S/D: Pedagogical Approaches

Not really answering the question, but - is 'jazz education' a giant scam? How can they tell what 'modes' someone was using, because any combination of notes can fit into several different scales so who knows what the player had in mind? A lot of it seems 'ex post facto' to me.

Again not really answering the question, but I think jazz education is a huge scam. It generally ignores the last forty years of jazz, but we'll leave aside that rather important point for now-- high school/ university "jazz education" isn't even very good for teaching kids how to play like Charlie Parker. It relies on Western-style notation, which can only approximate the pitches and rhythms played in jazz. You can go through several years of jazz education at a high school and even some universities without EVER having to improvise. (I've seen it.) Also, your teacher will probably be some aging white dude who maybe toured with Maynard Ferguson once. Jazz education in the schools is about as far as you can get from the culture that originally inspired the players these kids aspire to emulate.

True, but there is NO way any contemporary players could have any experiences in common with the 'original players', in fact a lot of the 'original players' experiences differed from each other. I would hope that this would be a given. Anyway, I see the function of jazz education to 'cull' players - the ones who elude the nets of the canon (difficult in a school setting) go on to become worthwhile to listen to. It's like the final obstacle.

Charlie, Dave, do you yourselves play jazz at all?

I could definitely see how some jazz education could be a "scam", but not in my experience. Although my professor is definitely considered an "original player", I've seen younger players/teachers who work in similar ways. The best method seems to be a primarily non-technical one, at least after a point.

Students can learn a good deal of the harmony/scales/technique of their instrument in other teaching contexts or on their own, but the most valuable things I've seen taught in a classroom had to do with group interaction, playing things that make sense/emote/are at the right moment, etc...things that older players know that would have been taught on the bandstand fifty years ago.

Also, a lot of the professional players that I've encountered seem to take a similar approach of saying things that may not seem incredibly useful at the time but allow you to figure things out in your own way, rather than teaching something dogmatically.

Phil - depends on what you consider 'jazz'. Some people say I do and others not, and I don't know if either are being complimentary or snide. I know scales and whatnot if that's what you mean.

To answer the actual question, by the way:

Taking classes: my initial middle-school band experiences were pretty traditional, and worked just fine. They got me familiar enough with the basic principles to get me started. From then on, even through college, I've been more "guided" than "taught", in that most of what I've learned I have, to some extent, taught myself, and the role of my teachers has often most effectively been one of putting me in the right place at the right time, rather than dictating information to me. (In other words, having been given a hint of something, I sought out the whole story on my own.) That being said, my understanding of certain other things -- counterpoint, for instance -- owes a tremendous amount to precise, detailed, and inspired instruction by certain of my professors. And the tutorials I took in composition were at their best when my professor treated my work as a living entity, to be grappled with and turned inside-out and so forth; this approach helped me break through a block I'd been having, and if I ever teach composition (which I've done a tiny bit) it's an approach I intend to use myself.

Teaching classes: when I taught and assisted in counterpoint classes, I emulated the way it was taught to me -- with a strong regard for the rules, but with an emphasis on musicality as well. The professor with whom I studied the most in college teaches in a free-association style that is very effective, and that, having seen how well it works, I feel comfortable emulating. When I taught other subjects, like ear training/dictation and (the equivalent of) Music 101, my strategy was usually to give my students the kind of building blocks that they'd need in order to have the same flashes of insight that marked my own advances in my studies. The idea was to point out a particular pattern or relationship, and let them realize its extent -- so, for instance, grappling with interval naming is a lot easier if you just realize you can literally count the letters. The other key, I found, was to closely monitor them to get a sense of what was clicking and what wasn't, rather than to proceed with a carefully-defined lesson plan. Having the luxury of reasonably small (under 12 people) classes allowed me to target particular people's strengths or weaknesses -- for instance, when teaching intervals I could use a vocal student's Webern piece that she was working on as a text: we'd go through it, note by note, identify the intervals, and each area of knowledge (knowing the piece vs. knowing intervals) would reinforce the other, AND the class would develop a sense of connection to a piece of music that would otherwise have been opaque to them, so that when they hear the piece in concert, they get the pleasure of recognition and, hopefully, the ability to hear it as a complete musical thought, having familiarized themselves with its parts...

Phew. I don't have time for this, but here's a first salvo, anyway. I loved teaching, it was great and I had eager students. I hope to do it again soon, when I go to grad school.

Jordan: for me, it's often been about being show individual things that are neat, but isolated, in themselves, but that eventually knit together into a larger understanding that is indeed largely technical, but is difficult to name. I remember the first time I saw/heard an augmented seventh chord named and in isolation, and thought to myself, "Ick, who would ever want to use that [as a normative sonority]?" Then I heard a Coltrane tune that used a Bb+7 as a passing chord, and I realized on some level that it was an elaboration of the V / I relationship, and was able little by little to hear it differently.

Part of why I've always thought that elementary music education ought to focus on jazz is that so many of those connections become intuitive, whereas a lot of the classical musicians (especially composers) I've known beat their heads against the wall about things that are obvious to anybody who's played more than a little jazz. Especially strong in good jazz players is what my professor called the "double-entendre" of tonal harmony -- that being that harmonic relationships that create tension usually involve a note having two functions at once, especially in modulatory passages, but I think the idea is even more far-reaching than that. The notion of something being "two things at once" is a very crucial one, I think, in improvisation -- and one that I, for instance, didn't grasp when I thought that I was only "allowed" to play notes in D Dorian when improvising over the A-section of "So What".

Phil-- I played jazz guitar pretty seriously in high school, then sort of stopped in college. But I've arranged for jazz band since then, and am close to a lot of people in my school's big band. Admittedly, it's a liberal arts college, not a conservatory, so of course experiences there may be different, although I've heard a lot of the same stories from friends who've studied jazz at conservatories. In high school, the teachers I had were conscientious, and I think I learned a lot from them about performing. But I'm not sure I learned a lot about jazz, at least not the important stuff. Phil, Jordan, I'm glad your experiences were better.

Dave:

"True, but there is NO way any contemporary players could have any experiences in common with the 'original players', in fact a lot of the 'original players' experiences differed from each other. I would hope that this would be a given."

Absolutely! That's the problem! In my experience-- and I know I'm not alone in this experience-- jazz educators want to teach you to sound exactly like, or very similar to, the "original players". But Parker, Dizzy etc. played what they played because of the culture that surrounded them, and our culture, especially the culture of the university, is just totally different. Unlike, say, classical performance, where Beethoven writes down many of the most important details of the music and the university musician is simply trying to play it back in the most pleasing/ historically appropriate way possible, jazz depends heavily on improvised individual playing. The job of "jazz education" ought to be to develop unique and original voices, and in my experience, it really doesn't do that. Jazz is by its very nature a living art form (big ass cliche yeah yeah), but the university seeks to make it an artifact.

"Anyway, I see the function of jazz education to 'cull' players - the ones who elude the nets of the canon..."

As you say, Dave, that's really hard to do, especially since the universities (and critics, probably) are the ones building the nets.

'especially since the universities (and critics, probably) are the ones building the nets'

Exactly. No point if there's no struggle involved on the artist's part.

Charlie, Dave, I agree with you to an extent (especially that the purpose of jazz education should be to aid in the development of one's own voice), but I think that at its best, the university system is the modern version of the mentoring system that earlier generations of players used to develop. It's become necessary to institutionalize it because of the modern music scene, possibly, but I think it can still be effective.

Phil: Interesting thoughts all...I think that was what I was trying to get at to some extent, the imparting of information/ideas that might not be readily useful, but that will be important later in your development when you can contextualize them.