Margel Overton

Melissa Simpson: Tell me about yourself. Who is Margel?

Margel Overton: My name is Margel. There's quite a few names after that, but first name is Margel, and it’s what I perform under. My profession is musician, with a focus on the instruments of piano and voice. I started off singing at a very young age, being with my twin. Then I had an education that focused on the piano—classical in my childhood. I went to school for jazz in college, and I played in various different bands, doing as many genres as I could touch after that.

I also teach, so that went hand in hand with my own education and performance experience. People start off asking you for advice when you're younger, and they see you doing something they want to learn how to do, and that went to formal lessons. By the time I was just getting out of college, I had long-term students on piano with private lessons. I started to do nonprofits, teaching workshops for performance—for group performance. Then I started to do just music teaching in general. I was with the Boys’ Latin Charter School for a while there as a teacher, a director, organizing their music program and teaching during the day. I'm now at KIPP doing basically the same thing. So my time is spent teaching mostly during the day, traveling around teaching craft lessons on weekends and workshops, and then performances in various bands—rehearsals during the evenings and gigs and stuff on the weekends.

Melissa Simpson: Got you. So you brought up singing—that was kind of your first introduction to creating music, and that was at a young age. Can you tell me more about that? Maybe your first memory of attempting to learn or someone teaching you about singing?

Margel Overton: My twin factors a lot into my music history. She and I are Haitian and came here very, very young. From my memories, music is much more a part of inner societal culture than it is here anymore—to an extent. People sang every day. Your lessons had a lot of different songs in them. When we came here and I didn’t speak English initially, she and I still remembered a lot of the songs that we would sing. They were used to put us in performances to help raise money for the situations we came out of.

How I started to get educated in that is through the church. The church is one of the great educators in our communities. I started—and she started—singing in the church, in choirs, when we were very, very young. That gets you all your pitch and harmony training—your basics. I focused mostly on the piano, but I still liked to sing the things I liked to listen to—D’Angelo, and a lot of the old soul stuff—Al Green, what my father played.

While my sister was going through classical voice, and they weren’t teaching me how to do that, because I could still sing, I would practice mimicking those tones. Her formal training and her teaching, and me singing, kind of mixed those two things together. So I think I’m heavily church-taught, heavily taught by my family’s music lineage passed down, and then music in general through the piano and its theory has informed my singing.

Melissa Simpson: You mentioned when you were in college you informally started teaching people. How did that come to fruition?

Margel Overton: I can’t remember an initial first student. I can think of my longest student. I had a student for about 15 years. He was in one of the afterschool programs through a nonprofit organization I was teaching in. His mother liked what I was able to do with him musically, and she asked me what my rate was for private lessons outside of the school. That kind of snowballed at a certain point. I don’t think I ever formally asked anyone, “Would you like lessons?” They usually came through performances, or through interacting with schools, and young people would say, “Can you do this particular thing?”

I also think I fit a particular niche of teacher because I had experience being taught classically, but my pull was for things that were, in my opinion, more grounded—more family-based, more rooted in my heritage coming from Haiti. So when I came and taught, I didn’t want to just teach kids theory, though I understood theory was important. I also understood that young people—or people in general—who have any talent or skill are going to have a pull toward something, and you can use the theory to teach them that, and you accomplish a couple different things.

When I was taught classically, it wasn’t to teach you voice. If I had spent too much time just listening and copying, then I wouldn’t have understood what theory has taught me over the years.

Melissa Simpson: Got you. So you came to music in a few different ways—culturally, through your sister’s classical training, and then through school. Do you feel that all three are equally valuable? What are your thoughts on traditional versus nontraditional learning?

Margel Overton: Like a play versus a classroom kind of setting? Which one's more beneficial to education? I think they’re equally important, but you can misunderstand both. You can set kids out on a playground, and it’s just chaos, and you think, “That’s terrible—let’s put all these kids into formalized games.” But then you’ll notice, a lot of us have the history of going outside and finding a game, organizing a game on our own.

So it’s more natural that kids learn to create structure on their own. Different boxes and structures can actually cause negative behaviors. I think it’s important to give them play while also giving them structure. At times, I had one and not the other. When I had structure, I wish I’d had more play. When I was doing nothing but play, I wish someone had been there to mentor me, or tell me how theory applied to that moment.

Melissa Simpson: Gotcha. Tell me about your most impactful music educator. Who stands out when you think, “Without this person...” Could be your twin, as you mentioned.

Margel Overton: That’s hard to answer, because obviously there’s a lot of people who touched my life. I honor all of them. The name that stands out to me, though—don’t know if he remembers me—is a college teacher named Tom Lawton. He’s a professor at the University of the Arts.

I’d had a lot of teachers before him, but he lived and played music in the sort of way I wished to. When I came out of classical and wanted to learn jazz, I was listening to guys at church playing free and instinctually—unable to explain anything they were doing. I was like, “How do you do that?” They were just like—shrug. I’m like, “Okay, that’s helpful. Real cool.”

But he could do all of that. He could play classical. He was playing in a Pentecostal church, in another Methodist church, reading and leading services. He was also doing jazz gigs. He had what I’ve always endeavored to have as a musician.

His lessons weren’t structured like other teachers who stuck to one genre. He’d ask, “What would you like to learn how to do today?” Then he would play it and explain what he did. I hadn’t had another teacher like that—before or since.

I’d say, “I like this song, this line, this chord change or progression—how do they do that?” He’d say, “Place your fingers here,” then explain it in two or three ways. One would be the theory explanation—these are the chord changes around the key center. Another would be more jazz-feel—he’d hum out each one so you’d get ear training. Then we’d talk about the song’s history, its importance, and the feel you need to emulate in order to play it correctly. That was unique. So, shouts out to Lawton, while he’s still doing what he’s doing.

Melissa Simpson: Why do you feel that music education is important? I’m thinking about my own experience—when I was in elementary school, we had music class weekly, like gym. I got to pick up violin and clarinet over eight years. But obviously, those programs are being cut. Can you speak to why it's essential to have that, or even nontraditional spaces? What does it do for children, adults—whoever?

Margel Overton: I’m trying not to stumble over this answer. I think society is based on the individual and their skill set. You love your children, but you also need them to have an idea that they possess a skill that benefits the family as a whole, as the family pours back into them.

As they grow, you allow them to play, but you're also asking, “Where does your talent lie? What is your inclination?” Besides them knowing how to wash, feed themselves, and handle money, you give them something in their personality that’s edifying—so they know how to work with their hands or whatever.

That was kind of part of the culture when we grew up. You learned how to box at a certain age when you were a young guy. But music was something you learned because it was also part of an older kind of family. Mom played music on Sundays—even if she didn’t go to church—while she cleaned or something like that. There were different types of songs she played. All these songs were stories.

Besides the actual songs, they were worth knowing and worth passing down because they told about something that happened before. Giving kids the ability to not just do for themselves now, but to understand their history and to take a skill forward, rounds out themselves, their families, and society.

It doesn’t have to be music, but music gives you a personal sense of self. It teaches you how to learn a skill, sharpen your mind, and give back. Most other things in school—outside of the humanities—just don’t do that.

When I say I’m teaching kids music, I’m like, “This is really not about this song here.” I’m doing what I said Tom Lawton did. “These are all the avenues of why this song’s important.”

If a kid is not skilled—and there are a lot of kids now who aren’t, because music isn’t in the schools the way it used to be—then you ask, “What do you recognize that you can mimic in this song?” Then we can add that to my skill set. Maybe I know how to play the chords rhythmically and give that to another kid to just table tap. Then we can fill in what we don’t know.

Besides them knowing individually that they’re able to do something and that what they’re doing has value, they know they can bring that to a group. And it mimics a family. There are a lot of different things that music just hits in kids.

You don’t really have to search. Once you go into a school, someone is going to be like, “Oh, you hummed that—would you like to do that with another kid?” And then that kid’s grades get better. I’ve seen it every year.

I don’t think we pay enough attention to that truth in our kids. That’s why I think it’s important. I think the humanities are just an ignored part of having a healthy person, a healthy family, and a healthy society.

Melissa Simpson: Awesome. Is there anything else you want to add about the topic?

Margel Overton: A while. You know, there’s a weird—and I think in a way trite—saying: “This thing saved my life.” Like, “Music saved my life.” And it did for me. And it continues to. That’s not always a good thing, sometimes.

The family condition is a little weird these days. We think we can save ourselves by giving ourselves just one great thing. So we’ll put a kid into sports or something like that. “If he’s messing up, he needs discipline—I’m going to give him sports.” Great was the idea.

But you’re weaving out all the other things that come before that self-edification piece. I think at the same time that you pay attention to how important the humanities are, and how much the humanities have saved my life, you make sure they’re well-rounded with everything else.

In the schools I see, most of the staff care about tests and stuff. And it’s not working. The kids don’t understand why any of that is important, because it’s not. If you just look at the results of it—kids see what the kids who graduate get. Kids see what the kids who get a job get.

Eventually, you have enough evidence, if you’re a child, to say, “If I continue down this line, what do I get?” Maybe sports or music will save me. But it’s only a very small part of the whole problem.

I just appreciate that, for me, it’s been a consistent thing.