Learning Jazz: Jazz Education, History, and Public Pedagogy

ADVISORY BOARD

David Evans, General Editor

Barry Jean Ancelet

Edward A. Berlin

Joyce J. Bolden

Rob Bowman

Curtis Ellison

William Ferris

John Edward Hasse

Kip Lornell

Bill Malone

Eddie S. Meadows

Manuel H. Peña

Wayne D. Shirley

Robert Walser

LEARNING

JAZZ

Jazz Education, History, and Public Pedagogy

KEN PROUTY

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

Portions of chapter two have appeared in a different form in Popular Music and Society 37, no. 5 (2014): 595–617. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2014.909202.

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2023 by University Press of Mississippi

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Prouty, Ken, author.

Title: Learning jazz : jazz education, history, and public pedagogy / Ken Prouty.

Other titles: American made music series.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2023. | Series: American made music series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023032796 (print) | LCCN 2023032797 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496847904 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496847911 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496847928 (epub) | ISBN 9781496847935 (epub) | ISBN 9781496847942 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496847959 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Jazz—History and criticism. | Jazz—Historiography. | Jazz—Instruction and study—United States—History. | Jazz—Social aspects—United States—History. | Jazz—Analysis, appreciation. | Jazz musicians—United States. | Big bands—United States. | Music and race—United States—History.

Classification: LCC ML3506 P76 2023 (print) | LCC ML3506 (ebook) | DDC 836.815/74—dc24/eng/20230719

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032796

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032797

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

DEDICATION

Beverly Jean Forbus

1937–2022

Thanks for everything, Mom

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: To Jazz, or Not to Jazz: Pedagogy and Publishing in Early Jazz Method Books

Chapter 2: We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know: Historiography and the Lost Voice in Jazz

Chapter 3: Sight-Reading, Virtuosity, and Identity: Big Bands and Race in Jazz Education

Chapter 4: Understanding Jazz Education’s Race Problem

Chapter 5: Jazz People and Public Pedagogies

Coda: What’s in a Domain Name

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The list of those to thank for this project might constitute a book all by itself, but there are some individuals whom I’d like to publicly acknowledge. My colleagues at Michigan State University have been a constant source of support and good cheer. Thanks to my fellow faculty in Musicology: Michael Largey, Kevin Bartig, Sarah Long, Marcie Ray, Joanna Bosse, Chris Scales, and Nick Field. And special thanks to my colleagues in the Jazz Studies program, including Diego Rivera, Michael Dease, Antony Stanco, Randy Napoleon, Xavier Davis, Randy Uncle G Gelispie, and most especially Rodney Whitaker. Their level of talent and dedication to nurturing this music leaves me in awe. Thanks as well to Juliet Hess, Ron Newman, Joe Luloff, and David Stowe, who have provided support and encouragement in my career. I would also like to thank our administrative staff, Dean Jim Forger, Associate Deans Michael Kroth and David Rayl, and a special thanks to Shawn Myrda Mahorney and Anne Simon, without whose efforts our college would almost certainly grind to a halt. Many students over the years have endured long-winded explanations of my sometimes hare-brained ideas; my particular thanks to Matthew Kay, Kelli Smith-Biwer, Christine Glassman, and Emily Demski. And an enormous thank you to recently minted PhD and professor Jonathan Gomez, my former student, thesis advisee, and continuing friend. Our time together was some of the most rewarding of my professional career, always challenging and sharpening my thinking. His imprint on this book is exceeded only by my pride in all he has done and will continue to do.

Many peers and colleagues from around the world show up in my work in some form or another: Chuck Hersch, Gabriel Solis, Mark Lomanno, Lewis Porter, David Ake, Kim Teal, Andrew Berish, Christi Jay Wells, Darren Mueller, Tammy Kernodle, John Howland, Mike Heller, Aaron Johnson, David Borgo, Nichole Rustin-Paschal, Alan Stanbridge, Tim Wall, Sherrie Tucker, George McKay, John Gennari, Ingrid Monson, Scott DeVeaux, Steve Pond, Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Krin Gabbard, and so, so many others with whom I have had the great pleasure of interacting over the years. A special thanks to the organizers of the Rhythm Changes research consortium, without whose efforts I would not be in the position I am in today: Tony Whyton, Walter van de Leur, Catherine Tackley, Nick Gebhardt, Loes Rusch, and Christa Bruckner-Haring have all gone above and beyond the call many times over in organizing some of the most engaging and rewarding meetings it has even been my pleasure to attend. Two individuals who have left us were particularly important in shaping my work. John Murphy provided exactly the right kind of critical feedback in the best sense of the term. His presence is sorely missed by so many, as is that of David Baker, whose insights, support, and wisdom were always freely and generously given. And to my teachers and mentors, especially Stan Buchanan, David Joyner, Andrew Weintraub, and the late Nathan Davis, my debt to you is simply beyond description.

Research for this book was conducted with the support of the Humanities and Arts Research Program at Michigan State as well as the Center for Black Music Research, from which I was fortunate to receive a travel grant to visit the archive. Research was also conducted at the Library of Congress, the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, the Chicago Jazz Archive, and the Institute of Jazz Studies; I sincerely thank staff members at these institutions whose assistance contributed to this project. A special thanks to Ella Campbell for her help with accessing materials at the Hogan Archive.

Finally, my thanks to the editorial staff and board at the University Press of Mississippi, and in particular Craig Gill, for continuing to support my work and for their constant encouragement of leading-edge research in jazz studies. I’d also like to acknowledge the assistance of Katie Turner for her guidance and Debbie Burke for her diligent editing. I am in very good company as a UPM author.

INTRODUCTION

In 2016, America bade farewell to the presidency of Barack Obama, whose affinity for jazz was clearly and publicly expressed, replaced by the political ascendancy of Donald Trump, for whom jazz was not, it seemed, even the faintest blip on his cultural radar. Jazz people more or less did not know what to do with or about Trump. Where Obama had been mostly celebrated for his interest in jazz, Trump’s presidency was met by uncertainty and, in some cases, hostility. Wynton Marsalis generated a minor controversy when the trumpeter and Jazz at Lincoln Center artistic director explained to a group of students that he would not necessarily refuse to perform at the new president’s inauguration, preferring to take a wait-and-see attitude.¹ A few months later, Marsalis had apparently seen enough, blasting the Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, an action which would leave the American public more ignorant.² Others were more pointed. In 2018, JAZZIZ ran a special issue on Jazz in the Age of Trump. What is most remarkable, perhaps even more than any specific comments to emerge from the various participants, is the very fact that this event took place, that the election of Trump necessitated it. And perhaps it did. In the introduction to the piece, the convenors discussed the idea behind the panel:

The idea was to sit together in a room for a couple hours and discuss the challenges of creating and presenting thoughtful art during a precarious moment in the United States. When we met in January, the nine of us strained the capacity of a friend’s dining room table in Harlem and represented some of the diversity present in today’s jazz community.³

Individual participants expressed a wide range of opinions, although, for the most part, the general consensus was more clearly conveyed by trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, who stated that I listened to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, I toured with Art Blakey. I’m not going to stand on the shoulders of these guys who struggled to better their communities and then water down who I am and what I think.⁴ On the other hand, Wadada Leo Smith, while not dismissing what Trump’s presidency meant, points to a more systemic, historical perspective, noting that [t]he times haven’t changed because one man got elected. There’s been a long struggle for what’s right and a long tradition of what’s wrong, and I think we have taken our eye off the ball for too long.⁵ While the panel hashed out the implications of Trump’s election, others took a different perspective, even going so far as to liken Trump to jazz itself. Writing in the Washington Post, David van Drehle refers to Trump’s jazz combo of national distraction, in which [Trump’s] fingers fly over the keyboard of his phone like Charlie Parker burning up the alto saxophone. But imagine Bird sitting in with a high school band: He must take every solo.⁶ Meanwhile, in The Atlantic, David Graham makes a similar connection between Trump’s erratic, improvisational approach to another jazz icon:

Trains have long been a staple of Donald Trump’s iconography. Trane, less so. But the recent North Korea crisis provides a moment to consider the parallels between John Coltrane, the iconic tenor saxophonist who died 50 years ago this summer, and the 45th president.

Trump and Coltrane both began their careers in fairly traditional ways, and each got more esoteric as he got older, producing what some listeners found brilliant and what others called incoherent and hard to listen to. Both are prodigious improvisers, tending to whip up new ideas and thoughts on the spot. And both seem unsure where to stop improvising.

I don’t know what it is, Coltrane once told Miles Davis, in whose band he was playing. It seems like when I get going, I just don’t know how to stop. Davis, never one to beat around the bush, replied, Why don’t you try taking the horn out of your mouth?

This week, some of President Trump’s advisers wish he’d just taken the horn out of his mouth.⁷

Comparisons such as these might seem a bit extreme, but they demonstrate the way in which, for the most part, jazz people aligned against the Trump presidency with uniformity and urgency. A number of benefit concerts to support the Biden/Harris campaign were held in the lead-up to the 2020 election; of these, none was of a higher profile than Jazz for America, an event held in October which featured numerous jazz luminaries including John Scofield, Ravi Coltrane, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Christian McBride, among others. Given the fact Biden and Harris were successful in the election, one might assume that these types of events played a significant role in shaping public opinion; that is, until we are reminded that jazz has stubbornly remained an increasingly modest aspect of American cultural discourse.

A statement like this, especially in the context of a book on jazz, might come off as being overly pessimistic. And perhaps, I’ll admit, there is some truth to this. But it is something I see nearly every day: many (if not most) students, including many who are advanced-level players in classical forms, know absolutely nothing about this music, not even the big names like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Yes, they may have heard these names before, but seldom do they have any particular knowledge of what they did. This is the unquestionably discomforting reality faced by jazz practitioners. But musicians, fans, and others who might align themselves with what has often been termed the jazz community never seem to lose hope that, with just the right education, more of the masses of jazz-ignorant music fans can be reached and converted. One can’t fault them for their efforts or their outlook.

I’d like to turn for a moment to terminology. In my previous book, I wrote extensively about the concept of the jazz community.⁸ In short, I suggested that this term, which is still used with great frequency, does not really have a specific meaning that aligns with conventional understandings of community. Following Benedict Anderson, I argued that the jazz community, such as it is constituted, is largely imagined, and that such a perspective allows us to connect with others not only across physical distances but also in temporal terms. Through recorded media, listeners can participate in a type of community that is generated through the process of recording and that is completed by the act of listening. Following on from this, I have chosen to avoid using this phrase for the most part, save for when it appears in a quotation. Instead, I use the term jazz people when referring to large-scale, nonspecific entities, as I find this term to be somewhat more useful in conceptualizing the larger jazz world. While individuals may differ vastly in their engagement with jazz, in the final analysis, they are all people who share an interest in the music.

Whether it is explicitly defined this way or not, jazz people today are increasingly occupied (or preoccupied) with advocating for jazz, with educating the public. Indeed, statements by musicians and others regularly invoke the need to educate audiences; jazz musicians are increasingly engaging in public service and advocacy designed to introduce jazz to new audiences and maintain a positive public image of the genre. This is not easy, to be sure, as the advent of digital listening and distribution has simultaneously opened up new worlds of music and culture and also has had the effect of shrinking the actual listening experience. A case in point: a few years ago, I was leading a discussion of the 1959 docudrama The Cry of Jazz. The story of this film, the goal of which was to establish jazz as Black music, is centered on a jazz listening club meeting. In our discussion of the film, one student raised his hand and asked, Professor, do people still do this, have jazz listening parties? The answer I gave, as I recall, was along the lines of not as long as the main way we listen to music is to stuff earbuds in our heads. Jazz listening among the nonspecialist public used to be more widely social, as did many other aspects of the music and its culture; the same might be said about many other genres. Social listening has been supplanted by social media, creating an interactive dynamic that is simultaneously more global and more solitary. Again, change has been rapid and profound.

Jazz education, too, has changed. A number of pioneering figures in the field have left us, including David Baker, Donald Byrd, and Nathan Davis, to name just a few. And we lost one of our most endearing and enduring figures in bringing jazz to the public, Marian McPartland, whose weekly Piano Jazz program was a fixture on public radio since the 1970s. This is to say nothing of the numerous jazz artists, writers, and other key jazz figures: musicians like Dave Brubeck, Yusef Lateef, Chick Corea, Ornette Coleman, Geri Allen, Curtis Fuller, Roy Hargrove, Wayne Shorter; jazz writers including Stanley Crouch, Nat Hentoff, Gunther Schuller, and Albert Murray; industry figures like George Wein; and many others too numerous to list here. The COVID-19 global pandemic has had a devastating impact on jazz, taking some of its most illustrious figures, such as Ellis Marsalis and Lee Konitz, as well as the countless local and regional figures whose deaths did not make the pages of DownBeat or the New York Times. This is to say nothing of the nearly incalculable loss of livelihood experienced by countless musicians, venues, and others who suffered devastating disruptions to their careers. These losses have left jazz in a very different place than it was even a few years ago. As time goes on, the temporal distance between jazz education and the actual historical worlds of the music that serve as a basis for study potentially grows even wider. This is the inevitable trajectory of time, but the oft-expressed anxiety over jazz morphing into a static, museumified music risks becoming even more entrenched.

And yet, in some ways, the past few years have opened new doors and presented new opportunities. Collaborative online performance, which has long been overlooked due in part to concerns about synchronization and limits on communication speeds, became, in some cases, the only way for musicians to collaborate. Performers from school ensembles to professional artists adapted to the online world. Many ensembles made recordings that were recorded separately and then mixed together; sometimes, the results were haphazard, but in other cases, the performances are exceptionally strong. One example can be seen in the recordings made by the Quarantine Big Band Helsinki that produced a series of YouTube videos featuring composite performances. Comprised—as the name would imply—of a group of Finnish musicians, the band recorded several challenging charts, including Vince Mendoza’s arrangement of the Brecker Brothers’ Some Skunk Funk.⁹ The band members are unquestionably very good players, and the syncing of the parts produces a performance that, if heard from a live band, would be classified as being very tight. Institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center presented virtual performances, carried live across platforms like YouTube and Spotify; not only did this allow regular patrons to continue their engagement with jazz, but the increased use of virtual performance through streaming has potentially opened new paths to connect with audiences that are not limited by how close they live to a venue. Jazz education programs moved teaching and performing online, using platforms such as Zoom to keep students and teachers connected, and although it was by no means an ideal scenario, it provided a means to keep going in the face of what was truly an existential threat.

The pandemic was initially approached as a fight for survival and not just in terms of public health. Already on the ropes in terms of waning public popularity, COVID threatened to erase the entire economic basis of jazz, its central performative and community space: the club. And indeed, many venues were impacted, in too many cases resulting in closure.¹⁰ But jazz people were already well versed in the ins and outs of keeping the music alive in the face of stiff challenges from the early musicians who struggled for acceptance to jazz educators who often faced hostile academic environments to fans of the music who desperately want to preserve what they see as a vital, important form of cultural expression. In confronting the pandemic, jazz people fell back on what they knew best: they improvised.

The creation of new jazz people, be it through a college jazz history class, a Twitter exchange, a motion picture, or a casual conversation, has thus become an even greater imperative; in all of these contexts, there is one constant: at the risk of stating the obvious, jazz is something that is learned. Learning jazz has largely been addressed in scholarship with respect to the pedagogy of learning how to play the music and in learning about its main practitioners. And indeed, these are important perspectives. But all such contexts must be understood in relation to forces outside the recording studio, the classroom, the stage, and the club. Learning about jazz takes place in many different forms, settings, contexts, and communities. In the following chapters, I examine a number of distinctive case studies ranging from historical publications and critical perspectives to recent events concerning jazz advocacy and the music’s place in media to the often poorly understood topic of race and its role in how jazz is learned and taught within institutions of learning. Any interaction relating to the music will, by its very nature, involve learning in some way, be it an exercise in improvisational theory, a jazz appreciation class, or a jazz fan explaining to a friend why they should give the music a chance. All of these studies involve the work and nature of particular kinds of institutions that play a role in learning about jazz. Some of these are formal, such as schools or civic arts organizations that have particular, often well-defined missions. Some are less formal, such as jazz criticism and publishing, which have their own kinds of practices, rules, and perspectives. And some involve the building of knowledge about jazz in less overtly defined ways, emerging from diverse communities within which jazz occupies an important place. Initiatives to foster a greater appreciation for the music among the general public are not the sole purview of educational and civic entities; jazz fans themselves serve as advocates for the music. Particular ideas about the nature of jazz—what it is, what it means, whom it belongs to—are shaped, taken apart, and shaped again, be it through a masterclass, a book, a conversation, a movie, or a tweet. Public jazz pedagogy has, it seems, become an institution in its own right.

In the first chapter, I engage in a close reading of jazz trombone method books in the first decade or so of jazz’s emergence in the public sphere, engaging an audience of musical learners whose understanding of jazz was still very limited. The proliferation of instructional books in jazz speaks to its increasingly vital presence in both professional music performance and with respect to the development of a general understanding of the music as a whole. The 1919 publications by Henry Fillmore, Mayhew Lake, and Fortunato Sordillo all endeavored to present not only practical musical guidance but to work toward a definition for and understanding of what jazz is. Later books in the mid to late 1920s continue these ideas, establishing an understanding of the music through particular musical and textual devices, often capitalizing on the increasing popularity of recordings. This is followed in chapter two by a discussion of lost voices in jazz historiography. Specifically, I present two particular case studies that speak to the question of why some individuals’ voices carry through the years while others seem to fall into relative obscurity. In the first case study, my focus is the jazz writer Paul Eduard Miller, a widely known and published critic in the mid to late 1930s who, by the 1950s, had been eclipsed by peer figures such as Marshall Stearns. In looking at Miller, I examine both his published columns for DownBeat as well as a pair of unpublished book manuscripts housed at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago. The next case study turns toward performers, and in particular, a related question of why some artists are picked for fame while others are relegated to relative historiographic insignificance. In doing so, I position canonic figures as outliers, drawing on the work of Malcolm Gladwell; specifically, I also examine the nature of the ordinary jazz musician whose appearances in the canon are generally a function of brushes with greatness.

Chapter three focuses on the culture of the big band in jazz education and how this emerged historically. In the first of two main case studies, I look at the relationship between Stan Kenton and jazz education in the 1950s and 1960s. Specifically, I examine the relationship between Kenton and Leon Breeden, the director of the jazz program at North Texas State (now the University of North Texas). Kenton and Breeden, I argue, shared many ideas and perspectives about what jazz ought to be and how it should be situated in education. Then, the chapter turns to a study of Kenton’s protégé, trumpeter Maynard Ferguson. I situate Ferguson as a significant influence on jazz education in the 1970s based on a combination of covers of popular hits and an intensely virtuosic, physical style of performance that resonated deeply with an audience consisting overwhelmingly of young White men. Both Kenton and Ferguson, I contend, sent ripples through the jazz education system that are still being felt today. The next chapter serves as something of a counterpoint, focusing on the ways in which Blackness has asserted itself in jazz education. The first part of the chapter looks at the stories of two bands from predominantly Black schools that, in 1972, succeeded in what were largely White spaces. The first of these, a band from Chicago’s Malcolm X College, would make waves with their performance at the Notre Dame Collegiate Jazz Festival, winning both awards and accolades. This band, hailing from a community college renamed for the late Black Nationalist leader, stood at an intersection between jazz education and the imperatives of social justice. The other band discussed in this part of the chapter is the Kashmere Stage Band. A high school group from Houston, the Kashmere band would stun the jazz education world by winning the 1972 All-American High School Stage Band Festival in Mobile, Alabama. Their win was an important occasion in the world of high school stage bands, long the province of White schools and ensembles. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington competition for high school bands. I position this program as a critical corrective initiative that attempts to redress the historical underrepresentation of students of color in jazz education programs. But even with the centering of Duke Ellington as a link to the institution’s larger aesthetic goals, the political economies of American music education are deeply entrenched, and a number of inequities persist.

In the final chapter, I turn to the topic of public pedagogy, the ways in which jazz people attempt to bring jazz to audiences that are unfamiliar with it and, at the same time, attempt to shape the public understanding of the genre. After a discussion of jazz defensiveness, I examine the ways in which the jazz metaphor has been employed as a vehicle for public pedagogy, predicated on a view of jazz as a democratic, collaborative art form. These programs will often involve a pedagogical component centered on particular understandings of the music that are accessible to lay audiences. In the final case study in this chapter, I examine the films of Damien Chazelle, particularly Whiplash and La La Land. As both films placed jazz at the center of their narratives and were very successful commercially and critically, they generated significant discussion in the jazz media, much of which was decidedly negative. The release and success of these films seemed to necessitate responses that sought to correct the record, to defend jazz against what was seen as, at best, a distortion of jazz, and at worst, an outright attack. The reality is, I argue, more complicated, calling for a more nuanced interpretation.

I would also like to make a brief comment about positionality. The studies that follow in this book are written from the perspective of a White, American, college-jazz-educated musician and musicologist. Having been a student and teacher in several different jazz education programs over the course of more than three decades, I consider myself something of an insider to this field, but in other contexts, some of which are discussed in this manuscript, I am looking in from the outside, at communities and histories that are not always my own. In saying this, in no way do I want to suggest that ideas that are not addressed here are not vitally important, and indeed, groundbreaking scholarship has been and continues to be done on such topics, much of which is a result of the work of nonmale and non-White scholars. This is very important work, and it is imperative that it be supported by those of us in this field. In general, I do not address topics emerging from outside the United States. In saying this, I likewise do not wish to dismiss or otherwise overlook this important scholarship. Indeed, many non-American jazz scholars, including some who are cited in this book, have made invaluable contributions to my development and are doing important work in understanding the ways in which jazz plays out as a global system. My voice and my perspectives are but a modest part of a multitude of communities of scholars, musicians, fans, and others around the world. I hope this work will open other paths and other avenues for inquiry from vantage points that are far removed from my own.

Chapter 1

TO JAZZ, OR NOT TO JAZZ

Pedagogy and Publishing in Early Jazz Method Books¹

INTRODUCTION: A GLISS IS JUST A GLISS … OR IS IT?

On February 12, 1924, an audience at Aeolian Hall in New York bore witness to a landmark event in American musical lore: Paul Whiteman’s infamous Experiment in Modern Music, which would introduce Rhapsody in Blue to the world and make a bona fide star of its composer, George Gershwin. And there is perhaps no more memorable moment in this piece than its opening passage, featuring a drawn-out rising glissando over the course of about five seconds and one and one-half octaves played by clarinetist Ross Gorman.² It was Gorman, in fact, who originally came up with the idea to play the glissando during rehearsals for the piece; Gershwin liked