Behind the Mic: Kwame Alexander on PBS KIDS Collab

Transcript

Steve Chavis: Was animation something new for you?

Kwame Alexander: Absolutely. It was foreign and I was not intimidated in the sense that I'm a Leo, I think I know everything, and I figured I could figure it out. Well, it was definitely a learning curve. Poetry, which is the language that I traffic in, is about being concise. It's about distilling the human heart into very few words. And animation is about capturing the really simple, mundane, but yet powerful and interesting things about our life into a really palatable, whimsical medium. And so there (were) some similarities, but certainly some differences that I enjoyed learning.

Steve: Mules Davis, Lil' Herdin, Ella Finch, Gerald Duck Ellington, the Chickadees - Brilliant! These barnyard characters have attitude. I mean, it's kind of pretty close to what I've seen on the bandstand. They challenge each other and sharpen each other. Really interesting interplay.

Kwame: Yeah, I mean the goal was again, to be representative of what jazz is, who jazz musicians are, and to really try to mimic, not really mimic, but to use as a model, as a template. The coolness, like the Rebirth of the Cool of these cats who play this music that we love. So yeah, I wanted to show you the flamboyant savoir faire of Duke Ellington. I wanted to show you sort of the orneriness of Miles. So all of those characteristics of these real live people I think came alive for these characters as well.

Steve: Because my grandchildren are six and going on four, that bedtime story.. because it's always about bedtime. I mean, how are we going to get these little kids to go to bed? And the Rooster starts out with some upbeat like thing and Ella walks in and says, "No, no, no, no, no, you've got to lull these children to sleep." And then she sort of sings a really sweet song. So as I said, these are really interesting conversations the animals are holding around the barnyard.

Kwame: Look, that's a straight riff from my own life in that I'm really animated and I get excited and I like to have fun. And there were times when my wife would say, "Kwame, the kid needs to go to sleep. You need to bring it down a notch - chill!" We're doing bedtime reading and I'm acting it out. We're having readers theater! It's like, no, it needs to be calm and chill, man. So that sort of really comes from my life. And I think that's what we try to do with this Acoustic Rooster world that we're building on PBS kids. And that is just really show our lives, show these kids their lives and show them what's possible. These episodes will be mirrors where they can see themselves and there'll be windows where they can see each other. And hopefully ultimately this show is not just going to teach 'em about jazz, but like you talked about all the different things that jazz teaches us and that music teaches us that ultimately can help us become better human beings.

Steve: So let me just touch on your passion for literacy a little bit. It's summertime, lots of book clubs and library reading lists. Just a thought about how we keep kids engaged over the summer, just talking to you as a guy who likes to write YA fiction and books for kids, it's summertime. I want to go outside and play.. Maybe I'll stay in and read.

Kwame: No, you should definitely go outside and play. And I think when you come inside, I think there's an opportunity for parents and librarians and teachers and all the adults to remember that books are amusement parks and that kids need to be able to choose to ride. Don't just give a kid a book and make them read it. Let the kid find their book that they're going to want to read.

Steve: Let's jump into way back machine right quick while I've got you for a couple more minutes. You're at Virginia Tech and your bio says you're on the pre-med track and you sign up for a class with Nikki Giovanni, first, lucky! Second, what were you expecting and what did you get from the great Nikki Giovanni?

Kwame: What did I learn? What was I trying to learn? I just thought I knew everything about everything. Obviously a 17, 18-year-old kid didn't know everything, but I thought I did. And taking her class, I at least had the intelligence, no matter how much grief I gave her in those three years, no matter how much pushback I offered, I at least had the intelligence to keep taking her class because truthfully, I didn't know what I wanted to learn from her. But when I look back 38 years later, I realized that while my mother made words fun and introduced me to the power of words and my father made words functional and help me understand what words could do in our lives, Nikki Giovanni taught me how to make my words dance on the page.