Young Musicians Join to Sing Compton’s Praises : Ambassadors: Band formed to enhance city’s image will play in Berlin, if travel funds can be found.

A joyous sound exploded from a garage in Compton on Sunday, the still evening air punctuated by the music of a band of six young men and three teen-age girls belting out their version of “Keep on Walking.”

Melanie Andrews, 43, who watched from the sidelines, suddenly looked concerned. As soon as the last drumbeat drifted through the dusty rafters, she was on her feet: “Everybody got your passports?” she asked. “You know you can’t go if you don’t have a passport.”

But passports are the least of her worries. Andrews is no amateur manager trying to negotiate a record contract for just another L.A. garage band. She’s an anxious lay diplomat who is trying to find a way to get these nine young musicians, one 16-year-old road manager and five chaperons from Compton to Berlin, and she is $3,000 short of the $10,000 needed for plane fare.

The Ambassadors of Compton, as the band members call themselves, are scheduled to leave in three days on a trip to promote a positive international image of Compton and African-Americans. “We may have to postpone a little,” Andrews told them at a rehearsal last weekend. “But we’ve had problems before and somehow they got taken care of.”

The trip was planned and engineered by Andrews, a Compton native and booster, who, until recently, worked as an aide to retiring U.S. Rep. Mervyn M. Dymally (D-Compton).

Andrews, as a result of contacts she made in Dymally’s office, became the West Coast representative of Initiative Berlin-USA, a 25-year-old program sponsored by Berlin’s government to promote cultural, social and economic exchanges with the United States.

The program is also the forum for a sister-city partnership between Los Angeles and Berlin. Andrews became involved last year when she traveled to Berlin with a group of American social workers to study the city’s burgeoning problem with immigrants and neo-Nazi gangs.

When a government official in asked her to become affiliated with Initiative Berlin-USA, Andrews said, she agreed on the condition that she be allowed to include African-American youth, who she believes are portrayed in a one-dimensional, negative way in the popular media in Europe.

“When I was last there, just about every gang movie made about African-Americans was playing in Berlin and Paris,” she said. “I had a kid come up to me and ask if my son had an Uzi.”

James Meredith, a Compton music teacher, had similar thoughts in mind when he founded the Ambassadors three years ago. He said he wanted to give talented young people something to do and to counter his city’s negative image.

When Andrews came up with the idea of an exchange between German and American musicians, the Ambassadors seemed tailor-made for Andrews’ purpose.

A few of the current Ambassadors are not residents of Compton, but all seemed imbued with pride for the heavily black community southeast of Los Angeles.

Dion Evans, 17, the Ambassadors’ drummer and a recent graduate of Compton High School, worried at the rehearsal that Germans may view his hometown through the image projected by so-called “gangster rappers,” who brag that they come from there.

“Compton and South-Central are not just what the rappers and the media try to make them out to be,” he said. “I want to show that something good comes out of Compton.”

Meanwhile, Meredith and parents of the Ambassadors were doing what they could to make sure the trip begins on schedule. They were trying to raise money by selling compact discs that feature Turkish immigrant rappers from Germany as well as music by the local youths.

Andrews engineered that dual billing. The rap portion of the disc was taped in Berlin. The rest was added later.

“We only got the tape two days ago,” Meredith said, adding that he had no idea it would be so difficult to raise money for the trip. “There’s not very much interest in providing money for kids who are not in trouble.”