Learning Jazz

Abstract

The nature of learning in jazz is a topic that has consumed its practitioners and advocates from the music’s earliest days. While most studies of jazz learning focus on the nature of institutional contexts (i.e., jazz education), or the kinds of informal learning mentoring long associated with the jazz tradition, Learning Jazz argues that this distinction works against a common identity for jazz audiences and communities. What happens within the institution impacts—and is in turn impacted by—events and practices outside institutional contexts. The chapters in this book articulate these ideas through historical case studies. Chapter one examines the ways that early jazz method books capitalized on a new commercial market, laying claim to a public expertise about the music. The following chapter extends this idea to writing about the development of jazz; one study examines attempts by the critic Paul Eduard Miller to develop a jazz canon; another focuses on the disconnect between the emphasis on “great men” and the everyday realities of jazz artists. Chapters three and four tackle race in jazz education, focusing on influence of Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson, public school segregation, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and other topics Chapter five examines jazz’s “public pedagogy,” and the sometimes-fraught relationships between “jazz people” and the general public. An important undercurrent of this story is the nature of the institution in jazz. While formal institutions are relatively well-defined in educational and civic contexts, informally constituted institutions have profoundly influenced the development of jazz and its discourses.