On a recent fall afternoon, behind an unassuming storefront, three little girls giggle and hop through a sunny front room. A huge, old dog lounges around behind the desk. Parents sit patiently, reading magazines and, ostensibly, waiting.

Their children are out of sight and almost out of hearing, tucked into a row of cozy studios, learning piano, guitar, trumpet, chromatic harmonica, viola, or any other of the huge variety of instruments that are taught at the Silverlake Conservatory of Music.

On a corner of Sunset Junction, the Conservatory is quietly entering its eighth year. Well, not entirely quietly. The fourth annual Hullabaloo fundraiser kicks off this weekend at Union Station, featuring one of the biggest names in jazz today, Roy Hargrove, in addition to one of the school’s co-founders, Flea, and Italian jazz singer Roberta Gambarini.

The school is the brainchild of Flea (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, in case there is another one) and Tree, otherwise known as Keith Barry. If Flea is the (caring, beneficent, somewhat absent) dad, Barry is the school’s Earth Mother. (They will be playing together on Saturday, the music teacher and the rock star: two old friends excited about opening for one of their heroes.)

In the late 90s, Flea returned to Fairfax High, where he played as a child, and was horrified to learn that music had been priced out of the curriculum.

Around that same time, Flea’s childhood friend Barry, moved to Silverlake—just as the neighborhood was beginning to be a haven for hipsters and families. Barry recognized it as a community ripe for teaching music. He is adamant, crazy even, about education. “It’s like water, air, food—it’s a nutrient!,” he says later in an interview.

The two friends had been kicking the idea of starting a music school around for a while, and it seemed like the time—and the place—to move forward. The idea was for a community music school. Somewhere anyone could come to and learn.

Barry, who runs the curriculum has his own version of the “three R’s” that you might remember from grade school.  He calls them “the three As: Academics, Athletics, and Art,” and they are what you need throughout our lives.  And he is full of homilies to illustrate this: from Babe Ruth (“Did people stop playing baseball after him?”) to children raised by wolves (“They’ll learn what the wolves have to teach them”)—but they all tie in to the importance of music, and of learning, in life. He is, as he says, “a proponent of music as a medium for child and personal development.”

The school is more egalitarian than most: slightly over a quarter of the students are there on scholarship, and the administrators are striving to hit the 50 percent mark. “Our school is here so that every kid has the chance to take music lessons,” Barry says. “Little kids shouldn’t be daunted to take their first music lessons.”

Adults are welcome and actually make up almost a quarter of the students‚ many of them parents of kids at the school.

Eight years after the doors opened, the school has about 600 students. But like other non-profits, permanence is a huge issue. The manager, Jennifer Rey, has told me that their rent just went up, and I can see just a twinge of that familiar anxiety in her face. They all want the school to exist in perpetuity, forever and ever offering this gift to the community. Which leads us back to the fundraiser:

“We’re not selling $125 tickets to see Roy Hargrove,” Barry says. (And it’s true. Hullabaloo is barely about raising money.)

And the auction is not about the cool stuff (which is, as befitting the school, very cool stuff:  skate lessons from Tony Hawk, designer clothing, art, music). Rather, says Barry, it’s about everyone—performers, the moms, the dads, the kids, the community, Roy Hargrove and Flea and Tree—coming together to support the idea that music is good, and healthy, and makes society better. 

The whole time we’ve been talking, Barry and I have been sitting in a cozy lesson room where, moments earlier, he had been teaching chromatic harmonica. The room has a music stand, with a signed book of sheet music, and a cork board with a Johann Sebastian Bach action figure pinned to it, a viola on the wall, and an iBook on a table. When I notice the computer, his eyes light up: “Let me show you something really cool.” He starts it up, and shows me one of the programs he uses to transcribe and teach. Out of a bunch of crazy music notes on the screen, Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” starts plinking digitally, and we both grin.

He plays a bunch of different parts, individually and then together, showing me how it all works for a group. Barry lives music, breathes it. And lives to teach it. It is awesome. I find myself wishing I were a kid in Silverlake. Maybe I am.

Advance tickets to Hullabaloo are available online, through the school’s web site at:
http://www.silverlakeconservatory.com.