14. See appendix A for the full text of U.S. Congressional Resolution 57.
15. For a sample of the work of ethnomusicologists on improvisation from a comparative standpoint, see Nettl 1974, Nettl 1991, and Lortat-Jacob 1987; for a sample of cross-cultural work on musicallearning, see Merriam 1964, 145–64. Of importance as well are Lord 1970, Bennett 1980, and the overview provided by Campbell 1991, 186–206.
16. Many musicians view the approach in formal education of “putting the cart” of music theory “before the horse” of practice as problematic. They refer, in fact, to certain graduates of college jazz programs by ridiculing their deficient artistry as “school jazz.” The implication, elaborated upon later in the study, is that, despite the students’ obvious instrumental virtuosity, they lack understanding of the jazz tradition and fail to appreciate fundamental creative processes and aesthetic values integral to jazz as an expressive language. See also chapter 7, note 17.
1. Love at First Sound
1. The idea of the newborn’s first dance and song is a popular Ghanaian view, as expressed by Ghanaian dancer Victor Clottey as part of a lecture and demonstration he gave for my world music class at Northwestern University, winter 1986. Similarly, in Nigeria, “it is believed that the musical training of the vocal-music composer starts from the womb.... The pregnant mother who participates in musical activities is believed to introduce the unborn baby to rhythmical movements of all categories of music. After the baby is born, he gradually becomes acquainted with musical sound through the lullabies sung to him, and through his mother’s continuous musical involvement while he is firmly strapped to her back.” Agu 1984, 13–14. The popular media in America has made frequent reference to similar notions in mentioning such contemporary child-birthing practices as encouraging women to hear, while pregnant, only those types of music they prefer.
2. The role played by these inventions of the music industry differs, of course, from person to person, community to community, and from one period to the next. For commentary on technological tools, see Fraser 1983, 38; although live performance appears to have had the most profound effect on initiating the interest of the older jazz players in his study, the radio and record player assumed a greater role in attracting learners of more recent generations to jazz.
3. It was not uncommon for youngsters to develop skills on a variety of instruments. Coleman Hawkins studied piano and cello, as well as tenor saxophone; Lester Young studied violin, trumpet, and drums with his father, and later learned clarinet, as well as baritone, alto, and tenor saxophones; Clifford Brown could play piano, vibraphone, and drums, as well as trumpet. Various considerations, from personal taste to the needs of different bands and the relative opportunities for acquiring one kind of instrument over another, ultimately influenced artists’ decisions as to performing on a variety of instruments and switching instruments during their careers. Hawkins in Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 208; Young in Porter 1985b, 4–6; Brown in Gardner 1961, 20.
4. Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 92–93. Similarly, as a youngster, Coleman Hawkins “used to sit up and practice [instrumental lessons] ... all day long. Then when I was through ... I would play jazz all the rest of the day.... I also used to go to all the classical concerts.” Ibid., 208.
5. Beiderbecke in Sudhalter and Evans 1974, 27; Armstrong described by Kid Ory in Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 49.
6. Gillespie 1979, 31. Regarding comparable aspects of musical training and models in the African American community, Pops Foster describes the members of a Holiness church as playing “some great jazz on those hymns.” Foster 1971, 21. Milt Jackson says, “My blues comes from church music.” Balliett 1971, 167. T. Bone Walker reaches back in his memory to early childhood when he relates that “the first time I ever heard a boogie-woogie piano was the first time I went to church.... [It] was a kind of blues,” he recalls, adding, “The preacher used to preach in a bluesy tone sometimes.” Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 250.
In the face of the ideological tensions between black religious and secular musical genres that sometimes complicate their learning courses, often youngsters absorb the essential elements of African American music from alternative sources, or adopt clever ploys of musical code switching to disguise their objectives. “Mama and them were so religious,” Nina Simone maintains, “that they wouldn’t allow you to play boogie-woogie in the house, but would allow you to use the boogie-woogie beat to play a gospel tune.... Our music crosses all those lines.” Fraser 1983, 75. Doc Cheatham described his participation in an early church band where he and his young friends would experiment with jazz until they caught sight of the dean, then quickly switch to hymns as he passed by. One day, the dean found the musicians out, and became “so angry that he broke up the group.” For an elaboration on the aesthetic values common to different African American musics, see Burnim and Maultsby 1987. Scenes of lively church music performance appear in Jones, video 1991, and Zardis, video 1993.
7. Gillespie 1979, 31. Aspiring white jazz musicians like Bud Freeman and his friends also attended services of Chicago’s African American churches, drawing great inspiration from the music. Freeman 1989, 17–18.
8. Fraser 1983, 61.
9. Bix Beiderbecke was alleged to have frustrated his piano teacher (“the Professor”) by playing back the demonstrated pieces “with improvements.” Sudhalter and Evans 1974, 30. As youngsters, Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang “slipp[ed] in some improvised passages” amid the mazurkas and polkas they performed at dances. Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 272–73. At times, circumstantial features of performance bring the student’s special talents to light. Earl Hines recalls an early public recital in which he temporarily forgot the music and improvised “fourteen bars” of his “own ideas until I caught up with the music again.” Dance 1977, 15. Other artists whom I interviewed describe their experiments, as youngsters, with varying such material as classical music themes and marching band parts (FH, GB, and BB).
10. Levine (1977, 294) notes the powerful “conversion” experiences of young white musicians discovering the music of African American jazz artists in Chicago during the twenties. The unnamed Japanese musician told his story, in Japan, to Ralph Samuelson, who repeated it to me in New York City during a personal conversation, fall 1982.
11. Stan Getz refers to contributing to his family’s income as a youngster, explaining that “the openness of jazz was so intriguing.” He adds, “Besides, I needed the money, for my family. My father was a mostly out-of-work printer and at that time in the 30s they didn’t allow Jews into the printer’s union, so we had a hard time.” Hooper 1991, 76.
12. For an elaboration on the theme of small-town bigotry, see Gillespie 1979, 30. Danny Barker discusses the jazz career as one of the few alternatives to domestic and manual labor jobs for blacks in New Orleans in Zardis, video 1993.
13. Related issues concerning the “attractions of a jazz identity” are discussed in Cambor, Lisowitz, and Miller 1962, 7–8.
2. Hangin’ Out and Jammin’
1. Community is used here in the sense of a “community of interest” that transcends geographic boundaries, where people “participate to some extent in the occupational role and ideology of the professional jazz musician. They learn and accept at least some of the [jazz musician’s] norms ... regarding proper and improper language, good and bad music, stylish and unstylish clothing, acceptable and unacceptable audience behavior and so on.” Merriam and Mack 1960, 211. For additional sociological studies elaborating upon this notion, see Becker 1951 and 1963 and Cameron 1954.
2. Similar devotion to idols has characterized the behavior of jazz learners over the music’s history. Young Rex Stewart “tried to walk like [Louis Armstrong], talk like him, eat like him, sleep like him.” Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 206. Jimmy and Percy Heath admit that, two generations later, they “followed [Dizzy Gillespie’s] band around. We were even wearing his costume, berets and thin artist ties.” Watrous 1992.
3. For numerous accounts by musicians
of “cutting contests” in the early jazz and swing periods, see Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 24–25, 128, 172, 194, 284; for a sociologist’s perspective on the jam session, see Cameron 1954.
4. Becker (1953, 22–25) describes the essential role of such networks in the jazz musician’s search for employment.
5. For discussion of these famous jam sessions, see Patrick 1983, Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 335–70, and Davis 1990, 51–82.
6. My recollection of an interview with Armstrong during a televised portion of the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival.
7. Konitz, video 1990. For an elaboration of Tristano’s teaching method and philosophy, see McKinney 1978.
8. Hooper 1991, 76.
9. Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 76.
10. Davis, video 1986.
11. Dave Bomberg told me of the Coltrane and Dolphy incident in a personal conversation, fall 1984.
12. Learner responsibility is a common feature of occupational apprenticeships in many trades. Becker 1972, 94–95.
13. For reference to male competitive bonding routines in African American culture, see Abrahams 1970b, 32–39.
14. Harsh methods by which jazz artists test each other’s abilities—especially during transitional, innovative periods in the history of the music—are well documented. Kenny Clarke and Dizzy Gillespie describe devising and performing compositions with unusual, difficult chord progressions to repel players who might otherwise have tried to sit in with their bands. Feather 1980, 9; Stearns 1956, 222.
15. Former students like Patience Higgins fondly recall not only the modest fees that Harris charged them, but exciting classes that extended from the evening into the early hours of the morning, until finally the exasperated landlord forced them out of the building where Harris had rented the classroom space. “Barry’s a giving, loving person,” Higgins explains. “It’s one of his purposes in life to pass the music on to our generation, the younger generation, to keep this music alive.”.
16. Classical music influence noted in Schuller 1968, 146. The practice of musicians with varied training interacting extends back to the early days of jazz in Storyville, New Orleans, where Jelly Roll Morton experienced the sharing of “musical knowledge” and musical “gifts” among African Americans of distinct social classes, each providing its artists with different kinds of training. Lomax 1950, 84.
17. Carter (1986, 12) credits Bowden in particular for his contribution as a pioneering instructor of dance band music at Tuskegee Institute in 1919, and at Georgia State College, now Savannah State College, in 1926.
18. The Berklee School of Music became the Berklee College of Music. Berk 1970, 29, 46. Reference to Lenox in Carter 1986, 10–11, 12. For a description of other early American degree programs in related areas such as “Commercial Music” at Los Angeles City College, 1946, and “Dance Band” at North Texas State University, 1947, see Branch 1975, 22. Discussions of the growing trends in jazz education are also in Bowman 1988, Briscuso 1974, and Suber 1976.
Attaining respect within the dominant culture is a problem of long standing for African American artists in every media. In the case of jazz, a number of interrelated attitudes have contributed, over the years, to the resistance artists have faced from the mainstream public and America’s music institutions. One fundamental problem has been racism. As early as their 1901 national meeting, members of the American Federation of Musicians pledged “to play no ragtime, and to do all in their power to counteract the pernicious influence exerted by ‘Mr. Johnson.’ ‘My Rag-Time Lady’ and others of the negro school.” Berlin 1980, 41. By 1947, the only local musicians’ unions in America that were integrated were those of New York and Detroit (Lewis 1947, 1), and many remained segregated until the early sixties. See also the discussion by Merriam (1964, 241–44) of the portrayal of jazz as a symbol of evil, and Gioia’s apt critique of “The Primitivist Myth” (1988, 19–49).
Other disparaging views owe to the confusion between jazz as an art form and the venues at which jazz has been performed, especially those promoting illicit activities. For musicians, the most offensive of these lingering associations concerns the alleged origin of jazz in New Orleans houses of prostitution. Sidney Bechet (1960, 53–54) attacks this misrepresentation, pointing out that, although such establishments hired solo ragtime pianists, they rarely hired jazz bands. Jazz musicians largely eamed their livings by playing for parties, picnics, or balls. Bechet sees the stereotypes surrounding New Orleans jazz as prurient projections on the part of jazz’s critics, and observes wryly, “If people want to take a [jazz] melody and think what it’s saying is trash, that ain’t the fault of the melody” (54). Related associations damaging to the reputation of jazz concern substance abuse in the lives of some musicians. See discussion in chapter 17, note 1.
Beyond the confusion of jazz as an art form with the extramusical issues described above are fundamental misunderstandings rooted in differences that distinguish jazz from the dominant music culture epitomized by Western art music. Many of the music’s detractors. have neither understood nor appreciated the stylistic, formal, and aesthetic components of jazz that delineate it as a unique musical language. See discussion in notes 4 and 6 to the introduction.
Equally problematical have been outsiders’ perceptions of the processes of learning, transmitting, and producing jazz. The emphasis that the Western art music community places on formalized education and the written symbols of musical knowledge—from notation systems to music degrees—has made it difficult for members to recognize and appreciate, as a learned system, the knowledge that improvisers transmit through alternative education systems and through alternative forms of representation, some oral, some altogether nonverbal. Naivete and ignorance have frequently led to belittling stereotypes about jazz artists as “unschooled” or “illegitimate” musicians.
Correspondingly, the importance that the Western art music community attaches to music literacy and written composition has obscured recognition of the actual skills required by improvisation. Although improvisation has had its own rich history in Western art music—contemporaries of Beethoven considered his some of his improvisations equal, if not superior, to some of his written compositions (Sonneck 1927, 15, 22)—improvisation has, with the exception of isolated practices of the avant-garde and church music, all but disappeared from the training of classical musicians and from their performances. Lacking experience with improvisation in their own music tradition, many fail to appreciate it as a rigorous compositional activity in other music traditions. To this day, jazz musicians feel that they must be prepared, outside their own community, to deal with any or all of the attitudes discussed above.
19. Brief discussion of jazz programs in Kernfeld 1988d, passim.
20. It was Benjamin Bloom’s study of prodigious development in other areas of creativity—among world-class tennis players and Olympic swimmers, outstanding research mathematicians and neurologists, sculptors, and classical piano virtuosos—that suggested to me the possibility of distinctive learning courses for jazz musicians. Although the backgrounds and educations of jazz musicians differ considerably from those of Bloom’s subjects, his work contains some useful points of comparison and contrast for this study. Bloom kindly shared the preliminary findings of his research with me as I began writing this book. He has since published the conclusions of his study in Bloom 1985, 507–49.
21. Like the written score, the record presents the artist with fixed representations of music; like a live performance, it remains an aural representation. For the advantages that these hybrid qualities offer musicians, the recording has become a primary vehicle for music learning and transmission in many aural/oral music traditions—both popular and classical. See Bennett 1980, 140–45, and Shelemay 1991.
3. A Very Structured Thing
1. Reference to various jazz standards in Witmer 1988c and Crawford and Magee 1992.
2. Sargeant (1976, 197) describes “the hot improviser build[ing] his spontaneous variations” on the ja
zz tune’s “harmonic pattern.” “Jazz historians generally agree that jazz changed from an ensemble to a solo art during the third decade of this century.... The front-line instruments no longer played all or at least most of the time, and the music consisted of a series of ‘choruses’ (solos) accompanied by the rhythm section.... How this change of style evolved and developed is one of the important questions for the future.” Wang 1988, 110–11. For Pops Foster’s account of this change, see Foster 1971, 75–76.
3. Owens describes popular songs from the musical theater as commonly including two sections: a non-repeating introductory verse; and a refrain or chorus, the main repeating theme. He observes that, whereas early jazz players sometimes used the two-section model in performances, since the twenties musicians have largely adopted the refrain alone as the song form or vehicle for invention. Owens 1988, 396.
4. Melrose Bros. Music Co. in Chicago published original jazz compositions such as “The Jelly Roll Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton as early as 1915. Lomax 1973, 292. Legal fake books, which musicians regard as providing more consistently accurate chord changes, have also appeared on the market in recent years. See Hyman 1986, Sher 1988, and Sher 1991. One of the inadvertent consequences of the production of fake books may be the weighting of pieces according to their alphabetical listings. As one artist I spoke with good-humoredly offered, “One thing you can always depend on now is that every player knows ‘Blue Bossa,’ because it’s in the front of the book.” For an elaboration of the conventions of notation adopted by the jazz community, see Witmer 1988b.
5. By the forties, learning to read music was part of the training of most jazz musicians. Embarrassment at not reading music or reading poorly is a common theme in early artists’ accounts. Lester Young (Porter 1985b, 5–6) and Eddie Barefield (Driggs 1960, 20) describe their own comparably humiliating experiences.
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