So you thought School Of Rock starring Jack Black was cool? Well now, you actually have the chance to attend “Rock University” aka Woodstock Music Lab, and learn about all aspects of the music business.
Spearheaded by Paul Green, who is said to have inspired Jack Black’s character in School Of Rock, and original Woodstock Festival promoter Michael Lang, the new talent incubator set in the Catskill Mountain is explained by Green as a “giant, fertile petri dish” where musicians, producers, and the like can rub shoulders and collaborate. He tells Albany’s Times Union, “Odds are you can step out of the studio and say, ‘I need a saxophone,’ and some other kid here working on a jazz project will say, ‘I’ll be right down!…It gives you that sort of Abbey Road, Muscle Shoals, Motown sort of collective beehive.”
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Green and Lang’s group have already raised several million dollars to put towards the project, but still need more than twice that amount to see it through. They hope the school can open as soon as next year, although Lang admits that that timetable is a bit optimistic.
Woodstock Music Lab is said to be looking for talented college-aged and post-college musicians, and will feature a curriculum based on a two-year program in which students will run the gambit of the music business, learning performance, production, arrangement and marketing. Additionally, all students will take up two instruments a semester, one chosen by the student, the other picked by faculty members.
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Mark Mulligan, a music industry analyst at London’s Midia Research notes that a musical breeding ground like this could be useful, in that it takes so much more to make in the music industry these days. He says, “To be an artist in the current era — right or wrong, good or bad — requires much more than being a good musician.”
It looks as though Green and Lang are on the right track, doing yeoman’s work for the next generation of rockers.
[Via Times Union/Photo by Mike Groll, AP]