them in performance become mechanisms for the regulation of group identity and collective memory (Bourdieu 1977, 78; Giddens 1979, 2; Gilroy 1991b, 211). There is, of course, value in approaches that see jazz as a complex system examinable in its own right. But when those approaches radically decontextualize the music, we might be moving toward realizing the state of affairs about which Dizzy Gillespie warned drummer Arthur Taylor in this chapter’s epigraph.
In evoking musicians’ pathways, I am drawing on Ruth Finnegan’s The Hidden Musicians (1989), a book that examines a specific locality, the English town Milton Keynes, and attempts to make sense of the variety of music-making activity in it: choral music, brass band music, jazz, rock, and country, among others. For Finnegan, the pathways that individuals follow in musical performance and their negotiation of urban life are the “known and regular routes which people [choose]—or [are] led into—and which they both [keep] open and [extend] through their actions” (305). Pathways, moreover, are meaningful beyond their offering familiar routes that one can follow or sets of musical practices that one can learn or adapt: “They also [have] symbolic depth. One common impression given by many participants was that their musical pathways were of high value among the various paths in their lives” (305). The importance of these pathways lies in their providing a “framework for people’s participation in urban life, something overlapping with, but more permanent and structured than, the personal networks in which individuals also participate” (323).
Moreover, she argues, “Entry on to particular musical pathways [was] dependent … on family membership [and] partly related to that family’s social and economic resources. Certain activities needed money, transport, or access to specific kinds of venues or networks, or were perhaps related to particular kinds of educational achievements, material possessions, cultural interests, or social aspirations. All these were thus likely to play some part in the selection of particular pathways—though differently in different contexts and for different individuals” (311–12). These varied constellations do not map easily onto notions of class, however. Her data showed that the encouragement and support of parents, siblings, and friends were often more significant for young musicians than their guardians’ incomes, occupations, or education. Gender and age in particular proved more crucial than parental resources or attainment in shaping or constraining the musical pathways chosen by young people (315–16), making it difficult for boys to become involved in classical music or girls in rock bands, for example. In any event, she asserts that “the continuance of … pathways—so often ignored or taken for granted as ‘just there’—depends not on the existence in some abstract sphere of particular musical ‘works’, but on people’s collective and active practice on the ground” (325; see also Goehr 1992, 102–15).
Although Finnegan’s pathways are largely ready-made templates that frame and enable collective and individual practice, her notion may be extended to include the literal pathways taken by individuals to musical performance. How, indeed, have jazz’s most highly praised practitioners typically learned their craft? What elements have been integral to the process of performing jazz, and what is the role of education, formal or informal, in making young musicians aware of and conversant with those elements? To what degree do class, age, and gender constrain one’s ability to enter a jazz pathway? And how does a musician’s deployment of what he or she has learned affect performance or our understandings of what jazz is? Too often commentators equate education with formal institutions and ignore the other salient ways in which people acquire knowledge. For jazz musicians, as Paul Berliner’s Thinking in Jazz (1994) shows, there are at least as many paths to knowledge as there are individuals willing to embark on them. In the course of a musician’s lifetime, he or she may glean important insights from friends and relatives, private teachers, fellow musicians, books and other pedagogical materials,23 audio and video recordings, and close observation of live performance, as well as from classroom instruction in history, music theory, and performance practice.
None of these activities has to be focused specifically on the different musical approaches generally subsumed by the label “jazz.” Indeed, at the most basic level, singers and instrumentalists need to find ways to use their respective tools. In some cases they can proceed admirably by learning to deal with the practical issue of generating sound without much reference to the aesthetic parameters of jazz or African American musics. Nor do musicians’ educational activities always have to concern music. Much work in ethnomusicology and anthropology since the 1960s has focused on the interconnectedness of different domains of experience. Writings dealing with musics as diverse as those from Papua New Guinea, the Amazonian rainforest, Liberia, and Nigeria as well as those most easily labeled jazz, country, and European concert music all stress the importance of knowledge of history, ecology, and social and cultural codes for music making (Feld 1994a; Seeger 1987; Stone 1982; Waterman 1990; Monson 1996; Kingsbury 1988; Fox 2004). Thus, learning about music requires engagement with a wide range of materials that may not be part of formalized instruction or simplistic understandings of race and history.
Mark Tucker’s description of Duke Ellington’s musical education (1991) encompasses what Ellington learned from musicians like Willie “The Lion” Smith, Will Marion Cook, and Bubber Miley, as well as what he gained from studying piano rolls such as James P. Johnson’s “Carolina Shout.” John Coltrane’s education includes what he took from studying at the Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia and playing with Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk alongside what he gathered from immersion in African American religious rituals, listening to recordings of Indian and African music (Weinstein 1993, 60–72; Porter 1998, 25–34, 41–53, 63–72), and reputedly practicing with Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (1947). And, in a more contemporary example, Joshua Redman’s musical education combines early experiences playing gamelan, rhythm and blues, and ska with those gained from playing in the jazz band at Berkeley High School in California and touring with his father, saxophonist Dewey Redman, in the late 1980s. A thorough and usable jazz education, therefore, is more often than not idiosyncratic and encompasses more than what might be typically taught in a classroom (see Reed 1979).
Classroom settings, however, were not foreign or inimical to jazz even before the beginning of formalized college-level jazz education in the late 1940s.24 Hsio Wen Shih’s description of the backgrounds of influential 1920s jazz musicians (1959) highlights the degree to which seeing these musicians as untutored omits crucial information. The typical 1920s innovator, he writes,
was born about 1900, into a Negro family doing better than most, possibly in the Deep South, but more likely on its fringe; in either case, his family usually migrated North in time for him to finish high school. If he had gone to college, and he often had, he had gone to Wilberforce or a … school like Howard or Fisk. He might have aimed at a profession and fallen back on jazz as a second choice. He was, in any case, by birth or by choice, a member of the rising Negro middle class; he was Fletcher Henderson, or Don Redman, or Coleman Hawkins, or Duke Ellington. (174)
Moving forward in time, we discover that the “young lions”25 who emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s are not the only ones to have had significant formal schooling in music. Among the prominent examples, saxophonist Joe Lovano studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston; pianist Cecil Taylor at the New England Conservatory; saxophonists Joe Henderson and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley at Detroit’s Wayne State University and Florida A&M University, respectively; and keyboardist Lyle Mays at the University of North Texas.
These examples show that the ways in which one learns to be a jazz musician are extremely varied. No one is actually born a jazz musician, even those who are phenotypically black. Instead, she or he must acquire the necessary skills through a lifetime of engagement with music making in general and by gathering as much information as possible from diverse sources. Young women have traditionally had a more difficult time acquiring such skills, given the extreme homosocial and masculinist practices that characterize the discourse and social world of jazz musicians (Tucker 2004). Formalized jazz education, complemented by antidiscrimination laws, has ameliorated the situation somewhat by functioning
