Jazz Education on trial....

by Minim Pro @ 2010-09-27 – 10:54:42

The Case For The Defence
- as made by PlayJazz QC (Quite Contrary)
To play jazz well, to improvise fluently and expressively, a musician must be in total command of his instrument and be able to express the ideas that spring from his musical mind. A lack of technique or facility can force the player to make compromises he didn't really intend; he can be hamstrung by his own technical deficiencies.

It stands to reason that if you can't play the lines you intend to, you will not be capable of communicating effectively with the listener and expressing yourself fully.
This is where jazz education comes in. There are no great names in jazz (like there may be in pop and rock music) who had a rudimentary command of their instruments and a basic knowledge of how the music is put together - this music is too technically demanding for such players to be able to express themselves.

Without developing the theoretical knowledge and instrumental facility to cope with the technical demands of the music, it is impossible to play jazz. It is often quoted that Errol Garner couldn't read music. Maybe not, but I guarantee you he knew what notes would sound consonant or dissonant against a Bb7 chord. This is what jazz education is for.

Jazz education can help emerging players to develop better command of their instruments, a better understanding of the history and structure of the music and provide them with all the tools they need to go forward and put their own stamp on the jazz world. Additionally, it provides a place for musicians to live in a close-knit community with other musicians where they can practice together and learn from each other.

Having said all that, the charges levelled against jazz education are not random nor imagined. There are jazz musicians out there who, whilst great technicians, are failing to connect with many listeners, who value complexity for its own sake and whose musical raison d'etre seems to be to play dissonant angular 16ths note lines in 13/8 at 300bpm without expressing anything.

I'm sure the members of the jury will be personally familiar enough with this phenomenon to preclude me from having to name names.
Furthermore, many of these musicians are currently in, or have recently been through formal jazz education. Nevertheless, I think holding jazz education responsible for a lack of creativity on the part of its students is implying a causality that does not exist.

Is it to be assumed that the kind of musician described above, deprived of his formal education would have gone on to become the next Miles Davis or John Coltrane? Did they possess an innate genius and expressivity that jazz education has somehow eradicated or suppressed?

It must be said that there is an implicit danger, in any genre, that those who study the mechanics of music to a high level are more vulnerable to turning playing into an academic pursuit or a highly skilled craft rather than an art.

This is probably because they concentrate so much on what is idiomatically and stylistically 'correct' that innovation is more difficult. After all, innovation usually comes from breaking away from stylistic conventions - in other words 'doing it wrong'!

However, there is no reason why formal education HAS to cause this kind of paralysis by analysis and I think it's more the case that many players are either incapable or unwilling to depart from the accepted conventions.

I suspect this has long been the case. In the bebop era, for every Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Dizzy Gillespie, there were probably hundreds of boring journeymen copying the stylistic conventions of their music and bringing little or nothing of themselves to it.

The fact is that these days, only the great players and communicators from that era are overly familiar to us and it's easy to fool ourselves into believing that there weren't as many vacuous clones and overtly technical stylists as we see around us today. If Jazz Education is guilty of a crime at all, then perhaps it is guilty in presenting the way that things have been done as the way that things must be done: that there are two ways of approaching jazz improvisation the right way and the wrong way.

Nevertheless, as with all art, it is the artist who must ultimately be held responsible for the art he produces. The nature/nurture argument concerning human development is an old one and it is not for me to say whether artists are born or made. However, it is hard for me to imagine that had Miles Davis stayed at Juilliard for example, his career would have been one filled with derivative and unoriginal music.

Could it not be argued that even if there is an approach to jazz taken by students of jazz colleges that is overly technical and more concerned with the desire to impress and show off ability than to facilitate artistic communication, that has more to do with mere precociousness and being surrounded by other musicians than something inherently flawed in the notion of formal jazz education?

In other words, if there are jazz students producing music for other jazz students, doesn't that have more to do with the students themselves?
The purpose of jazz education is to equip a student with the knowledge, facility and understanding to take his music-making in any direction he chooses; to provide a solid technical foundation for his future musical and artistic development; to give him the tools he needs to express whatever it is that he has to say.

Should it turn out in the end that he has nothing to say, it cannot and should not be assumed that is a direct result of his schooling. Finally, finding an original voice and developing your own style is hard and takes time. Trane was 33 when he joined the Miles Davis Quintet and only really at the beginning of working out the approach that would influence a whole generation of players to follow him.

It is as unreasonable and unrealistic to expect students at jazz colleges in their teens and twenties to be producing great music as it is to expect any great artist in any field to be fully formed at such a young age. This doesn't mean that there is no value in formal education, nor does it mean that it will somehow prohibit individuality in a musician's development over the course of a lifetime of music-making.

Formal jazz education as a concept itself is still really in its infancy. Perhaps in a few decades or so we can judge its value to the art form in a more objective and reasonable manner. In closing, I hope I will be forgiven for paraphrasing an old standard when I say 'don't blame it on their heart, blame it on their youth'.
Just don't blame it on their school.
The defence rests.

From: http://playjazz.blog.co.uk/2010/09/27/jazz-education-on-trial-9471135/