A Canadian walked into a Harlem classroom and asked kids to write an album

What I find fascinating about Galt MacDermot is his willingness to walk into environments that had nothing to do with where he came from and make something real inside them.

MacDermot was born in Montreal in 1928, the son of a Canadian diplomat. When his father was posted to South Africa in 1950 he enrolled at Cape Town University and made African music his specialty. His family's cook taught him drum rhythms, not by studying them but by feeling them.

When he came to New York in 1964 he fell in with drummer Bernard Purdie and bassist Jimmy Lewis through a music publisher connection and they became his people.

When Galt wrote Hair in 1967 he put Idris Muhammad in the house band. Miles Davis saw Hair twice and told Idris backstage: "when I saw Hair I changed my whole band." That's why Bitches Brew sounds the way it does.

In 1970 Ossie Davis hired him to score Cotton Comes to Harlem. He was inside the neighborhood now in a way that most composers never get close to.

That same year he walked into PS 125M on 123rd Street in West Harlem and PS 140X in the Bronx. Two New York City public school classrooms in two of the poorest neighborhoods in America. He asked the children to write about their lives. Nobody documented how the sessions worked. We only know what the children wrote and what he did with it. He composed the music around their words and had vocalist Angela Ortega sing every line.

He pressed it on his own Kilmarnock label from his home on Staten Island in 1972. The tracks are called Black Is Beautiful, Drugs, Slums, Evil Hands, Cry Sound, and Set Us Free. Teachers and counselors have used this record for decades to give voice to the experiences of inner city communities.

The process of how it happened is lost. The record exists.

Galt died December 17, 2018, one day before his 90th birthday.