bars and the numerous performance venues that dotted American cities prior to the 1970s. Before that time, musicians acquired their skills primarily, but not exclusively, in a performance world that limited opportunities for women. From the large corpus of musical and performative skills that musicians develop in either setting, a few merit more extensive consideration: developing proficiency and individual style; developing the ability to perform with other musicians and improvise in real time; and learning to navigate the professional world of music making.
Musical proficiency can most simply be glossed as the ability to produce the sounds that are in one’s head with whatever musical tools are at one’s disposal. Such proficiency is a function of knowing the capabilities and limitations of one’s instrument so well that the conduit from concept to execution seems almost direct. The fluidity and ease with which exceptional performers such as Charlie Parker have plied their craft typically leads the outsider to think that musicians are playing without reference to conscious knowledge. More accurately, though, they are exhibiting in such moments a mastery of their instruments and the structural, interactive, and textural parameters of performance that makes what they do seem natural. The ability to speak furnishes a useful comparison. In one’s adult years, the specific steps taken in acquiring that ability may have receded from consciousness, but one’s skill at deploying it, even while carrying out other activities simultaneously, is the result of having deeply internalized it.
For developing proficiency, education has a great role to play, particularly when we remember that education can happen effectively both within and outside institutional walls. Although guitarists Wes Montgomery, Allan Holdsworth, and Russell Malone learned to play with little or no formal instruction, they are indeed exceptions. Almost always, someone somewhere has been crucial to the young musician’s ability to navigate his or her instrument, tease appropriate and inappropriate sounds from it, and use them in a group performance context. At nearly every point in jazz’s development, young musicians have been eager to mine whatever they could from the accumulated wisdom of experienced musicians, teachers, and bandleaders. Since the 1970s, formalized study at institutions such as the New England Conservatory, William Paterson University, the University of North Texas, and Berklee has afforded young players apprenticeship opportunities with faculty such as David Berger, Loren Schoenberg, Joe Chambers, Jim Hall, James Williams, Rodney Whitaker, and Reggie Workman. Few aspiring players would pass up the chance to have the harmonic and rhythmic intricacies of their most prized recordings revealed to them in courses that deal with the development of particular jazz styles. Where sound is concerned, those institutions perhaps cannot and should not be expected to foster the development of individual style. Learning to improvise and learning to play with other musicians in real time are also skills that musicians can develop in a number of settings, from practicing with recordings that provide accompaniment or using functionally similar MIDI-based software like Band-in-a-Box to participating in jam sessions with like-minded musicians or performing in school or professional ensembles. In any event, musicians are constantly faced with having to listen and to think critically about what they’re hearing and how they’re contributing to it. What formalized institutions provide are spaces where musicians can practice, rehearse, perform, and assimilate a wide body of knowledge in an arena where the stakes are considerably lower than they are in professional performances.
According to the musicians I interviewed, the area in which institutions are perhaps the most deficient is the teaching of improvisation. In the decades after the appearance of George Russell’s The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation (1959),26 a number of improvisation primers were published that stressed what jazz educators commonly refer to as the chord-scale approach to improvisation (e.g., Reeves 1989). In an simplest terms, improvisers using this approach associate a particular scale with each harmony in a composition, so that upon encountering a G major seventh chord, they think, for example, “play a G Lydian scale or an F# minor pentatonic.” Such an approach, on one hand, makes it much easier for novice educators to teach jazz improvisation and, on the other, potentially encourages musicians to play scale patterns over harmonies rather than address the varied ways that expert players improvised in similar situations.27 Indeed, one inside joke among jazz musicians is that schooled musicians are easy to identify, for in improvising they instinctively employ the melodic minor scale a half step up from the root of a dominant chord whenever one appears on a lead sheet. Saxophonist Sam Newsome said that Terence Blanchard would always yell, “Get out of there!” when he heard his bandmates falling back on such clichés in performance (Newsome 1995).
Many musicians told me that educators work more effectively when they inculcate in students the idea that learning the conventions and rules of jazz performance constitutes a base for further exploration rather than a rigid formula to be applied. Jazz improvisation requires not only having the theoretical materials at hand: it also requires knowing how to use them. As vibraphonist Gary Burton has observed, jazz education such as that offered at Berklee “allows [the young musician] to go further faster” (Helland 1995, 24). Burton explains, “A typical classical musician studies how music works, how harmony works, what the grammar of this music is in order to play better. You study your instrument with a master player. You study these same things as a jazz musician, but instead of using as an example a piece by Beethoven, you use a piece by Monk or Ellington. You’re still learning musical information, which helps you to be a more knowledgeable, proficient player” (quoted in Helland 1995, 23). Through courses in harmony, improvisation, composition, and arranging and participation in ensembles, students are presented with the opportunity to assimilate the advances of the past in a systematic manner.
When it comes to negotiating the professional world, there are a number of ways in which formal and informal settings are again complementary. Professional musicians need, in addition to performance knowledge, an understanding of copyrights, music publishing, recording processes, booking, promotion and marketing, and survival on the road. In the past, the only way for musicians to learn such things was by gleaning them from conversation, trial and error, and experience. Jazz education in no way obviates the need for musicians to actually have such experiences, reflect upon them, and develop their own strategies for coping with them. What it does do, however, is to give them more reasonable expectations and the opportunity to benefit systematically from others who have already made and worked through mistakes. Perhaps the most significant, and perhaps unintended, consequence of jazz education is its contribution to the formation of musical networks that I discuss in chapter 4.
Despite differences in age, geographical background, cultural identity, and musical training, each of the musicians I interviewed stressed the importance of various African American musics and cultural practices in their education and experience as jazz artists. Pianist James Williams, for example, was born in Memphis, Tennessee. His early musical education included lessons focused on Western piano repertoire. His training included his work as a pianist and organist in church. In my interviews and subsequent conversations with him, he stressed the profound influence 1960s free-format radio stations in Memphis had on him. In addition to programming a variety of rhythm and blues, doo-wop, blues, and Motown-produced music, those stations played rock and roll that drew largely upon African American musical practices. Williams studied music at Memphis State University, dividing his time between jazz performance, classical performance, and music education. Upon graduation in the early 1970s, he took a teaching position at the Berklee College of Music. He left there toward the end of the decade to join Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the version of the group that included an eighteen-year-old Wynton Marsalis. Williams left Blakey’s group in the early 1980s and, over the next several years, established himself as a reputable composer, side-man, and producer of recordings for other jazz musicians. Through his production company, Finas Sound Productions, he hosted concerts in the mid- and late 1990s that paid tribute to (then) living jazz legends like Milt Jackson and John Lewis. From the late 1990s until his death in 2004, he was director of the jazz studies program at William Paterson University.
Pianist Bruce Barth was born in Pasadena, California, in the late 1950s. His family moved to New York state when he was seven. Like that of Williams, his early musical training included
