THE POWER OF MUSIC TO HEAL, IN PRISON & OUT

Creativity as a Catalyst For Success

The Story of Jason Naradzay

By Stephanie Thompson

“Pain and suffering can be a touchstone for change.”

So says formerly incarcerated substance abuse counselor and musician Jason Naradzay. And he should know.

In 2008, after four years of “walking around like a zombie” in Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, NY, he had a profoundly religious experience.

“I woke up, and started feeling like God really loved me,” Jason says. With this newfound self-esteem, he was motivated to join the in-prison program offered by the New York Theological Seminary to 10 students a year to teach ‘social gospel.’

“They teach you to take care of the city you live in because it takes care of you, to sow seeds,” Jason says.

After graduating with a Masters in Pastoral Care and Counseling in June of 2009, Jason was one of a handful of men made a Chaplain’s clerk, and was put to work as a mental health unit running a Mental Illness and Chemical Addiction (MICA) program at Sing Sing, returning to his bunk at night.

That same year, Jason attended his first concert put together by Musicambia, a nonprofit that employs world-class musicians to teach those who are incarcerated the power of music to build connections and community.

“In prison, because you are more sensorially deprived, your hearing becomes more acute,” Jason says. And while he had always connected emotionally to music as a listener, turning to a variety of genres when powerful feelings surged, the Musicambia concerts made him vividly aware of how playing music allowed inmates “to express powerful heartfelt emotions, and how people in the audience were ‘getting it.’”

To be heard. And understood. What a concept. Such a thing heals one’s childhood wounds, one’s trauma.

It took Jason two years on Musicambia’s waitlist before he could be accepted into the program, as Sing Sing has limited class sizes.

He began with basic music theory, then was able to buy a violin and learn a bit. But, he says, it was “when I began to write my own stuff for strings that I had an epiphany: music allowed me to truly express my intense moods.”

Teaching Jason how to compose music, for strings, was the way Musicambia helped him forge a pathway in his mind for success.

Over the next four years in prison, Jason learned music, and played, emotionally and with soul, with other inmates.

Post Sing-Sing, Jason immediately got a job at Crouse Health in Syracuse, New York. He has been certified as an alcohol and substance abuse counselor, whose skills are in high demand. He makes $60,000 a year. He bought a house and a boat for himself. And, just as important, he is sowing seeds to take care and help others in his community change their lives too.

Jason calls it a “little solution,” to use music to quiet people’s demons, even the fully isolated Seriously Mentally Ill Violent Individuals he worked with at Sing Sing. Music instruction, music theory, music practice and the playing and performance of music, those things help, he’s found. They helped him.

Jason started an arts nonprofit called the “Jeptha Group,” so named after the biblical general, once an outlaw and outsider, who was called upon to lead the Hebrew conquest of the Promised Land. Jeptha has been partnering with Musicambia, and its program director Souel Spiritchild Fenix, to bring music to the mental health unit at Sing Sing.

“In 1970, there were 25,000 people in prison in New York, and 60,000 in mental health institutions, now it’s the reverse,” Jason says. Highly medicated and preyed upon by the more mainstream prisoners, “these men shouldn’t be in prison,” he says.

But, while they are, music teaches these men how to be more connected, how to speak up and fall back or — as Jason puts it — how to more nimbly “occupy sonic space.”

He finds that people who might resort to violence out of unexpressed rage, “are more compliant and more receptive because they’re being heard, because they can get what’s on their mind off their chests, through song.”

In confinement, people are forced to look at ideas like, “Does anybody hear me? Does anybody see me? How does my family see me? My children? The world? What is my message? In a group, how do I function?”

But, he says, people need to be offered a practice to determine the answers to these questions. They need, he thinks, to get M-A-D: Music, Art and Drama, three artistic practices, to “help bring these men’s inner world to the outer world, to help them make connections to these meta-truths and messages through creative work and to foster social collaboration.”

Jason’s best moments in groups are when someone performs a song, shows a piece of art or acts something out and, he says, “Everybody nods. That brings consolation. The message is: I am more than my mistakes. I am a sound-maker that can reach you from all angles, without even touching you.”

The epiphany came to him after years of the kind of introspection isolation brings: what is essential to all humans is expression through creativity, being heard and being able to listen.

Playing music together, like other expressive artistic pursuits like acting and drawing, helps people get in tune with themselves and with those around them, and find the pathways they need to succeed.

Join Musicambia for a virtual benefit concert, a beautiful showcase of human expression, this Thursday, June 18th from 7:00 pm — 8:30pm! Find out what inspired Jason Naradzay and countless others, and get inspired yourself.

Visit Musicambia.org for more information.