Waxing & musings. Are music educators largely to blame for jazz's slipping popularity and taste level? I don't know the answer to that question, since I haven't done much research on the topic nor have I read any studies. But consider the following distressing e-mail that arrived last week from a music major at a rather prestigious university in New York with a world-class jazz program:
"I've been reading your blog
every day and enjoying each post. Anyway,
I've been thinking a lot about what you wrote on taste, and for what it's worth, your points really reflect a lot of the frustrations
I've been having with many of my fellow students in school here.
"Most of
them love playing outside of the chord changes, but they have a hard time or
barely can play inside them convincingly. They tell me they love
the 'freedom' of not playing inside the changes. But to me, not only
does what they're playing not sound good, there's nothing really 'freeing' if they
can't play inside the changes in the first place.
"I don't mean to
sound cynical, but it's what I've been noticing ever since arriving on campus. I can't tell you how many students majoring in
jazz piano either don't recognize the name Erroll Garner or haven't
bothered checking him out.
"I remember my first day of classical
music theory class freshman year. My professor asked me who my favorite
jazz pianist was. 'Oscar Peterson,' I told him. He smirked and asked, 'Are you kidding? He's way too old. I'm more of a Cecil Taylor type.'
"Being my first day of college, that was my first exposure to jazz
education in New York. It was a little discouraging, but things picked
up and I found my way, and luckily stayed on my path.
"I often get the
feeling that many of the college teachers assume that all jazz students
today want to come out of school sounding as modern as possible. A teacher here
once said to me, 'Red Garland and Wynton Kelly are great. Next you'll get
into Cedar Walton, and then you'll get into Chick Corea.' Why are Garland and Kelly viewed by some professors as some sort of low-level entry points to jazz?
"While many of my
teachers display great emotion in their playing, emotion and taste are rarely discussed as part of the curriculum. And other students never bring it up. I sometimes get
the feeling that discussing emotion with them is almost wimpy or
something.
"What's more, students prefer to listen
to music by going to concerts they find 'interesting' rather than those featuring more emotional traditional jazz players or listening hard to earlier recordings rich with emotion. It's really ridiculous because emotion is
why people enjoy the music in the first place!
"For what it's worth, I totally agree with you on the taste issue. I can credit my teachers for showing me how to play. But I
can only credit the things I've heard for teaching me how to be tasteful. I
totally agree with you that the development of taste can only be
obtained through listening to those with taste and making your own
decisions from there.
"It's obvious that taste can't be taught. Ultimately, it's the player's
choice to decide what to take from tasteful playing. While
taste may be a touchy subject for many young musicians, I think emotion
is another issue that's too often ignored as a discipline. It's
sad because no one wants to hear music that's just 'interesting.' And
even though emotion may be as difficult to teach as taste, it is an
aspect of the music that can't be ignored. Maybe if it weren't,
more people would like jazz. [Pictured: Howard Rumsey]
"I hope you don't mind my little ramble. Just thought I'd share some thoughts with you."
Eddie Palmieri. Following my post last week on Eddie Palmieri's 1965 album Azucar Pa' Ti, percussionist and Manhattan School of Music educator Bobby Sanabria [pictured] sent along the following e-mail:
"In
regards to your post on Eddie Palmieri—great job! I just want to add a few points.
"The
importance of Azucar Pa' Ti was that it showcased the
Palmieri band the way it sounded live. That was because Morris Levy, the owner of Tico Records,
assigned Teddy Reig as the producer. Reig, as you know, produced a lot of
the Count Basie sessions for Roulette, also Levy's label.
Reig asked Eddie to play the tune Azucar the same way the band
did the tune live. The result was the pure, raw, energy of the Palmieri's
La Perfecta group captured on wax as dancers would experience it in a dance
hall.
Azucar clocked in at more than nine minutes and broke the three-minute barrier for radio airplay. It
also made Barry Rogers the most influential trombonist on the Latin
scene in New York, as the recording became the model for the city's powerful new Latin trombone sound. In addition, Barry's blues-inflected solo style became the model
for a new generation of trombonists on the Latin scene." [Photo of Barry Rogers courtesy of Barry Rogers Jazz]
Trumpeter, composer and arranger Marty Sheller also sent along an e-mail:
"Eddie's [pictured] 1960's band was the hippest and hardest swinging dance band in Latin music. When Barry Rogers began improvising on top of that rhythmic heat, look out! Then Manny Oquendo would drop some of his superb timbales bombs, and the entire room would vibrate. When I joined Mongo Santamaria's band in 1962, we played on the same bill with Eddie's band, and those guys consistently set fire to the place. The best!"
Herbie Hancock's car. In my interview with Marty Sheller last week, he mentioned that Herbie Hancock [pictured] bought a car with his royalties from Watermelon Man. Reader John Pickworth
sent in the following e-mail:
"Enjoyed the post on Marty Sheller and Watermelon Man. The car that Herbie Hancock bought with proceeds from the song's royalties was a 1963 Shelby Cobra CSX 2000, which is now worth over $1million dollars."
John also sent along a paragraph from a post by Rob Einaudi, editor of the CarDomain blog...
"Another cool article in this month’s issue of Road & Track is on Herbie Hancock and his 1963 Shelby Cobra CSX 2000. Turns out Herbie is the longest original Shelby Cobra owner (other than Carrol Shelby). He bought the Cobra at age 22 off the dealer showroom floor with his first song royalty check. The car was his daily driver until 1990 when he bought a new Ferrari. Today the car sits in storage, but Herbie will never sell it since 'it represents my first success in life.' "
Django Reinhardt. The 10th Annual Django Reinhardt Festival will be held at Birdland in New York on November 3-8 thanks once again to producers Pat Philips and Ettore Stratta. The "Reinies" who will be there to show their stuff include legendary gypsy guitarist Tchavolo Schmitt [pictured], his nephew Samson Schmitt, Andreas Oberg, Ludovic Beier, Aurore Volque and bassist Brian Torff.
Wes Montgomery. Reader Kurt Kolstad sent along the following clip of 'Round Midnight from 1965 featuring Wes Montgomery, pianist Harold Mabern, bassist Arthur Harper, and drummer Jimmy Lovelace. While you've heard this song a bizillion times, Wes brings a whole new level of soul here. Dig Mabern's opening voicings and Montgomery's run-down at the end (this is now linked in my "Videos") section in the right-hand margin...
CD Discoveries of the week: Saxophonist Jon Gordon's Evolution is big on drama. All of Gordon's nine originals contain jazz-classical surprises, from compelling instrumental textures (percussion and strings) to wordless vocals. Songs skip along like a flat rock over water, and Gordon works steadily on a range of reeds, weaving through a rush hour of instrumental combinations. Individuation sums up Gordon's effort here best, featuring an ever-changing collage of reeds, strings, vocals, woodwinds and brass. This isn't bop or fusion but a restless work of spirited pieces. It's available as a download here (by joining Artist Share) or on CD here.
Another album with a fascinating groove from 2006 is Medeski Martin & Wood's Note Bleu,a compilation of the group's Blue Note recordings between 1998 and 2005. MM&W during this period featured a bracing stew of funk, electronica and jazz grooves. Which means you'll hear a strong bassline accessorized by a Hammond B3, piano, Fender Rhodes, turntable scratching, and a big elastic beat. Sort of Herbie Hancock meets Thievery Corporation meets your grandmother's upright vacuum cleaner. It's all very David Lynch, but it works.
Oddball album cover of the week. Before Jerry Fielding became a composer of movie music, he was a West Coast big band arranger, primarily for Charlie Barnet. He began recording as a leader in 1953, and his sound had a Les Brown plus Stan Kenton feel. In 1957, he recorded this Jazztet album. Assuming the title is somewhat clever, the concept is a mess. Why was Fielding asked to pose on a woodpile like The Thinker? I mean I get it—woodwinds, cords of wood—but is that the best they could do? And what's with the devilish temptress? You can just hear the cigar-smoking producer barking at the art director: "What? I'm not going to sell records with Jerry just sitting there. Take Barbara, my secretary. And get her into a red dress."
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It's kind of appalling that teachers will ridicule a student for for liking Oscar Peterson. At the same time a truly creative individual's curiosity can't be snuffed out by bad teaching so I'm not too worried. The select few who really, deeply care about the music will survive and continue to play it and if we're stuck in a swamp of "modern jazz" there will still be pools of passionate people playing the "old" music passionately which is actually the opposite of what happened in the 80's and early 90's when we had pools of "moderns" awash in a sea of imitation Dizzys and Birds. I've been teaching since high-school and I've found that the best way to teach is to find out what the student's into and run with that, gently try to expand their horizon's by just letting them know what else is out there but never place one thing above another. Obviously, this is impractical in a classroom setting but maybe the classroom is not the best place to learn to play jazz. I understand that we all want to keep the jazz we love alive but times change, people change, well, everything changes and you can't stop progress and by progress I mean moving from one point to another not from something inferior to something superior. We have the same issue but with language here in Quebec. Nationalists want to keep french alive by putting in place government programs to "encourage" the french language. What happens most is that they discourage other languages and cultures. For example someone had painted a Greek flag on their garage door. The province not only made him paint it over but fined him as well. Another example I find particularly offensive, in the Metro every now and then you can find these posters with a picture of a small business owner and a fleur-de-lis symbol. The man is saying, and I'm paraphrasing, "I place this symbol on my business to show that I am dedicated to serving customers in french, etc." thereby labeling non-french businesses by omission. You can't stop people from playing whatever the music-of-the-moment is and you can't stop francophones from speaking english.
Sorry, I don't remember where I was going with this, haven't had my coffee yet. I think that my point is that we shouldn't be worrying about it so much and just let things happen. Study what you're into, even if your teacher wants to teach you something else. Learning this stuff should be hard work, you have to dig. Dig?
Thank you for resisting the all-too-prevalent temptation to take easy, and largely uninformed, swipes at jazz education. I don’t know what “rather prestigious university in New York with a world-class jazz program” your correspondent attends, but what he or she describes is, while certainly not unheard-of, not overly typical either.
For my part and that of many, if not most, of my jazz-educator colleagues, we (should) make no assumptions about the students’ stylistic interests—those vary widely. My job as an educator is to expose them to a wide variety of jazz styles ranging over 100 years (not to mention classical music, world music, pop styles, etc.), and to give esthetic guidance when appropriate. Most of my more astute students take whatever stylistic “balls” they’re interested in and run with them.
Since your correspondent mentioned Erroll Garner, I’ll add that in my jazz-history class, I play Garner’s 1957 recording of “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To” from his underappreciated “Soliloquy” album. It’s invariably one of the biggest hits of the spring semester. Overall, I play recordings of pianists ranging from Scott Joplin to Ethan Iverson and Robert Glasper.
I enjoy your blog. I wrote a rather lengthy response to your student e-mailer on my own burgeoning blog, so I'll just post the link to that here. But in response to your question "Are music educators largely to blame for jazz's slipping popularity and taste level?," I think the answer is somewhat. When you have educators (and they're absolutely out there) who demand that students approach jazz by adhering to a specific stylistic bag which doesn't allow for influences outside of the realm of jazz, then you're going to see a culture who really couldn't care less what young jazz musicians are playing. And for the most part I don't blame them – why support musicians who are trying to replicate music that sounded better 50 years ago? But more on this in my post!
wow, believe me most musicianns don't listen either, and as far as what we have read, man this kid already sounds like a politician, creating the illusion of separation. think for yourself, use yur brain, louis armstrong made me smile when i was a kid, don't know why, mickey mouse never even came close., taste? it goes way beyond that, , maybe u need a mind enema.
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Marc Myers writes frequently on music and the arts for the Wall Street Journal. He is author of "Why Jazz Happened" (University of California Press). In 2012, JazzWax was named the Jazz Journalists Association's "Blog of the Year."
It's kind of appalling that teachers will ridicule a student for for liking Oscar Peterson. At the same time a truly creative individual's curiosity can't be snuffed out by bad teaching so I'm not too worried. The select few who really, deeply care about the music will survive and continue to play it and if we're stuck in a swamp of "modern jazz" there will still be pools of passionate people playing the "old" music passionately which is actually the opposite of what happened in the 80's and early 90's when we had pools of "moderns" awash in a sea of imitation Dizzys and Birds. I've been teaching since high-school and I've found that the best way to teach is to find out what the student's into and run with that, gently try to expand their horizon's by just letting them know what else is out there but never place one thing above another. Obviously, this is impractical in a classroom setting but maybe the classroom is not the best place to learn to play jazz. I understand that we all want to keep the jazz we love alive but times change, people change, well, everything changes and you can't stop progress and by progress I mean moving from one point to another not from something inferior to something superior. We have the same issue but with language here in Quebec. Nationalists want to keep french alive by putting in place government programs to "encourage" the french language. What happens most is that they discourage other languages and cultures. For example someone had painted a Greek flag on their garage door. The province not only made him paint it over but fined him as well. Another example I find particularly offensive, in the Metro every now and then you can find these posters with a picture of a small business owner and a fleur-de-lis symbol. The man is saying, and I'm paraphrasing, "I place this symbol on my business to show that I am dedicated to serving customers in french, etc." thereby labeling non-french businesses by omission. You can't stop people from playing whatever the music-of-the-moment is and you can't stop francophones from speaking english.
Sorry, I don't remember where I was going with this, haven't had my coffee yet. I think that my point is that we shouldn't be worrying about it so much and just let things happen. Study what you're into, even if your teacher wants to teach you something else. Learning this stuff should be hard work, you have to dig. Dig?
Posted by: Matt LeGroulx | November 01, 2009 at 12:08 PM
Thank you for resisting the all-too-prevalent temptation to take easy, and largely uninformed, swipes at jazz education. I don’t know what “rather prestigious university in New York with a world-class jazz program” your correspondent attends, but what he or she describes is, while certainly not unheard-of, not overly typical either.
For my part and that of many, if not most, of my jazz-educator colleagues, we (should) make no assumptions about the students’ stylistic interests—those vary widely. My job as an educator is to expose them to a wide variety of jazz styles ranging over 100 years (not to mention classical music, world music, pop styles, etc.), and to give esthetic guidance when appropriate. Most of my more astute students take whatever stylistic “balls” they’re interested in and run with them.
Since your correspondent mentioned Erroll Garner, I’ll add that in my jazz-history class, I play Garner’s 1957 recording of “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To” from his underappreciated “Soliloquy” album. It’s invariably one of the biggest hits of the spring semester. Overall, I play recordings of pianists ranging from Scott Joplin to Ethan Iverson and Robert Glasper.
The Irish bassist/composer/educator Ronan Guilfoyle recently posted on his excellent blog an eloquent “In Defence of Jazz Education”. I highly recommend that your readers check it out: http://ronanguil.blogspot.com/2009/07/in-defence-of-jazz-education.html
Posted by: Bill Kirchner | November 01, 2009 at 01:44 PM
Oh, p'Shaw, Artie! Go ahead, enjoy fame and Ava and getting on the bandstand with Roy every night... I dare ya.
Posted by: Ed Leimbacher | November 02, 2009 at 12:37 PM
... and that remark should be connected to Monday, not Sunday of course. Guess I need more caffeine. (Or do I mean less?)
Posted by: Ed Leimbacher | November 02, 2009 at 12:42 PM
Hi Marc,
I enjoy your blog. I wrote a rather lengthy response to your student e-mailer on my own burgeoning blog, so I'll just post the link to that here. But in response to your question "Are music educators largely to blame for jazz's slipping popularity and taste level?," I think the answer is somewhat. When you have educators (and they're absolutely out there) who demand that students approach jazz by adhering to a specific stylistic bag which doesn't allow for influences outside of the realm of jazz, then you're going to see a culture who really couldn't care less what young jazz musicians are playing. And for the most part I don't blame them – why support musicians who are trying to replicate music that sounded better 50 years ago? But more on this in my post!
http://jazzandliberalpolitics.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/musings-on-jazz-education/
Cheers,
Jason McCool
Posted by: twitter.com/coolmcjazz | November 02, 2009 at 05:05 PM
wow, believe me most musicianns don't listen either, and as far as what we have read, man this kid already sounds like a politician, creating the illusion of separation. think for yourself, use yur brain, louis armstrong made me smile when i was a kid, don't know why, mickey mouse never even came close., taste? it goes way beyond that, , maybe u need a mind enema.
Posted by: m.malloy | November 02, 2009 at 10:52 PM