Jazz T-Bone: The homepage for Joe Jackson

Let's Blame It on Jazz Education!

The idea that jazz education has held back, and not advanced the art of jazz is an oft-repeated theme today.

However, I can't be down with it.

There are some great, great jazz musicians around today that are products of jazz schools; in fact, the vast, vast majority of the really incredible musicians around today come from college music programs. Here's a partial list of people I went to school with:

Craig Handy
Dave Pietro
Edie Brickell
Magnus Broo
Jon Ballantyne
Stefan Karlsson
Roy Hargrove
Brad Turner
Shelley Carroll
Rob Schepps
Walter White
Douglas Yates
Hugh Fraser
Chris Karlic

The people in the list are, today, producing music as - or more - interesting and exciting as anything in the world, now or in the past. And that's just people *I* went to school with.

Other great musicians who come from music schools:

Chris Potter/New School/Manhattan School of Music
Nicholas Payton/University of New Orleans
Christian McBride/Julliard
Steve Wilson/Virginia Commonwealth University
Dave Douglas/Berklee School of Music
Joe Lovano/Berklee
Kenny Werner/Manhattan School/Berklee
Michael Brecker/Indiana University
Peter Erskine/Interlochen/Indiana University
Maria Schneider/Eastman
Ron Carter/Eastman School of Music
Pat Metheny/University of Miami
Bill Frisell/University of Northern Colorado/Berklee

I could just keep going, but the reality is that most of the great musicians of today attended music school, and one cannot parse their experiences at school from the rest of their lives.

I just don't understand this idea that all of the good things people become happens in spite of schools, and that all the bad things that people become are because of schools, especially since I have seen many great players develop (or seen the seeds of greatness planted) during their time at schools of various flavors.

I think it is a prejudice based on ignorance.

Nobody gives the college musician any credit for choosing who they are, but the day-to-day reality that I have seen is that the aspiring jazz musicians in college do the same things to improve that aspiring musicians do on the outside: check out as much great music as they can find, practice, and play as much as they can.

Additionally, some of the best music I hear being played today is happening in schools by young musicians, unfettered and unjaded by the professional world, making beauty for beauty's sake. I have heard some phenomenal, new music coming from small and big bands at many of the major and minor music schools across the US.

In his recent interview in the International Trombone Association Journal, the great jazz composer and trombonist Bob Brookmeyer takes aim at music schools of composition and arranging, vis a vis the supposed lack of creative writers emerging from them.

The point he brings up speaks to the different ideas about educational tracks and career progression of composers and arrangers, as he laments that many writers need remedial training even after their schooling, and seems to attribute this to the fact that schools have turned arrangers into composers bereft of basic commercial arranging skills and techniques who are more interested in creating overwrought art than they are creating well-written, playable arrangements that are openings for great playing rather than epic, overwritten arranger-centric tomes.

He carries this argument to players coming from music schools as well.

While I agree that there are far more mediocre writers now than there ever have been in the past, I also think there are far more great writers as there were in the past. And I think schools are given far too much credit for what people do. My experience is that writers and aspiring writers are a stubborn, determined bunch, and I think if one can make the assertion that the writers coming out of music school are bereft of basic arranging skills it is more a function of the deconstructist tendancies of young modern jazz writers than it is the schools' influence on these writers.

Every college arranging professor I know is practically obsessed with teaching basic arranging technique, often to the resistance and disgust of the students; having read Brookmeyer's comments on college arranging teaching I am certain that most teachers would throw up their hands in frustration.

I would use the debate as to developing as a jazz improviser as an analogy: there is a school of thought that the best way to develop as an improviser is to start from the basics in terms of theory and listening to and studying the forefathers of jazz. Another school of thought is that the only music that matters is the music that comes from your soul; you ignore style, start with one note, and build your collective "life solo" from there.

So if jazz musicians choose the latter route, how can we possibly blame it on the existence of schools? In the "early days" schools weren't around and people learned jazz (playing and writing) in sessions and gigs and rehearsal bands. The emergence of schools has merely provided an artificial environment where these precise same sessions and gigs and bands can occur in direct response to the massive groundswell growth of interest in playing jazz that occurred in the last forty years. There simply were not enough real-world sessions and gigs and rehearsal bands to support the tens of thousands of young people interested in being jazz players and writers.

The existence of jazz in schools are merely a response to the interest in the art form. Not the other way around. And the state of writers (and players) emerging from jazz schools is a direct consequence of who these people want to be, not what the schools tried to turn them into.

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