In last Friday's (Hebrew) edition of the magazine section of Haaretz, Doron Halutz interviewed Eitan Y. Wilf, a lecturer in anthropology at the Hebrew University, about his book, School for Cool, which is about the supposed dilemma of teaching jazz in conservatories. I say "supposed" dilemma, because I don't think it's very different from teaching painting, drama, creative writing, or cinema in academic programs. Mastery of all these creative arts was once acquired informally, by apprenticeship, and, by making academic disciplines of them, they have become bureaucratized and standardized. It is claimed that the graduates of jazz programs in conservatories all play pretty much the same way, and they are not as creative as the musicians of earlier generations, who learned by acquiring mentors, by taking the risk of playing in jam sessions, by getting jobs in semi-professional bands and moving up to better and better ensembles.
I'm suspicious of that claim because there were thousands of professional musicians in bands during the 1920s and 1930s, and most of them were fairly unmemorable. The great musicians, who played in famous bands, were the best of the best, and it's not to be expected that jazz programs at conservatories should turn out dozens of players like Bud Powell, Clifford Brown, or Lester Young. The jazz scene only turned out one of each.
Still, there is a connection between what is taught and the way it is taught. Jazz today is not what it was fifty years ago, because, as Wilf mentioned in the interview, though the interviewer didn't pick up on it, it is no longer played in night clubs by black male heroin addicts and white male heroin addicts who aspired to be black (to put it overly bluntly).
Incidentally, in his book, The Birth of Bebop, Scott DeVeaux points out that for black Americans, a career in music was a step up in the socio-economic ladder from the jobs then available to black males, whereas for white musicians, it was either a step down or a step to the side, into Bohemia.
If a young person wants to learn how to play jazz today, he or she can't hang around clubs where jazz is played and listen and try to squeeze in, because there are very few clubs where jazz is played. Aspiring musicians congregate in conservatories today, and that's where they learn from each other and from older musicians.
I had the good fortune to study music informally with Arnie Lawrence, one of the last musicians who learned his art the old way, from mentors, and from brashly taking the risk of playing wherever and whenever he could. Arnie tried very hard to create a jazz scene in New York, where he was among the founders of the jazz program at the New School, one of the institutions that Wilf studied. But jazz just doesn't have the commercial appeal needed for a "scene."
Incidentally (again) I kind of wonder why the thousands of young musicians who have learned to play jazz in the past twenty or thirty years, because they loved the music, haven't managed to create a commercial basis for the music.
There's still a lot of interest in jazz, and a lot of musicians still love to play it, which is a guarantee of its survival. Today jazz is an international music and, in a sense, a classical music. In part that's because it's become academic, and in part it's because of the efforts of musicians like Duke Ellington and the Modern Jazz Quartet, who wanted to take jazz out of the world of night clubs and situate it in concert halls, to make it "respectable."
I'm suspicious of that claim because there were thousands of professional musicians in bands during the 1920s and 1930s, and most of them were fairly unmemorable. The great musicians, who played in famous bands, were the best of the best, and it's not to be expected that jazz programs at conservatories should turn out dozens of players like Bud Powell, Clifford Brown, or Lester Young. The jazz scene only turned out one of each.
Still, there is a connection between what is taught and the way it is taught. Jazz today is not what it was fifty years ago, because, as Wilf mentioned in the interview, though the interviewer didn't pick up on it, it is no longer played in night clubs by black male heroin addicts and white male heroin addicts who aspired to be black (to put it overly bluntly).
Incidentally, in his book, The Birth of Bebop, Scott DeVeaux points out that for black Americans, a career in music was a step up in the socio-economic ladder from the jobs then available to black males, whereas for white musicians, it was either a step down or a step to the side, into Bohemia.
If a young person wants to learn how to play jazz today, he or she can't hang around clubs where jazz is played and listen and try to squeeze in, because there are very few clubs where jazz is played. Aspiring musicians congregate in conservatories today, and that's where they learn from each other and from older musicians.
I had the good fortune to study music informally with Arnie Lawrence, one of the last musicians who learned his art the old way, from mentors, and from brashly taking the risk of playing wherever and whenever he could. Arnie tried very hard to create a jazz scene in New York, where he was among the founders of the jazz program at the New School, one of the institutions that Wilf studied. But jazz just doesn't have the commercial appeal needed for a "scene."
Incidentally (again) I kind of wonder why the thousands of young musicians who have learned to play jazz in the past twenty or thirty years, because they loved the music, haven't managed to create a commercial basis for the music.
There's still a lot of interest in jazz, and a lot of musicians still love to play it, which is a guarantee of its survival. Today jazz is an international music and, in a sense, a classical music. In part that's because it's become academic, and in part it's because of the efforts of musicians like Duke Ellington and the Modern Jazz Quartet, who wanted to take jazz out of the world of night clubs and situate it in concert halls, to make it "respectable."
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