Julian’s pedagogy was strongly oriented towards teaching his students that playing jazz involves being a certain type of person and understanding and interacting with music in ‘jazzy’ ways more than it involves techniques, procedures, or musical principles. I have shown that Julian’s lessons gave enough technical detail for the students to play each tune and perform adequately at the end-of-camp concert and emphasised the ‘knowing’ aspects of jazz, but that gives an
incomplete picture of what his lessons gave. In Julian’s lessons specialised ways of knowing, such as attributes, dispositions, emotions, practices, and behaviours, were taught both explicitly and implicitly. Some of these values were about cultivation into the jazz community and its history, such as which musicians and recordings to listen to, canon, and authentic practices. Other values were about personal development including valorised attributes (prioritising aural
tended to be taught implicitly throughout the lessons and constituted what could be described as a hidden axiological curriculum. To complete the picture of what things Julian’s lessons
included, I shall first give four examples that illustrate how Julian gave direct axiological instruction and then examples that show the implicit ways in which values were communicated in the lessons.
Explicit knower-building
The first illustrative example of what Julian’s explicit axiological instruction looked like comes from Lesson 3, a sequence in which he taught how to behave while listening to jazz. The students were told they should ‘feel’ the music rather than simply attend to it. To clarify this, Julian first explained and then modelled how to embody the appropriate focus:
I don’t think you can fully invest yourself in this music without either maybe moving something like … just gently moving their feet or kinda like that. Some people have their eyes closed … that really makes me feel like you’re into it. (Julian, Lesson 3).
Julian’s physical modelling, as a recording plays, included eyes closed, exaggerated head- nodding, and foot-tapping. Video 6.1 (see supplementary Video 6.1) shows an excerpt from this lesson.
To help the class understand the expected emotional response, Julian drew on some students’ personal experience by likening it to the feeling of a churchgoer moved by a charismatic sermon. Building on the analogy, he explained that not everybody can respond the same way, be it to a preacher or listening to jazz. To ‘feel’ jazz requires being the kind of person who is moved by it:
If it’s like a [church] tune or something I’m like ‘I’m not feelin’ that but that’s great that you are’. But then I go to a jazz concert and I feel that, you know, that’s like a sermon to me. That’s like ‘oh’, like ‘yeah’. (Lesson 3)
Those unable to ‘read’ the emotional message of the music were asked at least to focus on technical aspects of the recorded music instead. Julian highlighted specific elements students might thus respond to intellectually such as the drum beat, the bass line, or the structure. An excerpt from Lesson 4 offers a second example of explicit axiological instruction. Julian invited the students to choose tunes to play from his book of lead sheets. The students having finished playing their first choice, ‘Tenor Madness’, Julian chose the next tune, ‘All blues’ by trumpeter Miles Davis and spoke to the class of its significance. He made explicit the importance of knowing the jazz canon to being both a musician and a person with a cultivated gaze through valorising the Miles Davis album on which the tune first appeared, Kind of Blue:
I don’t know any jazz musicians that don’t know this album. In fact, I don’t know many people that don’t know this … Just as you’ve just become an older human being, you start to get wise to the classics. This is one of the classics. (Julian, lesson 4)
Similarly, in Julian’s aforementioned closing summary to the class in Lesson 1, the students were told that they should use independent self-teaching—a knower practice, and playing by ear—a personal attribute, to practice key centre improvising: ‘you should all be doing this’.
Julian also taught about appropriate ways to know about the world of jazz, not just by valorising some, but by devalorising others. Like Drew (Chapter 5), Julian valorised knowing aurally over knowing visually. Often, this value was combined with the idea that the right way to learn something is through independent discovery. Sometimes this was explicit, as in an example from Lesson 1. With a recording of Kenny Burrell’s band performing ‘Chitlins’ playing in the
background, Julian asked the students to open their booklets of lead sheets to ‘Chitlins’ to that tune and asked, ‘is there anybody that can tell me what style of music that was that we were listening to right now?’ and seemed frustrated when students read the answer instead of listening:
Student Latin Blues …
Julian In that case, you’re all wrong. That’s a trick. Well, that sucks. So you just did that by looking at the page? Well, good for you because sometimes the answer’s right in front of you, hey, and sometimes it’s not. Alright, is there anybody else who can tell me anything about that song that’s not written on the page? Style-wise or anything? (Julian, Lesson 1)
In another example from Lesson 1 Julian again expressed frustration at students trying to learn in the wrong way and was forced to explicitly re-state the principle:
… no, no, no! This is about your ears. This is about what you’re hearing, anything about what you’re hearing … not about what’s written on the page because, remember, this is jazz camp … and jazz and music is not what you see, right? … this camp is about ‘what did you hear?’ (Julian, Lesson 1)
However, despite such instances of explicit teaching of ways of knowing, most of the lessons were imbued with implicit axiological instruction that specialised ways of knowing and
dispositions as well as signalling as important various canonical musicians and performances that were taught tacitly.
Implicit knower-building
One form of implicit knower cultivation in Julian’s lessons involved what could be described as pointing to which parts of the social world of jazz are to be valorised. Often this was
communicated by way of teacher expectations: certain musicians, tunes, recordings, and practices were assumed knowledge, even for this class of novice students experiencing jazz for the first time. These messages were reinforced through repetition throughout the sequence of lessons. For instance, it was implicit that the students should be familiar with various significant musicians and their works, reinforced each time the class began learning a tune. Before starting work in the lessons on each of the tunes the class rehearsed, Julian played the students a famous recording of the composition and told them about who the performers were: Kenny Burrell playing ‘Chitlins’, the Adderley brothers playing ‘Work song’, and so on. It was implicit that the performer, the performance, and the tune all were important. In Lesson 3, when Julian introduced
the new tune to be learnt in that lesson, ‘Pole dancer’, he emphasised the importance of the composer/performer, though without making explicit why: ‘so, really, really important … ‘The pole dancer’ is written by Darren Heinrich. Darren Heinrich is an Australian pianist and organist … this is him with his trio’.
As another example, it was often assumed that students should recognise famous recordings and have a knowledge of the jazz canon. In Lesson 2, Julian asked whether anyone knew or
recognised ‘Work song’ from a recording and, finding that it was generally unfamiliar,
emphasised that ‘this is a very well-known jazz tune’. Similarly, in Lesson 4 regarding ‘Tenor madness’ (Rollins, 1956) and ‘All Blues’ (Davis, 1959), and a Miles Davis album: ‘do you know
Kind of Blue, the album, Kind of Blue? … this is one of the songs off Kind of Blue, you might
recognize it’ and ‘have you heard this before?’ In Lesson 2 it was implied that students ought to be familiar with common forms such as 12-bar blues and practices such as jamming. In Lesson 1, Julian played the class a recording of ‘Chitlins’ prior to their first rehearsal of that tune. When the students had finished listening to the music, Julian asked them ‘is there anybody that can tell me what style of music that was that we were listening to?’ More than probe students’
background knowledge, it was also implicit in the question that the ability to recognise styles and genres by ear is important—valorising cultivation into the world of jazz and knowing through direct, aural experience.
As well as cultivation into the practices and significant figures of the jazz community, the lessons also involved an implicit valorisation of specialised personal attributes and behaviours. These included values and practices such as self-teaching, intuition, and self-expression as well as some more pragmatic behaviours and dispositions of good musicians, such as being prepared with the right equipment: ‘make sure you bring a music stand’ and ‘I always carry a lot of pencils around’ (Lesson 1). Less concrete attributes and practices were tacitly valorised too. For instance, the implicit importance to Julian of independent discovery learning was highlighted not only in such comments as that above, but also in an often-used pedagogic technique whereby, in favour of giving the students information, he would ask questions in a way that specialised
interview, he thought that independent discovery and intrinsic motivation to learn are essential attributes of successful jazz students. These values were communicated through characteristic uses of questioning, correction, and praise. For instance, Julian typically favoured questioning over telling the students something directly, a seeming reluctance to impart knowledge without negotiation:
Julian: Twelve bars is a very common form, a very common song form in music associated with a very particular kind of jazz, or music. Does anybody know what?
Student (1): Latin? Student (2): Blues?
Julian: The Blues. So, this song is in essence a twelve-bar blues … But it has what kind of rhythm? [silence]. A boogaloo. (Julian, Lesson 2)
Objects of praise and correction also expressed implicit axiological values in Julian’s lessons. For example, empirical features of student’s improvisations were rarely subject to criticism or feedback, whereas errors in other areas such as disposition, ways of behaving, and musical knowledge were all subject to correction. Thus, Julian would criticise a student improvisation for expressing insufficient joy, but rarely corrected the musical content or technical execution. When he did give feedback about improvisations, it tended to be vague with regard to techniques or musical principles, such as ‘too many long notes’ or ‘explore some rhythms’. In contrast, Julian gave relatively precise corrections when it came to specialist knowledge, such as names and instruments of famous musicians, jazz styles, note-reading, musical structure, counting bars, and percussion patterns. The things Julian praised tended often to relate to feelings or being the right way and less frequently to technique. Also, his praise often focused on his own feelings, such as ‘I love it’, and ‘lovely group, man, there’s a nice vibe in here, I like it’. Each of these examples implicitly expressed a knower code and signalled Julian’s view that knowledge is subordinate to knowing in jazz.
As another example of the implicit curriculum of values, in Lesson 3 Julian used his own achievements as a model for valorising practicing, persistence, personal taste, independent learning, instinct over intellect, knowing-by-ear, and creative self-expression. All of these were
implicit in a comment about himself as a 14-year-old discovering improvisation by playing along with records:
I would do that for hours on end, until I found notes that I really liked and then I tried to do most of those notes. And even though I didn’t know any scales, I still came up with heaps of ideas. (Julian, Lesson 3)
Emotions have already been discussed (in Section 6.2.2) in relation to how they contributed to minimising knowledge and the role of that emphasis in potentially making it difficult for students to see the technical requirements of improvisation. Emotions also were implicitly valorised more generally as significant personal attributes important for playing jazz by virtue of being included and reinforced by repetition during the lessons. Sometimes a specific emotion was explicitly valorised, such as ‘passion and silliness and joy’ in Lesson 2. However, rather than any specific emotion, the implication here seemed to be more that emotions generally must in some way be important, hence the exercise, and this was not the only such exercise. When the class rehearsed ‘Work song’ in Lesson 4, Julian prompted the students to recall the ‘really sassy kind of
saxophone and trumpet’ from the recording he had played them the previous day and asked them to imbue their playing with that feeling. Similarly, Julian’s reassurance to the students in Lesson 1 that ‘It’s very safe in here’ added extra significance to the emotional aspects of improvising, and likewise in Lesson 4: ‘if you guys are nervous about improvising, that would be expected … Just have fun’. These examples are illustrative of many other similar examples of the
characteristic way emotions and feelings were implicitly valorised in Julian’s lessons. 6.3.4 Summary
To recap, this section analysed the lessons to reveal how Julian dealt differently with the
knowledge and the knowing aspects of jazz in his enacted teaching and to show how his practice related first to his own expressed beliefs and the dominant code of the field. In some contexts during the lessons, such as teaching about musical notation, song structures, and procedures for realising lead sheets, Julian tended to use direct instruction, make technical criteria explicit, and
knowledge code. However, he did not remain in that code and used that way of teaching
pragmatically, giving students just sufficient knowledge to play a specific tune or complete some other task. Most of the time, Julian downplayed epistemic relations and emphasised social relations as important both as criteria for success in specific activities and for achievement in playing jazz—a knower code.
Julian’s pedagogy took a different form to that which is suggested by the rhetoric of the public face of the field (Chapter 4) and also contrasted with the teaching of the first case study teacher, Drew (Chapter 5). Julian’s lessons could be described as involving more knowledge and, perhaps, reflective of a pragmatic reality of teaching and learning in jazz education in which students are expected (and expect) to learn how to play tunes and improvise, with demonstrable, measurable outcomes. It could also be argued that Julian’s teaching was oriented more towards the requirements of the lessons and the end-of-camp concert rather than the long-term
educational needs of the students, reflecting the context of the jazz camp. Nonetheless, Julian’s pragmatic teaching was certainly in contrast to the stronger knower code of Drew. An
implication of Julian’s general emphasis on knowing while downplaying knowledge could be that technical aspects of playing jazz are unimportant, potentially disguising the stronger epistemic relations of the private face of jazz.
Having seen shifts between a knowledge code and a knower code, depending on the nature and requirements of each activity, and that Julian’s approach may embody a more pragmatic enactment of a knower-code pedagogy than did Drew’s, it is now possible to focus on how knowledge and knowing were built. To do that, the next section uses semantic gravity and semantic density to examine Julian’s lessons in terms of the forms of knowledge and knowing they involved and considers possible implications arising for students’ knowledge-building and knower-building.