Jazz Is Alive and Well. In the Classroom, Anyway.

NYTimes
January 7, 2007
Jazz Is Alive and Well. In the Classroom, Anyway.
By NATE CHINEN

IF you happen to stop by the Hilton New York or Sheraton New York during the latter half of this week, you’ll be about as close as possible to the global epicenter of jazz. That’s because both hotels are playing host to the 34th annual conference of the International Association for Jazz Education, which is expected to attract more than 8,000 registered attendees from 45 countries: students and teachers, promoters and producers, and musicians of every tier of accomplishment.

Wandering the overcrowded ballroom levels of either hotel, or through a 75,000-square-foot expo hall, you might draw a simple conclusion: Jazz is booming. And you would be right, in one sense. “I don’t have empirical data,” said Bill McFarlin, the executive director of the association, “but I would have to guess that the jazz education industry has quadrupled in the last 20 years.”

Yet the conference also offers workshops like “Jazz Radio in Crisis: Why That’s a Good Thing.” The panic in that title, and the strained attempt at reassurance, are emblematic: while jazz education is thriving, the business of jazz itself, as measured by things like market share and album sales, has been in a tailspin.

Fifty years ago those fortunes were reversed. Jazz, like any folk music, was imparted from mentor to pupil, or forged through trial and error. For many of those making it, the most valuable lessons came not in the classroom but on the bandstand. That was true even of artists who received some higher education, like Miles Davis, who matriculated (but did not linger) at Juilliard. The music’s instructional methods were rigorous but not yet codified.

Today’s aspiring player has a choice of school programs, method and theory books, videos and transcriptions. “I can recall back in the early ’60s, when it was sort of taboo for jazz to be presented in the classroom,” said Greg Carroll, the jazz education association’s director of education. “Now it’s unusual if a music program does not have a jazz program embedded within it.” This profusion of information may be a mixed blessing. “You can learn every Coltrane solo there is without ever listening to a record,” the saxophonist Bill Pierce said recently in his office at the Berklee College of Music, where he is the chairman of the woodwind department. “I’m not saying that’s a good thing. But it’s there. The musicianship, on a purely technical level, is accessible to anyone who wants to pursue it.”

With its clinics, performances, ceremonies and panels, the conference is where the disconnect between jazz education and the performance and business of jazz comes into starkest relief. Still, the event illuminates how profoundly jazz education has come to influence the aesthetics and mechanics of the music. Though separate, the two worlds are symbiotic, and the big question is this: How can one be so anemic when the other is so robust?

If the mass commercialization of jazz instruction has a decisive moment, it would probably be the arrival in 1967 of a play-along album and guidebook called “How to Play Jazz and Improvise.” The recording featured a rhythm section only, leaving room for anyone to fill in the blanks. Though not the first effort of its kind — a company called Music Minus One was already in business — it was quickly the most successful, and influential.

Jamey Aebersold, the man behind “How to Play Jazz,” was no stranger to formal study, having received a master’s degree in saxophone from Indiana University, one of the few colleges in the country with a jazz department at the time. He originally conceived of his target audience as hobbyists playing at home.

“Until I got up to about Volume 25 or so, I wasn’t thinking this was going to be a foundation for jazz education,” Mr. Aebersold said recently from his home in Indiana. But he acknowledged that the Aebersolds, as his play-along kits are now widely known, have become a regular part of jazz’s training arc. “If they haven’t heard of me, they’re probably not doing jazz,” he said, sounding not boastful but matter-of-fact. The series is now up to Volume 118.

High school students especially take advantage of play-along materials; for most young players it’s the best option they have. That’s partly because improvisation is not the focus of their training, even among the increasing number of secondary schools with serious jazz programs. For hands-on solo training, many students turn instead to extracurricular experiences like the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop or the Stanford Jazz Workshop, which have both been around for more than 30 years.

Big bands, relatively rare on the performance circuit, are still the focus of high school jazz education. This explains the continuing success of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition. And it explains the unusual prominence of Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, whose leader makes his original charts available to band directors.

“We’re like rock stars to these kids,” said Mr. Goodwin, who in the grown-up jazz world is known mainly as an accomplished studio professional. “It’s kind of a crackup.” At the jazz education conference, he will be promoting the first Big Phat Summer Camp, which won’t have enough openings to meet the demand.

So far the legions of high school band students haven’t produced armies of jazz consumers. That’s partly a standard retention problem; consider how many drama club members actually go on to become avid theatergoers. And not every member of a high school jazz ensemble is a true jazz fan to begin with. “When you look at the choices high school students have in general music education today,” Mr. Carroll said, “the menu doesn’t read, ‘Classical, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Rock.’ You mainly see classical music and jazz. I think one reason jazz is so popular in schools today is that it’s the closest style of music to what they listen to outside the school arena.”

On the other hand record sales may be a flawed measure of jazz’s popularity. More and more jazz albums these days are self-produced or released on independent or European labels. Those albums — many sold in person, at concerts and clinics — can slip under the radar of Nielsen SoundScan or the Recording Industry Association of America, which have reported a downward turn in jazz sales even worse than the general decline. There are almost certainly more jazz consumers than the data indicate.

Stroll through the closed environment of the conference, and the statistics come to seem irrelevant. The students in attendance make it almost impossible to get inside the door of some major ballroom performances. They pack many instrumental clinics as well, hanging on to every word. One gets a strong sense that jazz is something they’ll find a way to support, if not pursue.

At the higher levels the infrastructure for training professional jazz musicians is clearly working. Every year there are more supremely skilled players with university degrees and strong, sophisticated ideas. For almost every prominent under-40 artist, you could name an affiliated program, from the pianist Brad Mehldau (the New School) to the saxophonist Miguel Zenón (Berklee). For musicians now in their 20s the ratio is even more extreme. By most measures the age of the autodidact is over.

When that trend started in the 1970s and ’80s, a common complaint arose: too many musicians sounded as if they were hatched in a practice room. The problem with institutionalized jazz education, the argument went, was that it fostered bland homogenization and oblivious self-absorption. And the idea held at least a kernel of truth.

“It was the Me Generation,” said the trombonist and Berklee educator Hal Crook, characterizing a succession of students obsessed with running harmonic gantlets and indulging in empty feats of technique. “Now it’s more of an Us thing, where the focus is on more interaction, communication on the bandstand, continuity in the solos. Audiences have fallen away from jazz in the past because it’s gotten away from that.”

At Berklee, in Boston, one recent Friday Mr. Crook led a student ensemble in a classroom session that felt a lot like a rehearsal. The students got a piece of music and a conceptual objective, and Mr. Crook guided them through it, stopping now and then to issue a pithy critique. For the most part his comments had more to do with the collective concentration of the ensemble than the particulars of any single player.

Mr. Crook was basically behaving more like a mentor than a professor, filling a niche of jazz instruction once upheld by bandleaders like Art Blakey and Betty Carter. And in that regard, he is not alone. “The apprenticeship model doesn’t exist in the way that it once did,” said Mr. Pierce of Berklee, a Blakey alumnus. “So it’s being incubated in institutions.”

The august New England Conservatory is part of that movement, and so is the five-year-old Juilliard Institute for Jazz Studies, which benefits from a partnership with Jazz at Lincoln Center. At the University of Southern California, the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance admits only enough students to populate a small combo, which is advised by that program’s artistic director, the trumpeter Terence Blanchard. And the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, which has a network of hundreds of private lesson instructors, consciously upholds what its executive director, Martin Mueller, recently described as a “tradition of the practitioner as educator.”

It’s no wonder that the most serious high school musicians pay close attention to the faculty at college music programs. “That’s my highest priority, who’s the faculty there,” the pianist Zachary Clarke, a senior at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, said in the school library on a recent afternoon.

Because of their talent and their training, students at that school rank among the nation’s elite young players. “I’d like to be signed to Blue Note,” said the guitarist William Donovan, another senior, when prompted for a blue-sky aspiration. “I know I have more of a chance of getting electrocuted by lightning,” he quickly added. One week earlier Mr. Donovan had seen a clinic by the pianist Robert Glasper, a graduate of the school and a recent addition to the Blue Note roster. Another alumnus, the pianist Jason Moran, has recorded seven albums for the label.

Mr. Donovan was not far off the mark, but an increasing number of bright young musicians are preparing to defy the odds.

“There’s an interesting phenomenon happening,” said Roger H. Brown, the president of Berklee, “which is that some of our hottest players are majoring in music business, or production and engineering. They believe they are going to have good careers, though they’re entering a world where there’s no superstructure to take care of your needs.”

The place where musicians find increasing opportunities, not surprisingly, is within educational institutions, which often means a better quality of instruction. Accomplished musicians like the pianist Kenny Barron and the saxophonist David Liebman (both faculty members at the Manhattan School of Music) have gracefully balanced education and performance. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, Wynton Marsalis is a teacher as well as a player, sometimes even in the context of his own band.

And the instructional efforts of working jazz musicians, through the model established by Mr. Aebersold, can have a positive impact well beyond the academy. “I’ve got about eight books out on jazz education, and they’re all doing great,” Mr. Crook said. “They’re doing better than I’m doing,” he added, laughing.

What remains to be seen is whether the rise of jazz education can cultivate new audiences for the music. Some institutions, notably Jazz at Lincoln Center, are not taking any chances; the organization’s education department encompasses an ambitious array of jazz-appreciation initiatives, starting at the preschool level.

N.E.A. Jazz in the Schools, an outreach administered by the National Endowment for the Arts and produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center, reached an estimated four million students last year. “This could be an enormously powerful force in terms of audience development,” the endowment’s chairman, Dana Gioia, said of the program, a Web-based high school curriculum designed to run as a weeklong lesson during Black History Month. “The training of musicians is only one half of the necessary support for a thriving jazz culture.”

Of course, exposure to jazz doesn’t ensure an embrace of it; the biggest onus is on the artists who maintain the state of the art. “We have incredibly talented young folks out here now, but they have to create a market for themselves,” said the saxophonist Jimmy Heath, who retired from full-time teaching at Queens College not quite a decade ago and was named an N.E.A. Jazz Master in 2003.

However counterintuitive it sounds, local action may be the best hope for the revitalization of the music’s audience. Thanks to these educational programs, jazz now exists in college towns and isolated high schools where no club scene has ever thrived. The implosion of the monolithic music industry has little effect on that network. In that sense, jazz has a shot at becoming a folk music again.

“What I’m hoping for the future of the music,” Mr. Pierce said, “is that the students who come to these schools go back to their communities, create their own scenes and develop their own audiences so the music can come back to some level, as it maybe once was. When you multiply all these individuals and all these institutions, maybe that can happen.”

It may already have started. “These kids coming out of high school are more advanced than they ever were before,” said Mr. Crook, “and it’s because of the people teaching them, graduates of programs like this one. They’re bringing it back to the culture.”

In that sense, the International Association for Jazz Education conference might be understood not as a collision of worlds but as a gathering of the tribes. And the most important thing that happens there isn’t a clinic or show or ceremony, or a negotiation on the expo floor. It’s what happens after, when the various jazz constituencies pack up their stuff and head home.