Tipos de entrevista

In contrast to ways of knowing, the public face of jazz minimises the training or expertise of musicians. For example, a publisher’s promotional video shows the then twelve-year-old pianist Joey Alexander in a recording studio playing John Coltrane’s ‘Giant steps’ (1960), a remarkable, virtuosic display of technical prowess and musicianship. The footage cuts to Alexander speaking, his words captioned on the screen for emphasis. ‘My playing comes from my heart, not from technique or anything’ he says, ‘and that’s jazz’ (Rowan, 2015). To underscore the extent to which this downplays the technical basis of the performance and Alexander’s expertise, it is worth considering the choice of tune accompanying Alexander’s claim. ‘Giant steps’ is notorious as a technical challenge for improvisers, placing significant technical and conceptual demands upon performers (Gioia, 2011), and is famous among jazz musicians as a ‘test piece’ (Berliner, 1994, p. 90; Chinen, 2015) which could be described as ‘the antithesis of simplicity’ (Shipton, 2007, p. 547). Coltrane wrote it explicitly as a technical study, almost certainly influenced by a method book, Thesaurus of scales and melodic patterns (Slonimsky, 1975/1947), which he is said to have utilised extensively in his private practicing (Gioia, 2011; Kostelanetz & Slonimsky, 1990). The inclusion of ‘Giant steps’ in Alexander’s album and its prominence in the video was very likely intended to showcase the prodigy’s virtuosity and the novelty of remarkably fluent technique in one so young. However, the pianist’s emphasis on playing ‘from my heart’ can be understood as foregrounding social relations (SR+) and his downplaying of technique and expertise as weaker epistemic relations (ER–). This example can be analysed as a knower code (ER–, SR+) and is typical in the field.

Claims that famous musicians were ‘self-taught’ are routine in jazz discourse and may even be made of (or by) those who undertook formal training. For instance, as pianist Hal Galper argues in a letter to a jazz education magazine in which he objects to jazz teaching:

No one can teach anyone how to play jazz, it is, has and always will be, a self-taught process that cannot be bypassed … Most have learned in spite of their teachers and need us mostly to keep them on the right track of their self-teaching process. (Galper, n.d)

In another online article about jazz education, Galper reiterates: ‘It’s a well worn axiom that no one can show anyone how to play—it’s basically a self-taught process developed through trial and error and experience’ (Galper, 2000). These assertions are illustrative not only of an argument made frequently by Galper, but one that is widespread in the field. For instance, clarinetist Artie Shaw asserted in an interview that ‘you can’t teach jazz. You can learn how to play it but nobody can teach you jazz’ (Shaw, 2001, p. 30). Singer Betty Carter, also in an

interview, said ‘you’ve got to have a feeling for it. I don’t think jazz can be taught’ (2001, p. 76). This downplaying of training is supported by Berliner’s findings in his fifteen-year ethnographic study of improvisation learning and practice, that included interviews with over 50 American professional jazz musicians that:

The jazz community’s traditional educational system places its emphasis on learning rather than on teaching, shifting to students the responsibility for determining what they need to learn, how … and from whom. (Berliner, 1994)

The impression of jazz as dominated by autodidacts may be encouraged by explicit claims of self-teaching or conveyed implicitly by the common omission of jazz education from histories and its absence in jazz media (Ake, 2012). Musicians may make these claims about themselves. For instance, in an interview Australian saxophonist Don Burrows downplayed the impact of his formal training:

I did two years with Eddie Simpson, at the Conservatorium, on clarinet. That’s it. So, you wouldn’t say I was the product of any academy. It makes me laugh when I see write-ups to say I was Conservatorium trained. What a joke. I learnt to play on the bandstand. I learnt to play cross-legged in front of the wireless. (Burrows, 2001, p. 18)

Burrows’ dismissal of his formal training reflects a tendency for public jazz discourse to minimise or deny the contribution of formal training to the success of performers, in this case bypassing early training and jumping straight to the bandstand, an example of achievement as an unmediated progression without pedagogy (cf. Section 4.2.1). Examples of other musicians who

believed ‘that’s the way I learnt, you know, even though I studied piano and theory, actually playing with people … that’s how you learn, the real school’ (Tyner, 2001, p. 129). Joey Alexander also downplayed his training:

I don’t have a teacher. But I did take a short master class 2 years ago. That’s all … I am doing home schooling now. I couldn’t make music if I spent all day in a school … I practice with my dad every day. My dad gives me material to practice and songs to listen to. It’s a daily menu. (Alexander, 2014, para. 8)

Joey Alexander’s downplaying of training led his interviewer to conclude that the pianist was ‘self-taught’ (Alexander, 2014, para. 2). Often it is others who make the claim that one famous musician or another was largely self-taught. For instance, Kelly (2013) noted this tendency among biographers, finding:

there are few accounts of how musicians learn to play jazz in the earliest parts of their musical lives. Those that exist are within the biographies of notable players and tend toward the fantastic, as a way to position the musician as somehow having a preternatural connection to the music that could not help but be let loose on the world. (Kelly, 2013, pp. 8-9)

Art Blakey told one reviewer ‘I’m self-taught—I had no kind of training at all’, attributing his learning to ‘a natural gift’ (Blakey, 1987, para. 13). This was despite taking piano lessons as a child (Miller, N.D), playing piano at school and drums in junior high school band (Blakey, 2005), drum lessons with Chick Webb, and mentoring by Sid Catlett and Kenny Clarke (Gourse, 2002). As another example, pianist Hal Galper asserted in a blog post that his mentors were instinctive, self-taught players:

Most of the great masters I had the good fortune to apprentice with did not know theory and played completely by ear. They learned how to play by copying their masters. They didn’t ‘know’ the ‘rules’ of music in an intellectual sense … the term ‘knowing’ often describes a body of intellectual information. But the intuition and the ears often ‘know’ more that the intellect does. (Galper, n.d.-c, par. 1)

Galper, himself a graduate of jazz studies at Berklee College of Music (Carr et al., 1995; Fleming, 2003; Galper, 2012), names Jaki Byard, Sam Rivers, Herb Pomeroy, Chet Baker, Cannonball Adderley, Phil Woods, and later Joe Henderson, Lee Konitz, and Roy Eldridge as the ‘great masters’ with whom he apprenticed (Galper, 2012). In fact, none of these musicians was without formal music education and it is most unlikely that any played either entirely by ear or lacked knowledge of jazz theory (see Appendix D). Galper’s downplaying of formal training can be understood as a reflection of the stance that dominates the public face of jazz which

emphasises musicians’ intuition, self-teaching and informal learning. This kind of thinking has been critiqued by Gioia (1989) who attributes it historically to an influential mythology of primitivism and highlights potential implications for students:

creates a general impression among musicians, both established and aspiring, that discipline is not required to learn or perform jazz; that a firm technical mastery of one’s instrument is either unnecessary or positively to be avoided as stifling the creative impulse; that emotional immediacy is to be preferred over clarity and sophistication; finally, that the various well-publicized excesses of the jazz musician’s personal life are not problems to be avoided but signs that the musician has achieved a special intensity of existence that sets him apart from his peers. (Gioia, 1989, p. 143)