John - thanks for these very thoughtful and probing questions. I've responded at length as I think your questions deserve a full discussion. I've had a couple cups of espresso this morning, so I apologize if I ramble ;)
FROM JOHN'S POST: I would have asked these questions over the phone rather than a
post/critique if there was enough time. I just took the notes I jotted
down and turned them into the post below, so I could have
misinterpreted his remarks or not have gotten the whole story if there
was time for him to discuss some of these points:
One of the central problems I found in his discussion of the issues in
jazz education was deeming the current faculty neoconservative. To me,
this relates directly to a critique of the young lion generation of
musicians and the music they played. To be brief, I disagree with this
general critique of this group of musicians, and would argue that
since 2000, a whole body of work exists that demonstrates that these
musicians forged a unique identity in the jazz tradition and has and
will continue to be influential in the future. They also brought a
great deal of visibility to the music which I feel should be
appreciated rather than scorned. From a pedagogical standpoint, it
seems to me that what they were criticized for would be very useful in
an academic setting: drawing on the tradition of musicians that came
before them, and incorporating it into their own unique voice.
To clarify, when I say "neo-conservative," I'm referring to the context of the academy itself, not to the stylistic approach of neo-classicism (or whatever we want to call Wynton, JALC, et. al.). I'm basically using a political analogy, that neo-conservatives are political "converts" - progressives who are now conservatives (that's what this term actually means in its proper usage, and I don't actually think it carries over that well to a discussion of style). In saying this, I'm trying to get to the point that jazz education, which was once considered (rightly) a very progressive field, has now found a secure, stable, comfortable home in academia, and people don't want to jeopardize that. What concerns me is the idea that jazz studies is being "passed" by others in the academy whose work is taking musical study in different, innovative directions. As I noted before, much of the discourse of free improvisation is not going on within jazz education programs, but in other areas of the academy. In most academic disciplines, being on top of current developments is considered to be a critically important idea. This is doubly unfortunate when you consider some of the really great things going on in jazz today (I think I mentioned Bad Plus before). Why are these approaches not being embraced by the discipline in its pedagogy and curricula? Why are big bands still at the core of most jazz programs (how full time many professional big bands are in existence today)? Let me state that there is absolutely nothing wrong with big band music - I love it, and I do big band gigs every chance I get. But there aren't many, and most schools (with exceptions like William Patterson that come to mind) still use the big band as the center of their performance program. Likewise, a very circumscribed improvisational style is still largely the center of the curriculum. There's nothing wrong with playing that way, and indeed it would be absurd to suggest that students shouldn't learn it. But jazz education hasn't really moved beyond it. There's so much more jazz out there, and I do think that a "jazz studies" degree ought to reflect the breadth of the music to a greater extent than it does.
Tradition is a two-edged sword. It is, of course, important, as you rightly note, but there simply has to be more. But I think the question of why comes in. Are these methods of teaching still widely used because they are the most effective, or because "that's the way it's always been done." Given the amount of criticism I hear of jazz education FROM EDUCATORS THEMSELVES, I tend to think it has more to do with the latter. This brings me to another problem with the place of tradition in the field - the tradition itself is heavily skewed towards bop/hard bop/post bop. There's nothing wrong with those genres, but there is virtually nothing in improvisational pedagogy on pre-1940s or post-1960s approaches to playing (which often represent very different ways of playing and thinking about improvisation), at least on a wide scale (the same is true for performance - it is extremely unusual to see, for example, a small combo in a jazz program that focuses on pre-bebop jazz). The problem is not, therefore, simply an emphasis on tradition and its application. It's that the tradition that is employed is not complete. The "jazz tradition" that informs the teaching of improvisation has, I believe, been truncated. I simply don't see a lot of momentum in the discipline as a whole to change this. When I see university orchestras and wind ensembles programming "new music," I wonder why we aren't doing the same. When I see a composition department sponsoring an avant-garde improvisation ensemble, I wonder why jazz studies didn't get there first. When I saw a percussion instructor form a salsa band while I was in grad school, I wondered why the jazz program didn't devote one of its many big bands (there were nine) to Latin jazz. I wondered why it was left to a"repertory ensemble" to play Third Stream, or Mingus, or Jelly Roll Morton, or Sun Ra. These things are not specific to one school...
Jazz education came into full flower by launching an attack on tradition, that is to say, the traditions of the academy. But now jazz education has become the defender of tradition, and a very circumscribed one at that. I see this as a problem for the field moving forward, especially as more and more music (world music, pop, free improvisation, etc.) makes it's way into the academy. There are only so many resources to go around, and the academy does not need more defenders of tradition - it needs more iconoclasts. They are out there, but they are not driving the debate as they once did.
This was one of my big complaints about IAJE - they could (and should) have been a leader in this area. Instead, they reflected the status quo. I can't count the number of times I saw different people give the same basic presentation on improvisational techniques year after year (Lewis can probably speak to this better than I). Now they're gone, and though there's a new organization emerging to take its place, I'm not seeing this as one of their big priorities.
JOHN: One of the major criticisms Dr. Prouty pointed to was the lack of
forward thinking research done within the jazz field. However, I think
an important question to ask is why should professors employed to
teach jazz improvisation be expected to be doing this research? Should
we really expect untenured, associate/adjunct professors to be
teaching (lessons and academic classes), "coaching"/directing
(ensembles/combos), researching, composing, performing and recording?
Just attaining professional status in one of these fields would have
been more than enough for the "warrior" generation of jazz educators.
Think about one of the great musicians we like to discuss and emulate,
Lee Morgan. He picked up the trumpet at the age of 13 and is playing
with Dizzy Gillespie's band about 5 years later! And don't forget that
many "jazz" educators are also required to teach and perform classical
music in these academic positions. Speaking from personal experience,
when I was discussing doing DMA/Phd work with Ralph Bowen, he
recommended that I go for a DMA in classical saxophone performance
since he indicated it would be very difficult to attain a college
teaching position without demonstrating the ability to teach both jazz
and classical styles.
This last point illustrates, I think, one of the lingering issues in the field. Bowen is spot on from a practical standpoint, and indeed, it's hard to argue that a breadth of experience is not of enormous benefit to both players and teachers. The bigger question is why should it have to be this way? Why should a jazz musician be, in essence, forced to do this, to bow to the classical canon? I sit on lots of DMA committees and teach lots of DMA students in my classes, and I don't hear that many DMAs in trombone, trumpet or piano performance being told that they should learn some jazz (sax is a different story, but I think that has more to do with our faculty in that area). There simply is not the expectation that they need to do it. But MM students in jazz are often told, as you note, to do "classical" DMAs so they were be more marketable. (One other problem is that DMAs in jazz studies is still relatively new, and most people entering the job market don't have one...the MM is still widely considered to be a terminal jazz degree, but many jobs still require a doctorate...thus the "classical" DMA).
But back to your overall point. I do in fact think there is a lot of forward thinking research being done in jazz. Unfortunately, a lot of it is being done outside music departments. Why should this be the case? For the record, I think this is more a function of musicology than jazz studies. I'm a musicologist (actually an ethnomusicologist, if you want to get technical), and I was hired specifically to work both in musicology and jazz studies. I'm incredibly fortunate to be in this position, as it affords me the opportunity to do pretty much everything I want (jazz, American music, pop, world music). But positions like mine are really, really rare. Most jazz studies programs don't have a dedicated historian/musicologist, and jazz research is still relatively rare in American musicology. That said, people like Ingrid Monson, Steve Pond, David Ake, and Tammy Kernodle (not to mention your own professor) are doing terrific work. I also really like the work of Krin Gabbard, Sherrie Tucker, Tony Whyton, and many others who are in humanities fields (one of my colleagues here in American Studies, David Stowe, wrote a great book on swing). But I might be getting far afield here.
I'm not trying to say that faculty who teach jazz performance need to start doing historical research, but that they ought to be reconceptualizing of their own teaching. If teachers of jazz are not going to do these things, then who will? All of those activities that you mention that untenured faculty might be expected to do? The fact is, we ARE required to do most, if not all all of those things as it is, not to mention serving on University committees and doing public service (!). But I'm not really talking about taking on new research. I'm talking about thinking about different ways of teaching what we already teach, and of different ways of thinking about the music. It doesn't necessarily take new research to re-structure an improvisation curriculum to focus less on chord/scale theory and mainstream repertoire. What it takes is a change in mindset among faculty and administration that experimenting with curricula is a good thing. That's where it gets dicey for untenured faculty - experiments have the potential to fail, and who wants to take that chance to get a black mark on their teaching portfolio. At the same time, for the field to continue to develop, experimentation with teaching simply has to happen. It's the same as with music - if no one takes chances, nothing new happens. My sense is that there are a lot of people in the field who are content with the way things are. That's fine - they've paid their dues, as it were, and especially for long time faculty, why should we make them fight the same battles again?
As teachers and scholars, all of us should be constantly striving to innovate in the classroom or the studio, just as we do in performance, composition or research. It sounds cliched, I know, and maybe it's a function of one too many semesters on curriculum committees. But I see fields like music ed., musicology, theory, and composition that are constantly assessing and reinventing themselves (to say nothing of the humanities). I don't see the same in jazz studies, and that troubles me. And as I said, if faculty in jazz studies won't do this work, who will?
[On a related note, jazz historians face many of the same issues. The canon has come under constant and sustained criticism over the last 20 years, yet textbooks and teaching methods still are relatively canonical in perspective. It's hard (some might say impossible) to teach history without the canon. Nevertheless, historians are asking important questions about it, questions which have changed how we teach. These are good things that have few parallels in the teaching of improvisation curricula. It's also worth pointing out that these new perspectives on jazz history have mainly come not from traditional academic jazz studies (as it has been defined), but from musicology and the "new jazz studies," a largely interdisciplinary field.]
JOHN: For me, this discussion leads naturally into an answer to the
question of the sounds of sameness in the rising generation of jazz
musician. Considering the variety of genres, theoretical knowledge,
academic qualifications and understanding this new generation is
responsible to absorb, how can we possibly expect new voices to be
emerging in so short a time span (not to discount young "innovative"
musicians)? Maybe our expectations regarding
creative/original/innovative output should be tempered by the fact
that it takes time to absorb a diversity of influences before
something original can *hopefully* emerge. And given how much material
needs to be absorbed, maybe that gives us a way to estimate the amount
of time it takes to get to the point of the creative
artist/scholar/composer/arranger/director/administrator. That's a lot
of hats to wear!!
I absolutely agree, and I think, again, that this is one of the accommodations that we have to make as jazz educators to the institutional environment. What troubles me about the discourse of the field is that we are not able (or willing) to even try to move beyond this.
I'd add something else to this - any group of musicians in a bounded community are naturally going to gravitate towards a certain common approach. Players from Kansas City might sound a certain way, or Philly. Why should that not be the case in Denton, Texas or East Lansing, Michigan. I do think that jazz education gets tagged with this somewhat unfairly. That said, my experience as a student provided a serious wake up call on this front. It seemed that everyone's goal at UNT was to get into the top band. That, of course, makes sense, but to be in that band, you were generally expected to play a certain way. Again, there are "real world" parallels to this. What I found objectionable, and a little bit scary, was that people seemed to be listening more to recordings of the One O'Clock band than they were to Miles, Trane, Armstrong, etc. That, to me, was a reality check. And the fact is that the repertoire in most jazz programs is fairly limited, which further drives stylistic uniformity.
One of the things I really liked about Paul Berliner's book was that everybody had their own way of learning, and everybody's was a little bit different. Yes, many times people hit on the same things, but I think you see my point. Contrast that with an approach where everyone is brought through exactly the same sequence at precisely the same moment in their development, with precisely the same repertoire. Of course they are going to sound the somewhat similar.
Another issue that sometimes gets left out of these discussions is this most students start playing seriously only when they get to college (with some exceptions, of course). As you note above, Lee Morgan was playing with Dizzy at age 18. Most 18 year-olds today are just learning the basics of improvisation.
JOHN: I also think it is interesting to compare the "out of thin air"
approach of jazz musicians of the past to, for lack of a better term,
the "Coltrane work ethic approach", and how these relate to the state
of jazz education.
Let me say, for the record, that I do not subscribe to the "out of thin air" idea. Nothing operates in a vacuum, and all musicians (with maybe some really, really rare exceptions) practice and utilize theory (by "theory" I am not referring to the academic discipline...any abstracted thinking about musical structure is a type of theory). Yes, Trane was a workhorse, but people "practice" in different ways, not all involving a horn on their mouth.
JOHN: Because as we touched on in class, while jazz was a
popular music, musicians veiled their practicing behind the talk of
how it comes naturally to them. This gradually shifts during the bebop
era, with talk of practicing in the woodshed, pursuing completeness
through practicing in 12 keys and so on. Coltrane's work ethic seems
to have impacted jazz education from 1970 onwards in a profound way.
I agree with this, but I think it impacted jazz ed. in very specific ways. David Ake talks about this in his book Jazz Cultures (which I highly recommend if you've not read it). Ake argues, and I agree for the most part, that the "lesson of Coltrane" that jazz education absorbed was one of relentless practice leading to technical mastery. "Giant Steps," which is of course ubiquitous in jazz education, is essentially an etude. Ake goes on to argue (and I think he's spot on here) that we miss the "big picture" of Trane by relentlessly focusing on such works. His post-1964 works are almost never addressed in improvisation curricula or publications, and for many, this represented his peak period of creativity.
Another point - you seem to imply that as jazz becomes an "art music" (maybe that's overstating it, but that's the common paradigm of jazz's transition during bebop) that it picks up the cult of practicing/technique. That may be true, but I wouldn't so quickly dismiss the "veiling" of hard work as being simply behind popular forms as opposed to art forms. This was a major point in Henry Kingsbury's conservatory ethnography (that I discussed in my articles), that "talent" is an unknowable idea, but is still at the heart of power relations in the conservatory. The mystery of natural talent and the cult of practicing and not mutually exclusive, and I think it's still very much in force in jazz programs as well as classical ones.
JOHN:Now practicing is celebrated, even to the extent that you can hear
exercises played out in solos in solos from student musicians.
I'd suggest that these have long been present in jazz - things have always been "worked out" or "patterned." I mean, how many times does a specific Charlie Parker phrase re-occur across a number of solos?
JOHN: In
previous classes we have pointed to licks and patterns that musicians
played and practiced from Louis Armstrong forward, but I think it
demonstrates a categorical difference that within a solo a student
will play an ascending minor third chromatic pattern.
I don't disagree, but again, I'm not convinced that these things have not always been there in jazz. The difference for me is conceptual. When it's Bird or Miles playing a scalar pattern, we don't necessarily hear it that way. If it's a kid playing with his school combo, we do. Maybe that's an over-generalization, but, as they say, context matters. Of course, MIles also did lots of other things, but I think the point remains, that what we think of as theoretical constructs are probably much more common in the improvisational language that we often think they are. That doesn't mean they said "I'm going to play this scalar pattern" (or maybe they did), but the resulting pitches are the same.
JOHN: It points to a
dramatic difference in the perception of chord/scale harmony, and a
fundamentally different philosophy about what is valid in the context
of an improvisation. Again this points to the an increase in term it
takes generally to produce a creative jazz artist today.
I agree with you that this is an important distinction. Maybe the point is that the kid in the school combo ONLY plays scalar patterns, unlike Miles or Bird. There are a couple of different possibilities that are not mutually exclusive: 1) that's all he learned; 2) he's a bad player. Some students just will never move beyond this. This is a problem with criticism of jazz education - it always seems to be measured by its worst examples, whereas "real" jazz seems to be measured by its best. That doesn't mean that there were not lesser players. Paul Quinichette (did I spell that correctly) was referred to as the "Vice Prez" for his similarity to Lester Young (it was not a compliment). We don't know how many crappy jazz musicians there were in the history of the music because they're not in the history books, but I suspect there were a lot. But I digress...
I just wonder how much different it would be if we threw kids into a classroom and said "play" - let them figure out the tunes, tempos, etc. Give them some guidance now and then, but let them go at it. And let them fail. This really is the main point, isn't it. Failure, in academia, is catastrophic. It means retaking classes, delaying graduation, paying more money, having to tell your parents, social stigma, etc. We don't really afford our students the opportunity to fail. And besides, as teachers, failure reflects poorly on us, so we often pass them all anyway. But failure is such a crucial part of the learning process.What would Trane have been if Miles hadn't fired him? What would Bird have been if Papa Jo Jones hadn't almost taken his foot off with a cymbal?
Of course, curriculum does reinforce these types of ideas. I wrote in one of the articles that at UNT (when I was there - might be different now, but I don't think so), you had to pass jazz theory before you could take improv class. And you had to take a year of improv before you could do a combo. That means students were in their third year before they played in a combo! No wonder they haven't moved beyond a theoretical style - they never learned anything else (and so as not to single out UNT, this is a very common, accepted method of organizing curricula in jazz education, one that is sanctioned by NASM). This seems to me to be the complete opposite of how one should learn. That's only my opinion, of course, but I think students ought to be playing in combos from day one. Theory should follow practice, not the other way around. Maybe a reorientation of this idea would alleviate some of what you talk about above.
So this is where I come back to my core critique of jazz education. These types of curricula make a lot of sense institutionally. They are easy to sequence and schedule, to assess, to design and to replicate in subsequent terms. And for some students, undoubtedly, they work, as there are some wonderful musicians coming out of these programs. But it's a one-size-fits-all approach to something that I think is inherently at odds with such an approach. Where I really criticize the field is in the assumption that we CAN'T do things differently. We've been around long enough that our position is secure. The administration is not going to cut our funding if we shake up our curriculum a bit. We're well past the "foot in the door" stage. We came into the academy roughly around the same time as ethnomusicology - ethno is now a radically different field than it was 40+ years ago. Why shouldn't jazz studies be as well, particularly in light of the developments in the music since that time? Our age is starting to show...
JOHN:I also want
to distinguish this from current artists in the genre who might use
this concept with articulation/dynamics to create a valid musical
idea, because I am not necessarily criticizing the approach, just
commenting on the fact that the way we practice and the material we
use in improvisation has changed over time.
Good point - The way we practice does change. If that's true, then, why can't the way we teach or organize curricula change as well.
I want to thank you for your very thoughtful and very thorough questions. These kinds of debates are important, and frankly, they're a lot of fun too! this is what scholarship is supposed to be.
Best,
Ken
--
Ken Prouty, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Musicology and Jazz Studies
Michigan State University
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