CarnegieKids

How does anyone follow up a sold-out run at Carnegie Hall? If you’re bandleader Chris Washburne or host Airi Yoshioka, you teach kids how to play brass instruments in Japanese. In Japan!

In late April they’ll visit Suntory Hall in Tokyo, one of Japan’s most prestigious auditoriums. The occasion? The international debut of CarnegieKids, the hugely successful program of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall that introduces the four instrument families of the orchestra to children ages three to six.

Besides inspiring and teaching, making kids laugh—no matter what the language—is a priority for the artists.

“We often improvise with humor in our interactions with the children,” says Washburne. “One of the biggest obstacles will be to keep the improvised feel that makes the show fun and engages the kids—in a language and a culture that we’re not familiar with.”

Whatever differences there may be, Tokyo denizens are no strangers to Western music. In fact, Washburne’s primary focus, jazz, is alive and thriving there. Washburne, who is also an associate professor of music at Columbia University, recently consulted with a Japanese university to start a college-level jazz studies program, and he speaks highly about Tokyo’s burgeoning jazz scene. Eclecticism is no barrier. In fact, one of the strengths of CarnegieKids, says Washburne, is how it introduces kids to varied styles of music, from Bernstein to Frank London to Dixieland.

Now, Japanese kids will experience what thousands of lucky young New Yorkers have enjoyed for years—CarnegieKids concerts for children in preschool and kindergarten, sponsored in the US by The McGraw-Hill Companies.

And that’s something to cheer about in any language.