Building Bridges By Making Beats: System-Involved Youth in the Studio

There is something very special in the way music affects people: It moves us individually and it brings us close when we listen together. But more than anything, music creates pure magic when people make it with others. Over the past 15 years, my professional life has been devoted to creating spaces and opportunities for young people to make the music they love, both collectively and on their own. Time and again, I have found that music — writing it, recording it, performing it, and playing it for others — has not only lifted my students to great heights of pride and satisfaction, it has bridged cultural, racial, and other differences in profound and lasting ways.   

When people from different walks of life collaborate musically, they become collective torch carriers for traditions that are deeply important to them. The process of creating that music with others validates everyone's place in that tradition, no matter where they’ve come from. 

I’ve been lucky to make music with system-involved youth, both in and out of carceral facilities. The incredible young musicians I’ve worked with grew up in very different circumstances than I did, but we love the same stuff, and together we make something entirely new. 

The Center for Community Alternatives

Cover art for the compilation of songs Lawrence made with CCA kids

My work with system-involved youth started in my senior year at NYU, at a restorative justice facility called the Center for Community Alternatives. They had a small studio with blown-out speakers and a vocal booth in the rear of their Downtown Brooklyn office. All of the 14- to 17-year-olds had been arrested and were mandated by the courts to attend an after-school program where they received anger management classes and other services. Many had also spent time in the youth detention section of Rikers Island. Their music instructor had just left and I grabbed the opportunity to step in and keep the program going. 

Most of the young people at CCA were from East Brooklyn. I’m from West LA, but our differences in upbringing melted away almost immediately as we worked together to create great songs. Once I got the 808’s and samples going in Ableton Live and the microphone hot in the vocal booth, the world outside the studio faded away. A person's background matters only in how it shapes the music they create and the way they create it in the studio. When the creative process is safe, individual differences stop being impediments and start to become useful raw material for new ideas. 

A 16-year-old, who I’ll refer to as Ash B., his rapper name at the time, wrote a track called “Brownsville’s Got Me Out My Mind.” We sampled Aretha Franklin’s “Try a Little Tenderness” and got some breaks going for the drums. Unprompted, he began writing lyrics about growing up in Brownsville, witnessing hardship at a young age, and the experiences that led to his involvement with the justice system. I don’t think he would have opened up like he did if I just asked him to share his experiences with me in a conversation. The creative process offered an indirect mode of communication that unlocked an earnestness and self-reflection in him. Listen to the third verse in the song linked above to hear what I’m talking about.

Lawrence Grey and Ash B. in the studio at CCA 

My work with Ash B. and the other students at CCA had a profound effect on me, and inspired me to start developing Young Producers Group as soon as I received a Masters degree in education from UCLA in 2013. Making music with others who love the same stuff is a life-affirming, joyful experience that every musician craves. Back then, programs to create that sort of sonic connection across socioeconomic lines were absent from music educational programs, and music technology was still barely a blip in schools. 

I saw an opportunity to create a program that could bring people together around their shared passion for making music. I’ve stuck to that mission and Young Producers Group is now the national leader in K-12 music production curricula, helping students around the country make the music they love and connect with each other in the process. 

Barry J. Nidorf

Profile image created by the students for their Soundcloud.

In 2018, I started to work with the Arts for Healing and Justice Network, an incredible program working with the young people in the juvenile detention facilities in the Los Angeles area, including Barry J. Nidorf in Sylmar. They had noticed that a handful of young men in their programs were serious about music, writing raps all day in notebooks. Having set up mobile studios in classrooms, multi-purpose rooms, dining halls, and other non-traditional locations for years, I knew that all I needed was an outlet to record those raps. I suggested bringing in my set-up to the facility and sent them a short equipment list for approval: two monitors, an audio interface, a microphone, and a laptop. 

A month later, I was feeding that equipment through metal detectors at the facility. The budding rappers were housed in a large central space with cells lining the walls and a smaller connected room for staff where we set up the gear. Over the next several hours, I worked with six different young men, each with multiple notebooks overflowing with lyrics. 

Again, when the music started flowing, the world outside disappeared. They felt my drive, my love for music production, and the dedication I bring to executing an artist’s vision. I felt the heat of their pent-up energy, their hunger for expression. Our differences in upbringing became fuel that fed the explosive creative energy in the room.  

Cover art for Golden Boy Rich’s “Matte Black.”

The standout track from our first session was “Matte Black,” from a brilliant singer who I’ll refer to by his rapper name Golden Boy Rich. The chorus of the song starts with a lot of bluster and posturing, but the verses quickly put it in context: 

I had to do by myself. 

I didn’t have nobody else. 

I didn’t have nobody else, no, 

all those days on my lonely, 

all those nights when I was hungry. 

Nobody did nothing for me, no. 

I gotta get it. 

All he had were these lyrics and melodies, and we worked together shoulder to shoulder in the improvised studio. As the 808s, drums, and chords started to fall into place, Golden Boy got on the microphone and sang his heart out. He sounded incredible. For the ad libs, we took my computer, audio interface, and microphone into one of the empty, reverberant cells. When we closed the door, we found ourselves not in a place of punishment, but a beautiful-sounding echo chamber. He listened to his recording and added accents. If you listen to the recording linked above, his second “yeah-a-yee-yeah” in the intro was recorded in the cell. After we were done, we opened the cell door and stepped out. The complicated resonance of those recordings was not lost on us. This was his world and we were turning it into music. 

We posted the songs on Soundcloud, being careful to hide names and screen for any gang references. Sharing this music on the internet let their families and friends hear their voices. Most of the boys were getting out after a year or two, but I learned that one of them was going away for a much longer time. The music we made together served as a powerful connection and source of pride. 

I went back to the facility two more times before a change in leadership stopped the program from continuing. 

J.C. Montgomery School

In early 2024, YPG’s general manager Trent Durazo traveled to JC Montgomery School, a juvenile detention facility in Central California that had just begun licensing YPG curricula. An experienced educator and teacher trainer, Trent went up to do professional development with the teachers and run a multi-day music production workshop with the students.

The first group ranged in age from early teens to just under 18. Some were there for serious offenses and knew they were likely facing life sentences. When they aged out of the juvenile system, they'd be transferred across the street to an adult facility. 

Within minutes of launching Soundtrap, the students were engaged and collaborating, showing each other what they’d made and offering feedback. One student started spontaneously freestyling over a beat he had made; the content of his lyrics was raw, but the creative spark was unmistakable. He had something to say, and the class listened.

The next day, the session moved to the facility’s maximum-security wing—a locked-down, high-surveillance unit with multiple guards stationed in the room—not exactly a “chill” creative studio environment. These students were resistant at first, but by the end of the session, most of them had created something they were proud of—calling over staff and guards to listen. The adults in the room responded with real encouragement. They hyped the kids up. They gave them their flowers. In a place built to contain them, the students found space to be creative, expansive, and seen.

The music made at JC Montgomery may never be released publicly, but it matters. In music class, students who normally isolate and dissociate can find common ground with each other and the teachers, guards, and wardens in the room. The studio is a space for possibility. And even in that most challenging of settings, that possibility takes root.

Conclusion

Through making music together, people from different walks of life can connect with each other’s humanity and come to a better understanding of their own. When the session is over, the resulting music is an outgrowth of that connection, a life that sprung from their common ground.  

In an era where the humanity of those even slightly outside the law is being questioned, this music rings out with a different, better message. The young people we’ve worked with over the years may have committed crimes, but in this context that is not the point. We love the same music and share creative goals. I’ve come to know them as fellow musicians moving along the same frequencies.