David Pinto, founder of the Academy of Music for the Blind (AMB), speaks of his students like a proud parent. One past pupil is Rex Lewis-Clack, now 20, who is not only sightless but also an autistic savant at the piano, whose story was featured along with an interview with Pinto on “60 Minutes.”
The current AMB students include a 15-year-old boy with dystonia, which causes involuntary muscle contractions, whose piano instruction led him to vastly improve his fine motor skills; a withdrawn 4-year-old from a low-income family, blind since a cancer operation on her eyes, whose music studies have brought her out of her shell; and a 5-year-old boy who sang a Josh Groban song in an AMB YouTube video, prompting Groban to donate $10,000 to the school.
The funding came just in time. After more than 12 years of running the school — which has an operating budget of $15,000 per month, with 25 students and 17 teachers on campuses in Reseda and Whittier — Pinto had to close AMB for three weeks six months ago when money ran out. One problem was that many of the students attend the school on a scholarship; AMB was able to reopen its doors only after Groban and another donor came through with funding.
The school’s funds are scheduled to run out again as of Oct. 18, but that crisis could be averted if a crucial benefit that will take place at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica raises enough to keep AMB operating until December.
“It’s a lot of pressure,” said Rena Strober, the fundraiser’s producer, who is also the school’s voice teacher and a seasoned Broadway performer, having appeared in “Fiddler on the Roof” with Chaim Topol as well as portraying Cosette in “Les Miserables.”
For the fundraiser, titled “Shades of Broadway,” Strober has enlisted her Broadway colleagues, Roger Bart, who won a Tony Award for his appearance as Snoopy in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” and Adam Pascal from “Rent” to perform alongside all 25 students, ages 4 to 18. During the benefit, Bart will sing the Charlie Brown song “Happiness” with five children under 7; a 10-year-old girl will perform the Barbra Streisand number “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from “Funny Girl”; and two boys will play the flute during a rendition of “The Rainbow Connection” from “The Muppet Movie,” among more than 10 other numbers.
“We need to raise about $15,000 to $20,000 to get us through to the holidays,” Strober said. “That’s not long, I know. But it’s a matter of us being open or closed.”
Pinto, 71, began the academy after decades of making his living as a pianist, composer and conductor. His Sephardic father, a jazz saxophonist who toured Europe with Josephine Baker in the 1930s, fled Amsterdam to Los Angeles during the Holocaust. “We still have the papers that show his parents died in Auschwitz,” said Pinto, who by 13 was already composing as well as teaching other children classical piano.
“Music to me is like blood; the thing that courses through my whole being and gives me sustenance,” he said.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Pinto went on to work as an accompanist and dance arranger for pop artists such as Ann-Margret and Sonny and Cher, as well as conducting for the pop group The Fifth Dimension.
In 1996, he was teaching digital music recording at Pierce College in Woodland Hills when a blind student, Eddie Salcido, accidentally wandered into his class while searching for a rehearsal room. Pinto promptly led the young man to his destination and was impressed when Salcido sat down at the piano and demonstrated his talent as a jazz musician.
Pinto began to wonder whether Salcido might be able to use his digital recording techniques if he tweaked the computer to work especially for a blind student. After some research, Pinto developed a program that would enable the computer to talk back to blind users, among other adjustments. He went on to teach the program to Salcido, as well as blind musicians such as Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.
Along the way, Pinto began teaching piano to blind students, some of them with additional disabilities such as Asperger’s or Down syndrome. Eventually, these lessons led Pinto to acknowledge the dearth of musical resources for blind students in Los Angeles.
While a number of such pupils have good ears and even perfect pitch, he said, they often do not possess good technique on their musical instruments because traditional instruction is so sight-oriented, nor can they read musical Braille while playing their instruments. And many of the students suffered from low self-esteem as a result of attending school with only sighted classmates.
Pinto’s solution was to found the AMB, which now meets on Saturdays and offers instruction on a variety of instruments, from the flute to the ukulele, as well as voice classes, digital computer work, mobility and dance, speech and drama, and academic remedial lessons. “My dream was to have a musical school that would also assist in integrating the blind into the larger world of their peers,” he said.
Pinto traces his enthusiasm back to his family’s experience in the Holocaust: “I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog,” he said. “I’m concerned about those people who don’t get enough of a chance in life.”
Most of AMB’s students cannot afford to pay the full tuition of $6,000 per year. “But at the same time, the demand for our services has really increased,” Pinto said. “We have at least a dozen talented musicians from families with no resources at all who want to join us. So our upcoming fundraiser will hopefully help earn scholarship money for those kids.”
For tickets and information about “Shades of Broadway,” visit ouramb.org
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