Why Did It Take Me So Long to Meet Jazz? — confessions of a high school jazz geek.
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!
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