Urban Rhythm-Glee in Long Beach

By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor

Sandwiched between Big Brother on Wednesdays and Wife Swap on Fridays, millions tune into the musical teen drama, Glee, before watching So You Think You Can Dance, but only after watching three consecutive nights of America’s Got Talent – a weekly cocktail of “real TV” of superficial rivalries and fake controversies. For a scripted TV show like Glee to become the success that it has, is nothing short of amazing.

While the show has been a welcome hit for Fox, Glee has also been a boon for Urban Rhythm show choir which has been riding the show’s popularity to recruit legions of young talent from diverse backgrounds and experience. When Random Lengths News visited Urban Rhythm in its rehearsal space at the Mandala Center, the newly assembled choir had already started their third rehearsal practicing a small dance step.

Earl Harville, owner of the Harville Vocal Studio and co-founder of the Urban Rhythm show choir believes that Glee’s success is due to the relevancy and timeliness of the storylines covering issues that real teenagers are dealing with––from identity issues (from the social to sexual) to teen pregnancy and bullying.

“I think one of the reasons Glee has caught on is because it’s about the underdog that people keep trying to step on and they (the Glee club students) keep rising and keep coming back,” Harville explained. Harville noted that he thinks most people are able to identify with one character or another, even the popular girl who fell from grace after getting pregnant or the jock that catches flack when he exposes his artistic side as a theatre guy.

“Glee has been great at touching on transcendent themes… they address some real stuff, some real dramas that folks deal with,” Harville explained. “I think that’s part of why people connect with it. Yeah it’s over the top in some ways, but this season was particularly emotionally powerful.

“It really touched a nerve on so many occasions.”

Hailing from Gary, Ind., Harville is quick to note that his town is the birthplace of Janet Jackson. According to Harville, he didn’t come from a very musical family other than for his sister, whose voice he describes as “really gorgeous.” Other than that, his father played some of the greatest R&B and soul hits around the house, but no one expected that he would become a musician. Friends at church, however, heard something and encouraged him, allowing him to start directing choirs at the age of 11. He taught himself to play piano at the age of 15.

It wasn’t until college that he became professionally serious when he began studying with a music theory professor who encouraged him to pursue what they saw as his calling in music. As a result, he changed his major form nursing to vocal performances at Colombia College in Chicago. He taught for 11 years before earning his master’s degree in music education. While he was earning his degrees, Harville taught voice privately.

“That’s always been a passion of mine — training singers in private studio and teaching piano,” Harville explained.

The conversation that would become the Urban Rhythm show choir began a couple of years ago in 2008, when Harville was visiting friends including Eric Leocadio, founder of the nonprofit organization Catalyst Community Center with the mission of helping people with a progressive vision put a collaborative community together and bring that vision into fruition. The past couple years, Catalyst, in collaboration with other groups, helped set up the Green Long Beach Festival. Before that visit, California was the last place Harville thought he’d ever be.

“I just thought it was time for a change,” Harville recalled. “I thought this could be a place where with all the things I’ve done, I can plant [them] here. So that’s what I ended up doing. Before I moved, one of the things that Eric and I talked about were possible projects once I got here.”

Harville noted that they weren’t even thinking, “show choir” at the time when they were still conceiving the idea. A show choir is generally a group of people who combine choral singing with dance movements, sometimes within the context of a story (Think Whoopi Goldberg’s Sister Act franchise).

Harville explained further, saying that show choir is a combination of singing that can mirror pop music. It’s high energy and very demanding. “You have to be able to sing and do also a lot of movement and not get winded,” Harville explained. But he hopes even on that front to push the envelope.

“It’s about versatility, doing classic rock, contemporary pop, a cappella jazz standards and spirituals,” he said. “We want to do a lot of music that can do a lot of different things. I don’t actually come from a show choir background.

“I come from a gospel choir and R&B perspective.” Harville and Leocadio brought on board Davina Keiser as assistant director, a Long Beach Unified School District teacher who has a rich core of experience.

Together they began envisioning that this group would represent all of Long Beach. The original plan was to hold auditions in six different parts of the city to ensure that talent from every part of the city were taken into consideration, but this ultimately proved impractical.

They also only intended to allow high school-aged students to audition, but their plan attracted volunteers like 22 year-old Cal State Long Beach student Estrella Atkins, who volunteered because of her love for the TV show. At the time, the choir was just singing. Estrella was brought on to do choreography bringing to the table her experiences as a cheerleader. Haville and the rest of the directors felt that they could use that sort of talent and decided to increase the choirs diversity by opening up the age bracket.

When they set out to form this choir, Harville and Co. weren’t looking for the most accomplished singers. They were looking for singers with the most promise and a real hunger to create and to perform.

“That’s what we saw when they came into auditions,” Harville explained. “We saw individuals who had something to contribute to the experience.” When Harville, Leocadio, and Keiser first started talking about putting together the choir they spent time thinking about what young people would gain from the experience from personal development standpoint.

“What you learn in a group is that there is a lot of give and take,” Harville explained. “You learn to nurture everybody else… If you have a strength, and you notice someone has a weakness, you sort of pull them along.

“You learn humility because you have to be able to take direction and these are things they are going to need in real life.”