I'd first posted this as a comment on another site, then thought, in my aging curmudgeonistic belligerence, that I'd share it more widely because it does sum up a big chunk of my musicianship philosophy; comments welcome. The story begins when, in a forum post, a music teacher asks

"Anybody out there looking for music lessons? Or know of anybody who's looking for music lessons?"

and in response someone adds that they are losing students, even good promising students, that they have upgraded their studio, added all sorts of perks and enhancements and yet, "people seem to not care that you offer an enriched learning experience."

Well ... here's the thing: People don't KNOW you offer an enriched learning experience; after now 60 years of being told that music is "just sound" sadly most people in our culture have no direct experience of music at all, and will proudly say,when asked what they play, that they 'play' the radio. They've been sold a lie and even more sadly, we musicians re-inforce that lie every time we hold out a CD as if it was even important. So you can advertise until the cows come home, no one is going to call.

Time was, parents had direct experience of music. These would be the children of the 'tween-war era, those who lived through WWII, every last one of them had heard a real choir, a real organist in their church, they had heard brass bands up close, and their dancehall was a purely acoustic experience of the sonic laser of the Big Band. Most, at least most in the urban areas, had also experienced a full-scale symphony orchestra although in the era since the collapse of Edwardian aristocracy, that experience was, by 1945, rarer and rarer, progressively replaced by the National Radio systems, and by those Infernal Machines, the phonograph. So these parents knew about music, and even the protestants saw value in giving every child possible the opportunity to get in on the musicianship game. It didn't matter if you were poor as churchmice, even the Gershwins and the Blounts could justify the expense; it was a matter of survival.

Today we haven't many parents alive who can remember a world pre-phonograph, precious few remember pre-MTV. Their experience of music is of a commodity that is shrink-wrapped and dazzling, created by mythic heros in the halls of great Olympus, the domain of the gods themselves. Mere mortals do not aspire to challenge the gods of the music industry, they can only pay their tithes and feel priviledged to be allowed to listen in for a fee.

where have all the students gone?

The first order of business, imho, is to correct the misperception that music is only sound, and to earnestly move to ensure that every child has had DIRECT and emmersive experience of music before the age of 8.

That means no P.A.'s. That means no CDs. That means no electric pianos, no stacks of marshall amps, no 'sound' systems, only the direct brain to body to space to body to brain transmission of musical experience.

And dig: they think it is worthless, so they aren't going to pay a dime for it -- your concerts only preach to the dwindling choir -- if we truly believe music is worth anything, the burden of the proof is ours, it is then left to us to SHOW them what it is worth.

This is why I joined a community band, and this is why I always vote 'YES' when there is even a hint of a potential to play in front of people out where they are, in parks, in parades, on the street, in the shopping malls ...

One concert in the park is worth 10 in the hall. We have to get out there and demonstrate, play not for bucks or sales or awards or acclaim, but play because, very literally, civilization itself depends on our performance. We must rage against the dying of the light, show 'em what we got. If the kids see what you do as the thing they need for their own evolution, you can bet they will line up to learn how its done. But they have to experience it for themselves, they have to feel what it is, they have to SEE the goods,and for that to happen, we have to SHOW the goods.

Or we can sit on our backsides and complain as civilization slides farther and farther into commercialized primitivisms.

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it! (Vladimir Mayakovsky)

 

Visitors seeking to develop a program based upon Abreu's philosophy.

A dozen American players, grouped in an organisation called the "Abreu Fellowship" to honour the founding master of the Venezuelan orchestral system (El Sistema), arrived in Venezuela to study closely the FESNOJIV academic programs, to extend the results so successfully applied in Venezuela, in the U.S. and Canada.

The visit is due to an initiative that seeks to reproduce in North America, the Venezuelan model of Nucleos (music schools) as a way to "reconcile our efforts to build structures like those in all of Venezuela," said the head of this program Mark Churchill, Director of the New England Conservatory.

Professor Churchill, who is leading the artistic delegation visiting Venezuela, FESNOJIV has launched a project to promote "Sistema USA" aimed at "sowing the principles of teaching" inspired by the determination to build a gigantic musical movement that constitutes reality and an example in the context of our global world.

In the words of the maestro José Antonio Abreu,

"These wills combine to enable a world framed in progress and prosperity, to become an impassable barrier against drugs and violence."

Canada sends a task force to peek into the Abreu Miracle? hmmm ... something wonderful this way comes?

"The World
Is waiting
For the Sunrise
For the Sunrise
The World
Is waiting ..."

Following a tip from Peter Hum, teen blogger Rachel relates story I have to say was as true in 1972 as it is today:

What I’m trying to say is that I’m frustrated. I get frustrated when I read articles about how young people don’t listen to jazz anymore — as an elementary or junior high school student, how on earth was I supposed to find it on my own?

This realization began gnawing at me the moment I was accepted into the upper jazz band at West Ranch High School — I was playing piano for my junior high culmination ceremony and I got a tap on the shoulder from the junior high band director. I’d never spoken to him before. He only had one question for me: “Where were you?” He’d been managing a jazz band at the junior high, but the first time I’d ever heard about it was on the last day I would ever be attending the school. It was as if that jazz band was some secret that only the select few could know about — it was hidden from everyone but the band kids under the cover of football and spirit days and  honors classes at the junior high. Even later, I discovered that the neighbor that I’d been living next door to for eight years was a jazz fanatic — halfway into my sophomore year of high school.

Jazz isn’t supposed to be a secret. It’s intended to be shared — even my jazz teacher sometimes tells me that improvising is a compilation of everything you’ve ever heard. That’s why I smile when I hear about people like Jason Parker combating the whole “jazz is dead” notion by sharing their music with young people like me who didn’t have immediate access to it. Whether you’re a jazz musician, a jazz instructor, or just someone who’s got a penchant for jazz, please don’t give up on us. Please don’t conclude that we’re uninterested; please don’t assume that we’ll think jazz is boring. Granted, it’s probably a better idea to hand us Kind of Blue before you give us Vijay Iyer (even KKJZ’s Leroy Downs told me with a chuckle that “the world’s not ready for Vijay”). But by handing a kid a jazz record or taking him to a jazz show, you’re giving him a chance to discover something he never knew existed. He might not like it, and he might love it. Believe me, coming from my experience with jazz as that teenager who’s supposedly not listening to it anymore — it’s more than worth a shot.

Yes, I'd heard jazz before 1970, lots of it, it was everywhere in the 60's. James Bond movies, Peter Gunn and Pink Panther (or any Mancini soundtracks), my first real inspiration for musicianship probably came as much from a mesmerized pre-school watching of Rhapsody in Blue as from the jacket images on the rockabilly records my mother played, but it wasn't until Kenn played that Benny Goodman LP ... ironic in a way since Benny himself had lived a jazz-deficient existence before hearing the New Orleans sound at about that same age.

But the difference was, in 1970, out in the prairies, there was no obvious path for jazz instruction outside of a few scattered books like the Mickey Baker series, and it's here were I see another issue in Rachel's young-person's quest for jazz literacy: in order to teach jazz, teachers need to have jazz teaching resources.

This is of paramount importance. In the late 1950's, during the lean years for the waning big bands, a group of the old-school players established an innovative teaching project, the Lennox School of Jazz -- most of today's 'stars' in the jazz recording industry are alumni of the Lennox school, and among them one Jamey Aebersold.

Aebersold may not be a household name to the Jazz listeners out there, but in the practice of jazz post-Lennox there are two ubiquitous artifacts of mass production that shaped the landscape of jazz history more than any other, one of them the immortal handwriting of some unknown Berklee student who leaked their book of head charts out across the newly-invented photocopies network (aka The Fakebook, once upon a time sold to us by the same bloke who sold us other contraband) and, a bit later down the timeline, the Aebersold Jazz play-along books.

110 affordable volumes, maybe more by now, each with a play-along record featuring a rhythm-section accompanment, and covering a truly olympian spectrum of styles. This was the shape of jazz to come, the jazz that was to spread out into the world and into pubs, dance halls and venues across the planet.

But that was the thing: the only Jazz method taught was the Aebersold method, and it is a very good method worthy of mastery by anyone of any genre, but it is only a niche and, in many ways it is a snapshot, a freezing in time of the state of the jazz around the Lennox era. Bossa Nova, Swing, modal Bop, even up to exotic scales, it is all about playing the changes.

Miles said to 'Trane one day, "what happens when we can play all the changes?" and its that whole realm of the reality of the space of Jazz that seems exempt in the Aebersold method. It takes you all the way to Giant Steps but does not leap into Ascension; like the Zen saying that says how the reading of the Sutras can inch you up and up and up the pole, but at the end, you still must leap off ... so why not leap off from the start?

Sure there's the old joke about the incumbent roosters, one plays some Parker licks to audition, the next plays an Ornette solo and so forth until the old master Rooster calls them a bunch of young clucks and wakes the day with a simple Cock-a-doodle-doo adding that, before you can get anything going, you gotta know the Standards, but how many of the Standards bearers can play like Kid Ory, or like Mr Jelly Roll, or even care. Thing is, just as the Amish chose the 19th and not the 16th century to freeze their timeline, there is no real reason to base our approach to Jazz in 1955, other than the inertia of material.

There is hope, though, a new hope in the recent goings on at the Banff Centre where we've seen the likes of Darcy Argue and Ethan Iverson as guest instructors in a way very reminiscent of the Lennox School approach. It is a hope that is springing new shoots all over the place and if not revitalizing the jazz (I think the vitality was always there in the underbrush) Banff has been bringing it out and packaging the transmission into forms the kids can take home. Not enough to urge the local pub jazz trios to step beyond the comfort zone of the changes but definately enough to alert the Rachels of the world that there may be intelligent life out beyond Mancini themes and Weather Report.

I've heard too how the Sun Ra House has become a part-time school for the advancement of jazz music; I hope someday to see their method franchised the way the Shao-lin Monks have franchised their path to kung-fu excellence!

And who knows, maybe there's another Jamey Aebersold somewhere outthere, signed up for the next session, inspired to create new and effective packaged methods for teaching the New Thing, using the new media the way Jamey leveraged the old-world cheap/portable LP/Cassette/CD, maybe using real-time connections to bridge that great gap of geographic space between Lennox Avenue and Portage and Main, someday delivering that space fire tone science to the gradeschool!