It took Cleveland for flutist Greg Pattillo from Seattle, cellist Eric Stephenson and bassist Peter Seymour from Dallas to find each other to create their high-energy chamber music, beatbox flute.

Blending elements of jazz and classical with hip-hop beats, PROJECT Trio put on a master class Monday with Southwestern Michigan College students and then 60 high school students from Dowagiac, Niles, Brandywine, Edwardsburg, New Buffalo, Berrien Springs and New Prairie, Ind., before their March 21 night public performance in the theater of the Dale A. Lyons Building on SMC’s Dowagiac campus.

Heavy on Bach for the composer’s birthday, they opened with a Mingus tune before breaking off into a rhythmic exercise with a metronome, since the students would be hearing them play in a few hours.

“We’re like high-energy chamber music,” Seymour explains in an interview before their clinic. “We were raised classical musicians, attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, we’re all orchestral musicians.” In fact, Stephenson and Seymour are both former members of the Cleveland Orchestra.

“We started this group about four years ago and we tour around the world,” Seymour said. “We’ve played over 35 cities and states, Australia, Hong Kong, Italy and Germany. A big part of what we do is education wherever we go. We do classes for all ages and go into schools all the time. We’ve taught for more than 75,000 teens in the last four years.”

“It’s a very strange instrumentation,” Seymour agreed. “Strangely enough, all three of us were just friends in college. We all went to school together and jammed back in the day. Bass and cello are both kind of low instruments, too. We make it work because we’re all like-minded musicians.”

Pattillo picks up the story at beatbox, “an electronic drum instrument that came out in the early ’80s. Human beatboxes existed because those sounds were low-fidelity digital sounds, reproducing drum sounds, which could be equally be reproduced as human. Humans were doing fake drum sounds that the beatbox made. They were called human beatboxers. People like the Fat Boys beatboxed on tracks as drums, so it became a secret staple style of hip-hop, with breakdancing, graffiti writing and emceeing. You just made the beats on the mic with your mouth while other people danced or rapped back and forth. That was street styles of the Bronx back in the late 1970s, early ’80s, and it’s just come around to popular culture, most recently on ‘American Idol’ with the dude named Blake four or five years ago. He brought that beatbox sound to a lot of households.”

Pattillo continued, “About that time I was beatboxing on the flute, trying to find ways to make the flute less lyrical and more of a rhythm instrument, and to seek ways to make other instrument sounds on the flute. I was drawn by the sounds of Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. He could hum and do things into the flute that made it sound very much like an electric guitar. I grew up making those noises and trying to add some of the more urban elements I was hearing in the music around me,” including drums and cymbals.

He suddenly springs to light as his own syncopated percussion section.

“I already had classical chops,” Greg said. “We all met in conservatory, so we could do the normal things you’re asked to do on your instruments. But we were trying to come up with ways to play other styles of music. We could play classical music that no one had written for these instruments. We try and go over the top in communication with one another. They call it the fourth wall between the audience and performers. In a legit chamber setting, you’re on one side or the other. But in a lot of jazz and folk arts, it’s integrated. You’re trying to get a reaction from the audience. Sometimes people applaud after solos. Bridging that enthusiasm between performers and stage and bringing them on stage is kind of one of our ideas. Tonight we’re going to play proper Bach and Bach as realized by Jethro Tull because it’s Bach’s birthday. We’re going to play the Bach card.”

“We do salsa music and rock music,” Pattillo said, “and jazz stuff. We do a Mingus tune, even though you’re supposed to do that with a big band. All of this style and all of this energy, we’ve had a really popular response from people. They come to a function where you sit and listen, and enthusiasm-wise, the bar’s pretty low for these concerts. So we try to hype it up a little. We talk about everything we’re going to play and tell jokes.”

See for yourself on YouTube.

“I primarily play flute,” Greg said. “I don’t play anything else on stage. I started playing in fourth grade. It’s what I’ve wanted to do ever since I can remember. My mom greenlighted it, I got private lessons at an early age and started competing by seventh grade in Seattle, where I grew up. I could memorize full programs and concertos by that age and was well on my way to an orchestral career. I decided I wanted to be a professional musician at the age of 14. It was a decision I made with my flute teacher. She wanted to know what my aspirations were. I told her I wanted to do it for real for the rest of my life, so she gave me two lessons a week for the price of one. She really steeped me in my music all through high school. It was everything flute. I stopped all sports because I had to come home after school to practice and memorize all these pieces. I competed on the national stage in high school, which is what enabled me to audition and get into the Cleveland Institute of Music, which is where I met these guys. They went through their own similar processes to get to that school. I was in (Cleveland) for eight years. Ohio’s famous for educating people and having them leave the state. That was a big crisis when I left in 2003. That was the big theme of the paper, The Plain Dealer, that spring. They ran a lot of articles on all the universities in Ohio and people leaving. They called it the brain drain. It’s an international draw. We went to school with people from all over the world and since disbursed all over the world. We played in Hong Kong about a year and half ago and Peter didn’t want to fly a bass to Hong Kong. We went to school with one of the fellows who played bass in the orchestra there, so we had connections.”

Pattillo said, “The one nice thing about a classical education is that it teaches you how to totally dissect the process of what you’re doing and extract from that all of the fundamentals, and then build them back into whatever style you want. But in order to take apart a sonata and have the control to play something stylistically correct, you’re forced into goal-oriented learning that can be applied to anything, even math. That’s truly why music is so good for learning in general. There’s repetition and breaking things down into chunks, but it’s hard to quantify things like listening skills.”