Born to Groove - Introduction from Charles Keil
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I see imperfections as the key to life. Or, at the very least, imperfections are clues to the mystery of life. Don't those little imperfections we call "mutations" make co-evolution of species in an ecological niche possible? Mutations, mistakes, discrepancies, gaps, defects, deviations, differences that make a difference, create the speciation, the shapes of flowers, the colored feather patterns of birds, the wings and ears of over 900 species of bats. Imperfections shape our characters and co-evolve us with other creatures. And, it is the little discrepancies in timing between players that create grooves. Each child, given enough interactive experience, co-evolves ways of grooving with others.

It is our defects, imperfections, weaknesses, mishaps, inadequacies, discrepancies that require participation and collaboration, playing with others, balancing, sharing, arguing, resolving differences, relating, keeping together in time, if we are to survive and thrive as individuals, families, friendship circles, bands, classmates, colleagues, communities, nations. Awareness of these processes of coevolving imperfections shaping creatures and human characters predisposes me toward a sense of mystery and an ignorance-based wild-worldhear - listening for differences from the bottom up rather than dominating the world from the top down with a knowledge-based, domesticating-worldview.

We don't know enough about evolution to play God, splicing genes from one creature into another, meddling with Nature's blueprints for life. We do know just enough about the value of cultural diversity in adapting peoples to very diverse ecological localities to reject the perfectionism and "progress" of western industrial civilization as a solution to the world's problems, most of which were created by military-industrial civilizations in the first place. Valuing imperfection leads to a series of biases e.g. against civilization, against perfectly certain people sitting on top of hierarchies giving directives, against composers, conductors and inflexible written music, and against those technologies that replace primitive, primary communication and interactive experiences in any way. Most of the time these biases percolate under the surface of the chapters which follow because I don't want anyone to be turned off or turned away by what might be perceived as "negativity," or "politics" or "paganism" or - any label that might put a limit or an obstacle in the way of the grooving that is so good for us and our children.

Born to Groove could help people to:

• Start afterschool music-dance programs or "ngoma" (drum-song-dance-drama-healing 'clubs' or 'sangas' or 'ensembles') in all the primary schools of a district so that junior high and high school ensembles will be evolving and flourishing in unpredictable directions a decade later.
• Inspiring the pre-K and Kindergarten teachers of the present and the future to devote more time, energy, ingenuity, to helping children maintain and grow child culture with all its hand games, ring games, synchronizing skills, call & response, simon sez, chanting, invention of songs, dances, dramas.
• Restoring play periods, playgrounds, recesses, to primary schools and neighborhoods that have lost them over the past 40 years or so.
• Assuring that every school, college and university has a program for reclaiming and reintegrating musicking-dancing-dramatizing-performing-poetizing skills. We want to reach at least one faculty member at each institution and at least one fundraiser who calls alumni with the message that "we" want to lead the way in liberating children thru reintegrating the arts-skills in early childhood. The Institute or Center or Program at each school needs a core course whose syllabus starts with EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution (Elisabet Sahtouris), The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood (Edith Cobb), Music:Society:Education (Christopher Small), The Muse Within: Creativity and Communication, Song and Play from Childhood Through Maturity (Jon-roar Bjorkvold), Songs in their Heads (Patricia Campbell) and, we hope, Born to Groove.