Gabe Becker, music instructor for prisoners

Gabe Becker grew up in Carmichael, and got into playing guitar after listening to punk rock in high school. He earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in music from Sacramento State before starting his own school, the Becker Guitar Studio (http://beckerguitarstudio.com), which utilizes the Suzuki Guitar Program to teach classical music. For the past five years, he’s also been performing at and teaching inmates how to play guitar at California State Prison, Sacramento, and teaching a hip-hop class as part of the state’s Arts-In-Corrections Program. Becker took some time to talk with us about old-school hip-hop and the healing power of music.

How do you break the ice in the hip-hop class?

I get up there in the classroom, and I’m like, “Alright, who can tell me who Afrika Bambaataa is?” And they’re like, “What?” “OK, who are the five guys in Grandmaster Flash’s group?” And they’re like, “I know it, I know it,” and they’re coming up with the answers, and I’m just joking with them about that stuff. It was like instantly we were just kind of connecting with this cool history and culture.

Tough question. There’s Melle Mel, Kidd Creole, Cowboy and …

That’s right. Melle Mel is the one guy I kind of home in on with his influence on rap. Cowboy, he came up with the term hip-hop, so I’ve read. He was making fun of a friend who was going to join the army, and so he sort of like scat improvised mocking him, like you’re marching: “Hip-hop, hip-hop.”

Do you know what these guys have done to be in prison?

No, I don’t. A lot of them, I’d say almost all of them, I don’t know what’s going on. The way I think about that has been, “Here I am looking at you now, and time is going forward and we’re going forward, so we need to think in that direction.” Just kind of on a personal level, it’d be devastating thing to be remembered for the worst things I’ve done.

How’d you go from punk rock to classical guitar?

If I get into something, I really get into it—like skateboarding, I was so serious about it. I was so persistent. So my personality kind of lends itself to that. And so I kept grinding into guitar as a high schooler, just working at it more and more, and just starting to discover fingerstyle on my own, and writing music on my own. As I got to college, I didn’t know what I wanted to study, and I had a moment where I was outside of this organic chemistry class, and I wasn’t quite sure where is was going—really having this big question-mark moment. Over some time I reflected on all the music I had been driven to do and motivated by, and I just knew I needed to just jump in fully. And that was two weeks into that semester, and I switched all my classes and I just literally jumped in kind of late. But I loved it right away.

Are any students really talented?

I haven’t met anyone in there that’s already taken classical guitar, but a lot of times they know about guitar and can do a couple riffs.

Part of the success of it all is that the classical guitar is really challenging, and I found out really early on that they respond to structure and to challenge. And so when I first started, it was really strict, it was like pretty hardcore. There was no wiggle room. I was like a drill sergeant classical guitarist guy. But you know what, it was funny, they really responded positively to that.

How else do prisoners respond to your classes?

I’m an artist, I’m not a therapist. But just by pursuing excellence in what I do, and demanding that, I guess the music really became this interface for an exchange of humanity and transformation is kind of what starts to happen.

There's actually one guy that I work with now from my first class, and he's become an exceptional guitar player. He's doing everything from Bach to “Here Comes the Sun” fingerstyle. He actually just performed yesterday two Bach gavottes from the sixth cello suite arranged for guitar, and it was like, “Wow.”

I can't really talk names, obviously, but I'll tell you this: They have these little monikers, names they come up with. One of these guys that I've been teaching for a long time, he's since given up that name, and changed his name back to his real name. It's like; “What just happened?”

Like the real him was starting to come out?

Right. Another guy that was in this class, in the same yard, when we first started, even though he had kind of earned his way in, there was still an attitude. You could tell. Later, I got letters from his mom. This is so heavy, but his mom would write me and one of her letters said, “I can’t thank you enough for your work with my son. I had visitation time with him,” and then she goes, “thanks for giving my son back.” I was like; “What just happened? Oh my gosh, I’m just teaching music, this is crazy.” But I could see that transformation in him as well—his attitude, he was different, he was appreciative, grateful.