A beloved local music-education program is pausing operations.
The Academy of Musical Performance (AMP) has been giving kids the “school of rock” treatment for more than a decade. Students from elementary through high school learned music skills, got placed into bands, learned cover songs and performed them live. The program launched the careers of many desert musicians, birthed more than a few bands, and offered great opportunities for young creatives to perform at a number of Coachella Valley venues.
On May 14, AMP announced on social media: “After deep reflection, the Board of Directors has made the difficult decision to temporarily pause program operations.”
“A number of things happened,” AMP co-founder Kate Spates told the Independent.
In recent months, the AMP board lost a few crucial members.
“Abie Perkins, who is amazing and has been with the program since the very beginning, he’s a very busy working musician,” Spates said. “He never really wanted the title of executive director; he liked music director, and his schedule works well with running the Oasis on Miles … a performance space where we could do open mics, and we actually did some recruiting there.
“Michele Penn, who has been on our board since pretty much the beginning and was the executive administrator, her husband fell very ill, and she couldn’t do all the things she needed to do, and she ended up resigning—and then he passed away. When you have this great organization, but its leadership is all busy doing other stuff, it always suffers. I’ve seen that happen in other great organizations, and it’s just a timing thing.”
The original plan was for AMP to take the summer off and try to regroup—but then AMP received news from the city of Indio concerning the future of its office and the Oasis on Miles.
“We got this notice that they had a bookstore that wanted to come in, and we were like, ‘This is the sign,’” Spates said. “We’ve been in that space for, I think, seven years, and it’s always been a month-to-month (lease), which is fine, but that’s not very secure.”
Spates said the remaining AMP leadership is so strapped for time that even cleaning out the spaces has been difficult.
“‘We already have a skeleton crew, and now we’re going to need to go through there and figure out what we’re going to do with this stuff. Do we put it in storage? Do we get a new space? All of us were just looking at each other like, ‘I don’t have time. This is such a great organization, but my business is booming.’”
Spates pointed to her own schedule as an example.
“I have a full-time job now. I work at (Acrisure) Arena, running the One Valley Foundation, and honestly, I don’t want to be on any boards, because I am in a position where I’m giving money to organizations, and I don’t want any conflict of interest of any sort. I pretty much said that I was going to need to step back a while ago, and nobody just could step up.”
Spates said AMP never found a true successor to former executive director Will Sturgeon, who departed in 2021.
“A bunch of family members, a bunch of local musicians, former instructors, coaches and directors are pretty much open. My hope and prayer and plan is to come up with something.”
Abie Perkins
“After Will left, I realized how special Will was; like, it took three people to do the job that Will did,” Spates said.
The future of the program is uncertain, but Spates said she is hopeful that AMP can return in some capacity.
“It’s going to take a little something special to start it back up, but I’m talking with people I know … and there could be some possible fit with some other organizations,” Spates said. “All we want is for kids to have this kind of outlet, whether they get that in school or in some other form.”
Perkins explained why he made the decision to walk away from AMP.
“It just became apparent to me that it was going to be difficult to continue to run the program for various reasons, with people stepping down from the board,” he said. “Everything was kind of put upon my shoulders, with trying to run a music program and also run a music venue. I figured it’d be in everybody’s best interest if I just stepped aside, and I was hoping that maybe they might be able to find a replacement—but I truly see that was also a challenge as well.”
Perkins said he was particularly proud of how he grew AMP beyond a traditional “school of rock” program.
“I just focused on that word ‘performance,’” he said. “When I took over, my thought process was, ‘Why does it need to be just focused on rock when there are so many other different genres out there?’ I opened it up to kids who are into musicals and kids who are into jazz … and it gave us a lot more kids as far as attendance.”
Perkins remained in charge of the Oasis on Miles after leaving AMP—but the city of Indio is requiring that both spaces be vacated. While Spates said the city has been “great,” Perkins expressed disappointment.
“I think the thing that went down with Little Street Music Hall was kind of like the writing on the wall,” Perkins said. “It’s hurtful and disappointing all at the same time, because our venue was a lot more focused on the kids to have a place to come and express themselves and everything. Adults could come through as well, and it was more community-based, but we didn’t sell alcohol or anything like that. We had our open mic on Friday nights, and we had special things, so I was under the impression that’s kind of what the city was looking for, more of a community-based venue. … The city and the board wanted the Oasis on Miles to show some value, to show some foot traffic, and that’s where it got really difficult, because we’re not really a business.”
Perkins said that both he and other members of the former AMP family want to continue helping youth and the arts.
“The last two years, as a director, I wrote the curriculum for what we were calling the RE-AMP, so I still have tons and tons of curricula that are just sitting in a folder on a computer, and I would love to see that realized,” he said. “A bunch of family members, a bunch of local musicians, former instructors, coaches and directors are pretty much open. My hope and prayer and plan is to come up with something. It would be just a program where kids can still learn their craft and learn how to be musicians or artists and entertainers and performers.”
Perkins said he hopes the closure of the AMP and Oasis spaces remind people of the importance of supporting the arts.
“If people are interested in keeping music alive, they should support local musicians, and they should support the local music venues,” he said. “Just show love to people. There are venues and places out here in the valley, and everybody has their opinions about all these different places. I want nothing but for everybody to succeed. It would be a cool thing to see a valley-wide collective, where it influences the entire valley as a whole—and we’re talking high desert, low desert and everything in-between. I think that’s when we could really reach and affect the most kids as possible.”
Meanwhile, Spates said she’s “hoping for a miracle.” She noted that the program got a fast start in 2015 thanks to financial support from Goldenvoice, which funded the program during its first three years.
“Going forward after that, it was tough to try to keep (the program) free, because it was free for the first three years, and we tried to fundraise, so that we could at least offer scholarships to people who couldn’t afford it—but it’s hard out there,” Spates said.
“If there was somebody who believed in the organization and the direction and saw the need and was ready to write a big check, we could find somebody to really truly be that executive director.”
