Poly High School’s music directors knew they had a problem when 50 students lined up to borrow instruments at the beginning of the school year.
The school’s music program has recently exploded, growing to more than 800 students across over a dozen ensembles. The marching band doubled in size. “We went from one tuba player last year to seven this year,” said Tom Terrell, one of the music directors.
It was a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. “All these kids are ready to play, and we didn’t have the instruments,” said Tom Hughes, another music director.
Terrell and Hughes refused to turn anyone away.
Hughes began sourcing instruments from OfferUp and Facebook Marketplace. “I just drove around town buying $40 used clarinets in people’s garages,” he said. Many of the sellers were delighted to learn that students would be using the instruments, which Hughes began naming after the people they’d belonged to — and sharing those stories with his students.
Despite these efforts, students still had to share instruments and play on dented trumpets with broken valves, Hughes said. His percussion classes consist of “40 kids in each class banging on five-gallon Home Depot buckets,” partially to spare the ears, and also due to the instrument shortage, he said.
Two weeks ago, they had “a prayer answered,” Terrell said. At a recent Poly band concert, alumna Tatiana Tate, now a renowned trumpet player, donated 20 trumpets and three trombones to the school. “We needed this desperately,” Terrell said. “This came at a perfect time.”
Tate, a Long Beach native and jazz and R&B trumpeter who has played for Stevie Wonder and performed alongside Doechii, launched her musical career at Poly. While a student, Tate served as marching band drum major and jazz combo leader, sought-after roles that took time to grow into. Hughes, an upperclassman at the time, observed that Tate arrived at Poly somewhat stressed out and still finding her place. But over her high school career, he watched her undergo “this incredible progression. She just fell in love with it,” he said.
“Anything involving music, I was a part of it,” Tate said, adding that her Poly music teachers always “told me I was destined for greatness.”
So when the Guitar Center Music Foundation turned to Tate for somewhere to donate several dozen brass instruments, she knew she would send them to Poly — “the first place I thought of,” she said.
“It’s my mission to ensure I support the next generation the same way [Poly teachers] supported me,” she said.
On returning to Poly, Tate said she was not only surprised by the size of the band (much larger than when she was in school), but by the number of girls playing horn — “something I never really saw growing up,” she said, speaking to the fact that jazz, and brass especially, has historically been dominated by men.
At Poly, that is changing, Hughes said. At a recent jazz festival, the school’s top combo was made up of girls, he said, and the number of girls playing trumpet at Poly has grown significantly. While Tate’s instrument donation offered a solution to a tangible problem, her mentorship of younger musicians, especially girls, is even more impactful, he said.
“For her to be this beacon of light who started in the same place that all these musicians have started, is really, really powerful,” he said. “Tati is paving the way.”