[Dixielandjazz] What music do young people hear?

[Charles Suhor]

On Apr 30, 2005, at 6:39 PM, Tramette89 at aol.com wrote:
> Speaking as a high school student....  Teachers seem intent on making 
> the students listen to jazz, but only modern jazz. All of my band 
> directors throughout middle and high  school admit that they have 
> never listened to anything recorded before 1940.  We've had some 
> terrific young jazz musicians  come out the the high school I attend, 
> but they're all interested solely in modern styles. It's because 
> that's all their instructors tell them to listen  to...I can't help 
> but wonder if maybe more kids would be into OKOM if they were ever 
> actually exposed to it at school. -Lily Korte

Great hearing from a high school student! I believe that the main 
reason why it has become standard to reject the teaching of pre-big 
band jazz--various breeds of Dixieland, trad, early N.O. styles--in 
school music programs is the same as the reason for not having programs 
to teach the playing of blues, country and western, bluegrass, rock & 
roll, etc. These aren't considered by the educational establishment as 
high art but as folk or pop music, or hobby pursuits.

It's no accident that the first widespread jazz inroads into high 
school and college educational programs in the U.S. were big bands (at 
first, dance bands and then "stage bands") that involved reading of 
music, with little attention to improvisation. If you could read, you 
were behaving like a musician, under the inherited orthodoxy. 
Gradually, modern jazz improvisation, with its emphasis on chops, 
speed, chords, and other obviously trainable skills and 
theoretical/analyzable aspects gained the respect of educators, who 
wrote methods books on these things. Many of the pioneers were fine 
modern players like Barry Harris. They and many other jazz educators 
respect early jazz styles and artists, but see them mostly in a 
historical context rather than as models to be cultivated in their 
students today.

Part of their rationale is that the market out there is for players who 
can read all kinds of music from concert to popular, one model being 
the versatile "studio musician" who can sightread all sorts of things 
and if called upon, play jazz choruses as well. Learning the ins and 
outs of modern jazz theory, practice, and improvisation is now seen as 
wholly consonant with an extended view of serious music education. But 
despite the fact that an outstanding Dixieland, blues, or C&W artist 
might be operating at a level of artistic expression that way outruns 
innumerable merely competent modernists, the school isn't seen as an 
appropriate artistic route to reaching high artistry in those kinds of 
music.

I think I can understand how and why this happened and still lament the 
lack of attention to teaching students to play the repertoire and 
styles of pre-big band jazz.  They often hear it in the recordings that 
accompany jazz history courses. In fact, blues and other musics are 
sometimes studied (not as performance) in elective "popular culture" 
courses. My bias is that music schools are right in not offering 
performance instruction in every popular, folk, etc., music but that 
within jazz programs there should be credit courses, possibily 
elective, in the ART of performing earlier jazz styles, focusing on 
collective improvisation, solos, techniques, and repertoire.

Charlie Suhor