Lost From Club to Classroom

Jazz drummer Art Blakey’s bands were often referred to by musicians--affectionately--as “the University of Art” and “the School of Swing.” Steaming caldrons of on-the-job training, they served as musical incubators for a range of talent stretching from Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard and Jackie McLean to Keith Jarrett, Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard.

Blakey was primarily active from the mid-’50s to the late ‘80s. But his methodology was a reflection of a learning curve that reached back to the earliest days of jazz, when education was an oral, and aural, process in which mentorship played a crucial role. Players learned from listening, modeling and imitating; they tested themselves in the trenches, often supported by older, established artists, occasionally risking their ire. (One of the most famous, perhaps apocryphal, jazz stories describes an incident when a young Charlie Parker, sitting in with some established seniors, had to duck a flying cymbal, hurled at him by veteran drummer “Papa” Jo Jones as a commentary on the quality of his alto saxophone playing.)

It was a tough way to learn, but it obviously worked. Consider that virtually all the great iconic figures of jazz--from Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong to Miles Davis and John Coltrane--honed their craft without the benefit of extended academic training. Yet no one would question either the richness or the magnitude of their contributions to the art.

During the past half century or so, however, an academic approach to the music has gradually become far more prominent. Starting slowly as early as the ‘40s, with Len Bowden’s pioneering training activities for African American servicemen at the Great Lakes Naval Station, educational efforts gradually surfaced in institutions such as North Texas State University, the Berklee College of Music in Boston and Los Angeles City College, which were among the first institutions to offer accredited jazz courses.

The process escalated during the next few decades via summer band camps and an expansion of programs reaching from the junior high school level into postgraduate college work. By the end of the century, there were hundreds of thousands of youth ensembles ranging from big bands to small combos. And the activities were not limited to the United States.

Saturday night, the International Assn. of Jazz Educators concluded its 29th annual conference in Long Beach, with more than 7,000 attendees from 35 countries.

What does all this academic jazz activity mean? Is the music being more widely heard? Has it become a more significant presence in the marketplace? Is there evidence of the emergence of more iconic figures along the lines of Armstrong, Parker and Coltrane?

The answer, unfortunately, is a qualified “no” on all counts.

On radio, jazz is still heard almost exclusively on university and public stations. With the exception of smooth jazz, that is, which most observers in mainstream jazz view as instrumental pop. Nor has jazz gained a larger portion of the CD market, continuing to occupy a niche similar to that of classical music.

It doesn’t take a jazz critic to note that iconic figures have lately been in short supply. Yes, it’s true Wynton Marsalis is the jazz celebrity of choice. And with good reason, because his work with Lincoln Center and his own prolific compositions have considerably enhanced the music’s visibility. But for all his skills as a composer and his fluent ability to cross over to classical music, he would probably be the first to acknowledge that as an improvising jazz player, he has not established himself as an influential figure.

So what about all this jazz education? What is it actually doing for the music--and for the players?

“I think, at the very least, that we’re creating a larger, more musically aware listening audience,” says Dr. Ronald McCurdy, president of the jazz educators group and a faculty member at USC’s Thornton School of Music. “Many of the kids in these programs will not have ... professional careers in jazz, but they’ll be aware and appreciative of the music.”

That’s all to the good, obviously. Toward that end, the four days and nights of the educators’ conference illustrated the extraordinary range of musical experiences being offered in educational settings: clinics in composing, arranging and improvisation; clinics focusing on individual instruments, vocalists and rhythm sections; professional and industry panels discussing every aspect of the business of jazz; and teacher training.

Add to that four evenings of performances by such world-class jazz artists as Dave Brubeck, Greg Osby, Gary Burton, Al Dimeola, among many others, and the role of jazz education as the foundation for the creation of a wider, more sophisticated listening audience becomes clear.

But it still doesn’t answer the question of what has been lost in the shift from the on-the-job, mentored learning process to the classroom teaching model.

Although every musician has to step out of academia and onto a stage to confront the realities of performance, the music that emerges at that point is going to be colored, inevitably, by the life experience that supports it. If there has been anything consistently noticeable about players who are the product of the jazz-in-the-schoolroom era, it is that their playing is more admirable for its technical virtuosity than its emotion.

Historically, jazz--like all types of American popular music--has been galvanized by a continuing flow of life experience and creative energy from young African American artists. As rock, soul and rhythm & blues became commercially viable musical forms, it was almost inevitable that they would attract talent that might otherwise have moved into jazz. The increasing success of such subsequent forms as rap and hip-hop in the ‘80s and ‘90s drew even more potentially vital creative energy from jazz.

Academia is not likely to draw that talent back to jazz. Nor is the classroom likely to produce the sort of untrained but spontaneously, explosively creative ideas that have driven jazz into ever more revelatory areas of expression.

Nonetheless, McCurdy is right in his belief that a growing audience of listeners familiar with the process of making jazz is good for the music. In addition, he is correct in his belief, as many studies affirm, that the presence of this music has distinctly positive social consequences. And the educators group is right on target with its efforts to expand those benefits--despite unfortunate government cutbacks dating to the early ‘80s--into every area of education.

But the essential dilemma of jazz as an art poised on the razor’s edge between art and commerce remains. It may be that fact alone that makes it so difficult to assess the real value of academic education to the creative process.

Jazz would surely benefit from a more realistic appraisal of its significance as America’s true classical music. The sort of support provided to European concert music--and the kind Marsalis has established for jazz at Lincoln Center--would help move the music into the position it deserves within American cultural life. That positioning would integrate well with the work being done by the many dedicated jazz educators around the country (and the world).

But it would be a shame if jazz, by separating itself too sharply from its roots in the turbulent currents of American urban society, were to become--as contemporary classical music largely has--a child of polished academia.

A musician friend once told me, after performing in a concert theater, “It was cool, man, but--and I hate to say it--I kind of missed being in a club, with all the talking and the back and forth with the crowd. Playing to all those people sitting politely in their seats just didn’t get me going.”

So let’s have the International Assn. of Jazz Educators, the jazz instructional courses, the play-along records and the video demonstration tapes. They have their place. But let’s not lose the Art Blakey-style, on-the-job-training bands and the in-the-trenches, feel-free-to-take-a-chance gigs. For jazz to continue to be what it can be, it needs both the polish and the grit, the virtuosity and the emotion, the order and the chaos.

*

Don Heckman writes frequently about jazz for The Times.