jeff Beck Group (with vocalist Rod Stewart).
Later, in “Desert High,” Billy recites:
“The Joshua Tree
Gram died in room eight and left it all to Keith
Just a couple of miles from the salt and sea”
“Gram” cited in the song is Gram Parsons, one-time member of the Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers and Rolling Stones (“Wild Horses”) collaborator. “Keith” is, of course, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Parsons did, in fact, die in Room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn on September 19, 1973. He, of course, survives and took it upon himself to induct Billy along with the rest of ZZ Top into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in 2004. Richards’ friendship with Gibbons dates back many decades to the notorious string of concerts in Hawaii in the early ‘70s when ZZ Top shared the bill with the Stones. When ZZ Top showed up in Honolulu in their western regalia, Stones’ management thought they had mistakenly booked a country band, but their concerns were immediately assuaged when the ZZ Top took the stage and rocked out. “Salt” and “sea” is an oblique reference to the Salton Sea, a man-made inland body of brackish water that lies just 45 miles south of Joshua Tree.
Billy commented on the release of “Desert High,” “The song is, perhaps, not typical of Hardware as a totality but it gives indication of the album’s desiccated sonic sensibility. The desert is a truly mysterious place and we were privileged to have spent all that time there absorbing the heat, the vibe and cranking it out. It’s where natural background is at its most raw and untamed. We suspect what we’ve done is something of a reflection or, perhaps, a mirage, that relates.”
Hardware was produced by Billy F Gibbons with Matt Sorum and Mike Fiorentino. All songs were written by Gibbons, Sorum, Fiorentino and Chad Shlosser except “Hey Baby, Que Paso,” written by Augie Meyers and Bill Sheffied.
Pre-order Hardware: https://found.ee/BillyFGibbons-Hardware
