CALGARY — Ryan Perez knows all about anger.
At age 17, he was an angry young man, hanging out with the wrong crowd in a low-income neighbourhood in Calgary and flirting with a possible life of crime and drug abuse.
Now, 10 years later, he has a job, a home, a fiancee, a two-year-old son and a burgeoning musical career as well.
"There's a lot of people I know who are still in jail or they have a drug problem. I was able to excel beyond that," said Perez in an interview with The Canadian Press at his northeast Calgary home.
"I can only speak for black youth and a lot of the males are misguided. We don't do well in school and our mothers are never around because they're working two or three jobs."
His life changed when he met longtime blues guitarist and musician Gary Martin, a Chicago native and martial artist who was once the leader of the Motown Revue, a touring group of Motown musicians.
Martin, 57, has performed with artists such as Pinetop Perkins, Howlin' Wolf, Luther "Guitar" Johnson, and Billy Branch, and appeared off and on with the legendary Motown "Funk Brothers" for close to 30 years.
Martin, who also spent six years with the U.S. military police, estimates he has mentored about 1,400 troubled youth in his life.
"I listen to their story. If they're not real angry I will deal with them. If they're very angry I won't touch them," explained Martin, who uses a combination of martial arts and music to reach his charges.
"I teach the kids how to express themselves. I will make them come up with the most difficult situation they're unhappy with, and tell them next week you come back and write me a beautiful song about how you hate getting up and going to school," he said with a chuckle. "Now you have to write me a song on how you're going to make a difference, and for the first time in their life they're getting a chance to first of all be public about it, and secondly come up with a solution."
Perez, who performs rap under the name B. Nelson, launches into one of the first songs he ever wrote, "I Move Along," with Martin playing guitar in the background.
"Oh yeah, I was very angry and I didn't understand why. Gary would ask me all the time, 'Why are you so angry?'" said Perez, keeping close tabs on his son Malcolm, who is two. "When I was 17, for five years I was depressed. I was locked up in my home. I would not go out anywhere. It was a bit I was afraid for my life and a bit I didn't know why."
Martin also works with the National Gang Crime Research Centre in his native Chicago and specializes in gang prevention. He said learning how to express is the only way to deal with the anger.
"We keep tearing away the layers of 'why are you angry, why are you angry' — and once they get to the part where they realize they can no longer be angry, they start to find themselves," said Martin. "Sixty per cent of this generation have no education, have no job skills and really have been neglected. We're gonna have one hard time when we get too old to take care of ourselves."
The relationship between Martin and Perez appears more like father and son than teacher and student. Martin is scaling back his mentorship and concentrating more on his music while Perez is taking on more of a mentorship role to help youth.
"He is a second generation mentor," Martin says. "Every year we go to Bob Edward School and I mentor kids about rap. There's a few people I mentor even today. I teach them about rap, how to write lyrics, etc.," said Perez. "I call him sensei, and I hear his voice in my head saying, I told you so."
