This high school marching band 'represents the soul of Inglewood' (2024)

The 12 students lined up on the track, their caps and gowns signaling their status as graduating seniors. The commencement ceremony honoring the class of 2024 was over, but the show had just begun.

In their final breakdown performance of the school year, the Inglewood High School marching band launched a send-off for the departing seniors, swaying to the beat they had marched to all year long.

The crowd that filled the bleachers — parents and cousins, siblings and neighbors — knew what was to come; they’d probably witnessed the performance many times. But still, it was a spectacle they didn’t want to miss.

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1. The Inglewood High School marching band rehearses for an upcoming performance under the direction of teacher Joseph Jauregui. 2. Inglewood High School band members arrive for a spring concert. 3. Inglewood High band director Joseph Jauregui has transformed the school’s band program, reviving a tradition that was had diminished because of the pandemic and the former band director’s retirement. 4. Inglewood High School senior Itevia ‘Ivy’ Jack performs a sax solo at concert. 5. Inglewood High School band teacher Joseph Jauregui congratulates Yvette de la Torre at graduation ceremonies.

“Do it, baby!” one woman cheered, and the seniors took their cue, marching past their fellow bandmates who were lined up on the track and the football field. Some of the seniors kept it simple, marching through with their heads held high. Others incorporated flashier moves, jumping, dancing, skipping through as the crowd cheered.

The breakdown is an Inglewood tradition that came to a halt four years ago when the COVID-19 pandemic prompted schools to close and rely on remote learning. For a time, there were no in-person practices for the marching band, no football games to energize, no competitions to dominate. The students were schooled — in music, style, pacing — over Zoom. As a result, the program cratered from more than 100 students to just 20 band members.

Itevia “Ivy” Jack, the 2023-24 drum major, put off joining the band until the summer before her junior year. “Being at home, inside, you can’t really do anything, and you can’t have a marching band online. It’s hard,” Ivy recalled. “It just went downhill.”

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Inglewood high school band experience with Anthony Guzman

Anthony Guzman talks about his Inglewood high school band experience with Anthony Guzman (Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)

But a year into the pandemic, a new band director started to steady the program, hoping to return it to its former glory and showcase an energetic show style derived from historically Black college and university marching bands. With unwavering support from the principal and band parents, 37-year-old Joseph Jauregui — a Cal State L.A. graduate and former member of USC’s marching band — restructured and revived, bit by bit.

Today, about 1 in 8 Inglewood High students are in the band. Prospective freshmen are already signing up for the 2024-25 season. Every senior in the band, including Ivy — who will attend Talladega College in Alabama on a full ride — was offered a band scholarship. And next year, the band will march in front of the White House, taking the pride of Inglewood to the nation’s capital.

Inglewood High School students celebrate at their graduation ceremony.

“In my mind, the band represents the soul of Inglewood,” Principal Lamar Collins said. “This is the city of champions, and the band is that.”

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For decades, the Inglewood High band dominated high school competitions under the stewardship of band director Conrad Hutchinson III, whose father, Conrad Hutchinson Jr., had been a legendary band director at Grambling State University in the 1950s and ‘60s in Louisiana.

Under Hutchinson, who arrived in 1977, Inglewood adopted the show style — with its energetic mash-up of music and dance, high-stepping, swaying and gravity-defying backbends — which at the time was largely absent on the West Coast. The band came to dominate show-style competitions in Southern California.

He was strict but fair, students would say. Under his tutelage, the band captured the nationwide Battle of the High School Bands repeatedly — in 2006, 2008 and 2013 — and appeared in commercials and TV shows.

Hutchinson molded generations of disciplined students, who praised him for opening doors through music.

Inglewood High School band director Joseph Jauregui, left, chats with former director Conrad Hutchinson III at a spring concert.

Louis Jack, Ivy’s father, graduated in 1989 and remembers Hutchinson’s “drill sergeant” attitude and his challenge to be the best. Jack, who played the sousaphone, recalled how the band would march down the street from the school to Caroline Coleman Stadium, the site of home football games, and neighbors would pour out of their homes to watch.

Ivy “asked me a lot of questions about how it was when I was in school, and more of the traditions and legacies that came from being in the band,” Jack said. “Other than the football and basketball [teams] in the school, it’s something that everybody around the community draws to when that season comes around.”

After graduating from Inglewood High in 2003, Daniel Anthony Farris, also known by his rap name D Smoke, went on to a successful music career, performing with artists including Snoop Dogg and becoming the winner of a Netflix music competition show, “Rhythm + Flow.” But before his professional career took off, he was a student honing his craft under the guidance of Hutchinson.

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The Inglewood High School band experience with Ivy Jack

Itevia “Ivy”Jack talks about her time with the Inglewood high school band. (Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)

“It just meant everything to be a part of the band, being that my brother was in the band, my best friend was in the band, and I still learned the drum cadences even though I wasn’t on the drum line,” Farris said. He played an electric keyboard attached to a bass speaker that was wheeled around during marching season.

Inglewood High School senior and band drum major Itevia “Ivy” Jack celebrates with the band at graduation ceremonies.

Hutchinson “brought the whole culture of historically Black colleges and their bands to Los Angeles, with the high-knee style, with doing dance moves and choreo and the drum majors, and doing formations in the halftime show,” Farris said. “It was a big source of pride.”

Hutchinson retired from the school in 2021 when he was 81, but he continues to show up — at the band’s performances, offering praise to students who are excited to meet the former band director.

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While the band was winning titles and honors, the Inglewood Unified School District was dealing with a revolving door of administrators and financial problems.

In 2012, the district, struggling with debt, required a state bailout of $29 million after decades of mismanagement. The district still owes $21 million to the state and makes annual payments of $2.2 million. In March, the district announced it plans to close five schools at the end of the 2024-25 school year as a result of “declining enrollment, financial challenges and the need for facility repairs.”

Jauregui arrived in 2021 as the band program was experiencing one of its roughest periods. That first week, he said, he considered quitting. The trophies that the band had earned over the years were piled up and collecting dust on the floor of a storage room. The instruments were old, rusty and in desperate need of repair or, often, replacement. Of the six band classes he’d been assigned, four were for beginning students. Everyone wanted to be a drummer.

He recalls anticipating his last class of the day — the advanced class — hoping to finally see an ensemble.

“I walked in excited to hear the band, and it was just eight people sitting right here in the front, in a little circle with the method books. I looked at them and I was like, where’s the rest of them?” Jauregui recalled. He quickly discovered that none of the students in the advanced class had performed or played in front of an audience. “Every class was a disaster,” he said.

The pandemic, Jauregui says, had disrupted the cycle of upperclassmen mentoring younger students. He needed to reconfigure his approach. So he started pushing students — who were jittery and hadn’t been schooled in the art of marching and playing at the same time — toward different instruments based on their abilities.

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1. The band director at Inglewood High School, Joseph Jauregui, conducts during a performance. 2. Student Angel Zanabria offers a congratulatory birthday hug to Inglewood High band director Joseph Jauregui. 3. Inglewood High School band director Joseph Jauregui prepares for a fund raising gala performance at the school. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Then he rearranged the classes by instrument family, teaching students the approach to each one before putting them together in an ensemble. And he got Collins — who arrived at the school in 2023, drawn in part by the legacy of the marching band — on board.

Band members received new uniforms, new drums and, most recently, new flutes and piccolos, all of it paid for by the district’s budget for the arts. “A lot of these kids, they’ve never experienced anything new like that,” Jauregui said. “And so here’s this brand-new sax out of the box, and they get to play it, and they get so excited to just unwrap it. It’s like Christmas for them.” About 71% of the students qualify for the federal free or reduced-price meal program, and band members don’t pay to rent or use the instruments.

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Inglewood high school band experience with Justin Orellana

The Inglewood High School band experience with Justin Orellana. (Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)

The first few months were also a time of learning for Jauregui, a former Los Angeles Unified music teacher. He had to learn the show style on the job, a technique that was vastly different from drum corps, the more militarized, technically challenging style that most high school bands learn. He had always admired show style and, as a teacher, had always dreamed of directing a big band. He just had to figure out how to get there.

Inglewood High School band leader Joseph Jauregui wrangles students before a spring concert at the school.

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Jauregui takes a gentle approach with his students. He understands that they’ve been through a lot — the disruption of the pandemic, the doubt that comes with picking up a new instrument — and school is not always easy for them. He pushes the kids — ranging from homecoming queens to those on the verge of dropping out — to be better because he knows they can. They are all on equal footing in his band room, and he greets every single one of them as they enter.

“Hola, chaparra, where have you been?” he asked one student, to whom he referred as “kid” in Spanish, as the band prepared to practice. “Welcome back!” he said to another with a side hug.

The key to growing the band, Jauregui said, was for other students to see how much fun the members were having. The friendships came easy as his class sizes grew and the students improved as musicians. Sometimes they spend their lunch periods with him, and often they seek him out to decompress about things going on at home.

“Every school has kids that go through enormous pain or struggle … and here, it was just sad story after sad story. ‘My parents did this and that.’ And it was just a little bit overwhelming at times,” Jauregui said. “So I wanted a safe, positive place for them to just come and not have to think about stuff like that, and just feel warm and loved and appreciated and wanted.”

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Inglewood high school band experience with Amber Flores

Amber Flores talks about the benefits of her time with the Inglewood iIgh School school band. (Albert Brave Tiger Lee/Los Angeles Times)

Amber Flores, 17, a percussionist, found her voice in the marching band. Her own anxiety had kept her from doing extracurricular activities throughout much of her high school career, but when she was placed into a band class as a senior, she found she could turn to Jauregui, who is known as “Mr. J” by students, for guidance and a shoulder to cry on.

Inglewood High band director Joseph Jauregui with student Kennedy Preston, who performed at a concert.

Amber was offered a full ride to a university in Arkansas but turned it down to attend Prairie View A&M University, a school in Texas she visited and fell in love with. She intends to study architecture and try out for the marching band the first chance she gets.

“This is our village,” she said while sitting in the band room during one of the band’s last after-school practices. “As I play, I let go of my anxieties, the feeling of the drums helps me, and that’s like the heartbeat of the band. I don’t know, it just makes us feel powerful.”

Over the course of three years, Jauregui’s students — who were once timid freshmen — became leaders, mentoring those who came after them. Summer band camp became a rigorous experience again. When the band members practice outdoors and march down the street, residents come out of their homes to cheer them on.

“It creates such energy you can’t replicate,” Collins said. “It’s hard to describe. You got to see it — it’s not something you tell somebody, it’s something you feel.”

Inglewood High band members surround teacher Joseph Jauregui during graduation ceremonies.

In January, the band placed first at the Kingdom Day Parade celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day, beating out 20 other schools. The judges said they loved the band’s energy and dance routines.

The high school band has played at Dodger Stadium, and next year the band members, many of whom have never been on a plane, will fly to Washington, D.C., to perform in the America’s National Independence Day Parade on Constitution Avenue. The school is raising the $250,000 needed to cover transportation, hotel and food.

“It’s exciting to go to the White House. These kids that were, you know, treated like trash or thought that they would never amount to anything … they get to go and they get to march and they get to be on a national platform across the United States. That’s huge for us,” Jauregui said. “And I’m hoping that it sheds some positive light here. We desperately need it in this school. ... These kids are worth fighting for.”