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Some critiques of jazz education focus on alleged failures and/or negative effects on the field of performance. For instance, in an online article pianist and jazz educator Hal Galper comments:

one well-known educator once expressed to me a recurring nightmare: ‘what if we graduated a student who couldn’t play?’ I would postulate that this is the case with the majority of graduates of the current educational system. (Galper, 2000)

Other musicians working as tertiary-level jazz teachers are similarly critical of jazz education, such as Javors (2001). Trumpet player Bobby Shew shared the same concern about university jazz training, that ‘you come out of there with a performance degree in jazz, and then you go on a bandstand and you can’t play … it says the whole thing is a failure’ (Shew, 2001, p. 388). Trumpet player and musicologist Ed Sarath has criticised jazz education for ‘failing to realize the experiential core of jazz’, a sentiment echoed by saxophonist Phil Woods who also worries that tertiary schools are graduating performers far in excess of what the market can accommodate: ‘it’s kind of become so collated and codified that everybody now has the same “Real Book”, the same fake books’. (Woods, 1999). Drummer, Ed Soph argues that formal jazz education mostly reproduces itself, creating ever more educators who are ‘mediocre’ as performers. A proliferation of music schools, he feels, has led to a decline in standards manifest in a supposed ‘cycle of propagating more and more institutionally-based teachers’ (Soph, 2001, p. 449).

Clarinetist Artie Shaw and former head of jazz studies at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, saxophonist Don Burrows share the concern that formal jazz education fails to develop creativity or individuality of expression, aspects of jazz they see both as essential to jazz and lacking in the field’s results (Burrows, 2001; Shaw, 2001). Singer and jazz educator Betty Carter, saw jazz education as irrelevant claiming it is only about knowledge whereas ‘if you don’t have that little ingredient that makes you a jazz player you never will be, anywhere’ (Carter, 2001, p. 76), emphasising knower attributes as the basis of learning jazz. Jazz students too may see their own training as deficient (J. P. Murphy, 2009). Where these criticisms exemplify arguments that formal jazz education fails to teach jazz or neglect essential expressive aspects of the art, others blame it for supposed declines and crises in the practice field.

There is a widespread argument following from claims that jazz education fails to foster individuality that teaching, in tertiary institutions especially, has had a homogenising effect on jazz (Ake, 2012; Burrows, 2001; Prouty, 2008; Wilf, 2010). Musicians Don Burrows (2001), Artie Shaw (2001), and Phil Woods (1999) for example, all felt that, in the 1990s, all young tenor saxophonists graduating from universities sounded alike. Burrows complained that:

They all sound like John Coltrane clones, here and in every country I go to. I’m so bored with it I don’t even bother going to listen. I want to hear an identity not an identikit. (Burrows, 2001, p. 19)

Interestingly, according to Burrow’s logic, John Coltrane would be considered a failure because as a university student he played in the style of Johnny Hodges of the Duke Ellington band (DeVito et al., 2013), and likewise Eric Dolphy, an iconic free jazz reeds player who as a student imitated Charlie Parker (Horricks, 1989).

Another example of this criticism, often-cited, is made by Collier who blames jazz education for a supposed stylistic stagnation in jazz: ‘With students all over the United States being taught more or less the same harmonic principles, it is hardly surprising that their solos tend to sound much the same’ (1993, p. 155). He described this as an ‘homogenizing process’ (p. 156) that, he argues, is not unique to jazz but is more widely symptomatic of institutional teaching in creative fields. In a move that is typical in this rhetoric, Collier claims that every musician of the past was an ‘instantly identifiable’ (Collier, 1993, p. 153) individualist yet cites as evidence a tiny handful of jazz greats (cf. Section 4.2.3). Setting aside the inherent unfairness in contrasting university students with the professional recordings of the genre’s superstars, and of judging musicians of today according to anachronistic standards (Libman, 2014), it seems likely that anyone very familiar with any given musician might find them ‘instantly recognisable’. As a teacher, I can instantly recognise the playing of any of my students while to many non-aficionados ‘all jazz sounds the same’ (Quora.com user post, 2016). Rank-and-file jazz musicians without fame are invisible in the type of narrative Collier’s argument exemplifies. Even if Louis Armstrong, for

Another related criticism of formal jazz education is that it stifles creativity, and so is responsible for a supposed stagnation and crisis in jazz, a claim made by jazz students (J. P. Murphy, 2009), by scholars (Beale, 2001; Borgo, 2007; C. Watson, 2012), by journalists and biographers

(Collier, 1993; Nicholson, 2005; Nisenson, 1997), and by musicians (Brokensha, 2001; Burrows, 2001; "In conversation with John Scofield," 2009; Shew, 2001). Guitarist John Scofield, a

graduate of Berklee College (Myers, 2012), complained that ‘jazz education and the squareness of the university just don’t sit right with me’ ("In conversation with John Scofield," 2009). Exemplifying the charge that formal jazz education stifles creativity are claims by Collier (1993):

[most jazz instructors] are well aware of the dangers of over-rigid training, of squelching the musical instincts of their students. But nonetheless, most of them feel duty-bound to give their students the same rudiments, exercises, and études that music students in any field will get. (Collier, 1993, p. 153)

Collier’s principal objection is to institutionalised jazz education and the formal teaching that this implies. The teaching practices that he sees as contributing to artistic stifling include jazz educators’ instrumental pedagogy, use of written methods, improvisation instruction, and focus on jazz theory. In this, Collier’s objections can be understood as arising from a code clash. Illustrative of a widespread stance in the field, Collier objects both to teaching practices that emphasise knowledge and to direct instruction—epistemic relations. What he decries as absent or lost are ways of knowing and being—social relations, such as individuality, self-teaching, taste, personality, autonomy, and self-expression. Thus, Collier valorises social relations and devalorises epistemic relations, expressive of a knower code. In the absence of empirical evidence that creativity in jazz has declined or of a causal relationship between formal jazz education and crises in the artform, real or imagined, these criticisms can be understood as expressive of a clash between the predominant knower code of the performance field and the stronger epistemic relations seen as underpinning pedagogy, whether a knowledge code or an élite code.

Other commentators extend the criticism beyond creative-stifling to include authoritarianism. For instance, David Ake notes that jazz education tends to be viewed as ‘unhip’, a perception

encouraged in part by, and implicit in, stereotypes of autocratic teachers, ‘the ensemble conductor who appears to wield a high degree of control over students’ (2012, p. 251).

This archetype has infiltrated popular culture too, for instance embodied by central character in a recent film Whiplash (Blum et al., 2014) in which a university jazz band-director bullies and belittles his students. Pianist Kenny Werner alleges in his part-autobiography part-motivational text that this jazz teaching-style is commonplace:

since many were taught this way … they teach this way. Fear and anxiety are passed from generation to generation. Also, there are those who occupy positions of authority, but are incompetent—that too causes fear. (Werner, 1996, p. 65)

According to Kelly (2013) the stereotype of the authoritarian teacher may not be over-stated, ‘based on numerous stories from participants and as well as educators whom I observed during the study and with whom I interacted when adjudicating at jazz festivals’ (pp. 190-191). However, examples of teachers who are bullies do not show that teaching itself is inherently authoritarian, any more than inexperienced musicians ‘being on the bandstand and getting their butts kicked’ (Shew, 2001, p. 372) implies that apprenticeship equals brutalisation.

Adopting a more moderate tone, Collier believed that ‘in part, jazz musicians are reluctant to offer advice because it might seem presumptuous’ (1993, p. 152), a concern also expressed by the jazz educators interviewed by Beale (2001) in his study of distinctions between professional jazz and its pedagogised forms in education. English guitarist Derek Bailey objected more strongly to jazz education’s claimed stifling authoritarianism, almost to the point of caricature, in a critique of the bebop-derived approach that dominates conventional curricula:

[due to] its somewhat simplistic rigidity, its susceptibility to formulated method … be- bop has obviously been the pedagogue’s delight. It has proved to be one style of

improvising which can be easily taught. And taught it is; in colleges, music schools, night classes, prisons. (Bailey, 1992, pp. 49-50).

4.4.4 Summary

These illustrative criticisms of jazz education as ‘not really jazz’, as inauthentic, as a failure, and as deleterious to the field can be understood as rhetoric reflective of the practice field being projected onto the pedagogy field. This is not to question the valuable contributions of studies such as Javors (2001) or others to a more nuanced understanding of jazz pedagogy, for instance by highlighting the potential neglect of the ‘knower’ and ‘knowing’ aspects in institutional jazz teaching but it does call into question the ‘either-or’ binary thinking that underpins many of the criticisms of jazz education, such as the fallacy that if some teachers are bullies, then all teaching must be unacceptably authoritarian. While empirically diverse, these criticisms all share a

common basis in foregrounding knowers and ways of knowing and downplaying knowledge, expertise, and training—a knower code. Given the apparent strength of influence of the

performance field over the public face of jazz (cf. Section 4.2), these criticisms illustrate how the logics of pedagogy, and hence the educational needs of students, might become overshadowed by values from the performance field that may have little to do with teaching and learning.

4.5 Conclusion

This chapter has shown how the public face of jazz, emphasising knowers and ways of knowing, overshadows knowledge, skills, and expertise—a private face. The public face portrays

achievement in jazz as based on the personal qualities of musicians, who they are, and how they come to know jazz, while downplaying their techniques, expertise, or training—a knower code (ER–, SR+). This emphasis can make it difficult to see that formal and informal training, techniques, and other specialist knowledge as well as cultivation into the social practices and values of jazz often play significant roles in the musical education of successful jazz musicians. A major implication of this is that education is near-invisible in the public face of jazz, both in current discourse and in narratives of jazz history. The public face overwhelmingly characterises jazz learning as personal, private, and authentically occurring without pedagogy. Where

education is addressed, teaching is often portrayed in negative terms as inauthentic and

incompatible with jazz. Another implication of the public face of jazz is that only people from certain social categories or those with certain qualities or experiences can be legitimate. This

problematises any who might be the wrong kind of knower, such as students or teachers lacking the specialised attributes. The rhetoric of the public face of jazz excludes many if not most people from the possibility of learning jazz.

To recap, this chapter has shown that the jazz field’s public face discounts teaching and emphasises autodidacticism or expression of innate qualities as the basis of learning jazz—not teaching and learning, just learning. However, the examination of biographies and the private face indicate a more complex obscured reality. This raises questions of what jazz educators see as the basis of achievement in jazz education, what strategies they use to teach the ‘unteachable’, what they teach, and what the potential implications of their pedagogic practices might be for students’ access to achievement. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 address these issues through case studies of jazz teaching in lessons for young people. The three cases are illustrative of specialisation codes active in the field. Each chapter looks at beliefs, examines the knowledge and knowing included in lessons, explores knowledge- and knower-building, and considers educational implications arising.