BRENDAN KELLER-TUBERG
Indiana University (USA)
February 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (1): 105–27. [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.1.105
Abstract: The second half of jazz’s history has been defined by its expansion from more informal spaces into academies and concert halls. Integral to this cultural transformation has been the advent and standardization of collegiate jazz education. This paper explores the pedagogical and institutional responsibilities of institutional jazz education through two broad categories: its commitment to the formation of diverse, individual creative voices and its impact on the continued celebration and honoring of Black history and culture. Through this analysis, a number of recommendations can be made in the interests of honoring and upholding the Blackness of this art form, whilst acknowledging the radical openness and creative thinking that allowed it to flourish.
Keywords: Jazz, jazz education, institutional responsibility, creativity, cultural appropriation, open education
In its early history, as any fledgling creative medium, jazz communities were informal and decentralized. As an “outsider” art that transgressed against the aesthetics and cultural norms of traditional art institutions, individuals participating in the creation of jazz were equally autonomous in creating the musical philosophies and systems that guided their art. In the present day, jazz has flourished into a global phenomenon equally at home in the concert hall as it is within a dive bar, and is rightfully receiving recognition from all corners of the music world. Part and parcel to this transformation has been collegiate institutions’ embrace of jazz education, drastically increasing visibility, exposure, and appreciation for jazz across conservatory music landscapes.
Despite the positive changes institutional recognition of jazz has brought, such a shift inevitably leads to a host of important pedagogical and philosophical questions. In some ways, this process has contained parallels to Randall Allsup’s (2016) theory of “closing” an “open form,” wherein the formalization and codification of jazz education has increasingly resulted in collegiate institutions holding and distributing the skills necessary to participate in jazz, rather than musicians themselves. As a result, these collegiate jazz programs hold significant responsibility in honoring the history that predates their participation in its culture, whilst encouraging the radically creative and open-ended thinking that first enabled its birth. Given their distance from these initial communities, it is critical that institutions consider and address such issues in assuming their new role in jazz history, as they create the musicians that will shape its future.
In the efforts of such consideration, I provide a brief historical context of this transformation of jazz educational practices, through an explanation and application of Allsup’s theory of “closed forms.” Then, I explore critiques of an exclusively “closed form” collegiate jazz education through two overarching branches. Firstly, exclusively closed form settings constrict students’ ability to discover and nurture an original creative voice, which alienates them from developing an authentic individual relationship to jazz. Secondly, utilizing exclusively closed form approaches in the collegiate classroom runs a high risk of appropriating the Black labor that created jazz, dispossessing Black communities of art they retain custodianship over, and selling it for the sake of capital. Stemming from these critiques is the conclusion that the appropriate balance, delineation and application of both closed and open-form approaches is essential in carrying forward the artistic and cultural project of jazz from the collegiate classroom to the future.
I: Setting The Scene: The Closing of Collegiate Jazz Education
The history of modern jazz education is synonymous with the history of university jazz programs. Prior to these programs’ founding, jazz education was informal and decentralized, driven instead by a vast communal network of mentor-mentee relationships, informal public spaces such as “jam sessions” and other performances, and private informal spaces, such as composer Gil Evans’ apartment in the late 1940s (Crease 2003, 128). Though remnants of this cultural history remain intact, the second half of the twentieth century initiated a dramatic transformation in the structure of jazz education, as it began its steady move toward the university classroom. Influential programs such as the University of North Texas, and eventually Indiana University (Rodriguez 2012), paved the way for an enormous influx of collegiate jazz courses: over five hundred universities within the United States offered classes in jazz for credit by 1980 (Murphy 1994). The cultural consequences of this institutionalization process have transformed present-day jazz culture at large. As graduates of these programs increasingly populate jazz communities around the world, collegiate institutions inherit compounding responsibility to wield this influence responsibly.
Initially, there were no centralized resources for early collegiate jazz educators and programs to draw upon, but the rise of formal jazz education coincided with an increasing need and demand for standardized texts. Of these early educational resources, Jamey Aebersold’s Play-A-Long books and backing tracks are arguably the most influential, having formalized and organized an approach to jazz improvisation based around “chord-scale theory.” The first volume of Aebersold’s (1967) series focused upon building a foundational literacy of scales from which students could begin to improvise, eventually applying these scales and chords (including the blues scale) to a twelve-bar blues form. These resources provided students with a formal theoretical framework that had the potential to rapidly enhance their improvisational ability within prescribed boundaries and aesthetics. Subsequent volumes and editions of Aebersold’s work introduced further rules, highlighting “functions” of each note in a scale, and different scales and patterns to play over other chord qualities or common chord progressions. These approaches were applied to the works of seminal jazz musicians, including Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins and others.
The heightened expectations of formality, rigor, and reliability associated with higher education has resulted in an increasing demand for standardized resources and practices for modern-day collegiate jazz programs. To this end, the National Association of Schools of Music’s (NASM) handbook (2024) provides competencies jazz studies programs must teach in order to receive and maintain accreditation. NASM requires all undergraduate jazz studies programs subscribe to a “common body” of knowledge and skills, including “an understanding of the common elements and organizational patterns of music … [and] the ability to employ this understanding in aural, verbal and visual analyses” (105). This knowledge is then connected to students’ “comprehensive capabilities in various jazz idioms” (112). In this context, pedagogical tools such as chord-scale theory become powerful, simple tools to fulfil these needs. Although each individual curriculum includes varying instances and commitment to open-form settings, there remains a core “family resemblance” of established commonalities. These typically include academic classes on chord-scale theory, improvisational techniques, and “juries” that test students’ abilities to recall scales and common jazz tunes, also known as “standards” (many of which Aebersold’s books feature).
For Randall Allsup (2016), this codification of jazz education would be a clear example of “closing” an “open form” of creative practice. Allsup describes the closing of a musical form as beginning “with the making of the Law” (10). While chord-scale theory captures a retroactive understanding of the blues’ underlying structure, such “law” fails to represent the more open creative laboratory which facilitated the blues’ initial creation. In prescribing these rules to students, the blues’ still-unnamed architects become invisible, “sedimentary” authority figures, rather than “guest[s] in [their] own work” (Allsup 2016, 10). Where the blues represents a radical artistic experiment and piece of creative research, learning to improvise on a blues form through chord-scale theory emphasizes rule-memorization and pattern recognition.
A tension is therefore created between students’ understanding of the blues as a living, creative musical tradition, and an educational experience that focuses on its systematic reproduction. Instead of opening and deepening the relationships between students and their music making by empowering them to decipher an aural understanding of the blues for themselves, the curriculum and accompanying pedagogical strategies “bring[s] the learner into a bound system that operates outside of time” (Allsup 2016, 20). These systems may help students sound like the blues in a musical performance, but in and of themselves they cannot help them embody the blues. The privileging of chord-scale theory at the expense of other pedagogies therefore exhibits the limitations of “closed-form” pedagogy. Such a closing of an “open form” parallels Michael Apple’s (2014) assertion that the standardization of education curricula fundamentally shifts the power relationships between curriculum, teachers, and students. This transformation begins in the codification and transformation of knowledge, which unavoidably is colored through individual biases and “particular constructions of reality, particular ways of selecting and organizing” knowledge (Apple 2014, 46). Through “selection, simplification, condensation, and elaboration” (65), the knowledge is hijacked in service of a narrative framed by its codifiers.
In the context of jazz education, the “constructed reality” of chord-scale theory obscures the broader philosophies and lives that facilitated the blues’ creation. It concentrates solely upon understanding the systems that govern blues forms instead of understanding the circumstance in which the blues was created, and the processes by which similar creative breakthroughs could be achieved. Even as raw theoretical analysis, chord-scale theory’s selective presentation of particular musical qualities fails to accommodate all of the blues’ musical innovations; for example, such systems rarely address the microtonal and “extended techniques” commonly used in blues recordings.
It is important to note that all closed curricula become “selective traditions” through their very definition (Apple 2014, 46). Embedded in this process of codifying and transforming artistic culture into curricula is the canonization of jazz’s history and culture into a coherent narrative. Certain composers, eras, or subgenres of music may be either emphasized or deprioritized by jazz curricula due to their ease of use as pedagogical tools, their synchronicity to chord-scale theory, or their fitting into this historical narrative of choice. Consequently, a multitude of jazz styles and aesthetics—such as free or avant-garde jazz, Afro-Cuban and Latin jazz more broadly, and most developments of the 21st century—are not commonly covered in depth by institutions. In reference to their proximity to the curriculum’s status quo, all music is assigned a distance from a curriculum’s canonical repertoire, and outliers begin to be interpreted as deviant and subsequently devalued in their usage. As a radically hybridist form which has bridged vastly disparate musical cultures and communities since its inception, such judgements are antithetical to the forms of thinking that spawned jazz’s canonical language in the first place.
The codification of jazz knowledge into textbooks and curricula severs it from ongoing communal discourse. Rather than remaining malleable or modifiable by all who may access it, this knowledge is calcified, governed by, and held by those working within formalized hierarchical power structures. As these collegiate institutions increasingly shape jazz communities in their image, modern day jazz culture continues to diverge from the cultures and communities for which it once was a platform. This closing of educational forms in jazz education can alienate musical communities from the institutions that purport to represent them.
One possible justification for the closing of jazz education is the perception that programs should be conceptualized as a space exclusively for the dispensing of raw techniques and tools that musicians can freely implement. If the institution concentrates on dispensing technical tools to students, rather than the creation of new artistic works, the institution can equip students as best as possible with techniques derived from historical artistic application, while leaving their present-day application open to the interpretation of the students. Once students have demonstrated their mastery and comprehension of “craft” in order to graduate, they are then assumed to implement them into artistic practices outside the institution, away of the gaze of the curricula and faculty members. Whilst students of such programs significantly raise the standards of craft and musicianship across jazz communities, their ability to pursue the application of these skills in new and unfamiliar settings is entirely self-derived, rather than nurtured by the institution. In other words, though such schooling offers students the raw materials for artistic creation, it does not aspire to give them the space to familiarize themselves with the process of creation itself.
II: Closed-Form Education and Artistic Practice
Though the strict separation of artistic practice and technical craft may seem a “safe” approach in concept—one that preserves the informal, “do-it-yourself” creative philosophy that defined jazz’s early days outside the institution—it also muddies institutions’ acknowledgment of the crucial role of explorative creative practices in both jazz’s history and future. Consequentially, the absence of such spaces inside school walls can hinder students more than it enables them. Because the continued vitality of jazz relies on such creative practices, it is crucial that jazz education recognizes them as a central pillar in the educational experiences they provide.
Historically, almost all of jazz’s most influential practitioners found themselves in spaces open to the experimentation necessary to refine their artistic voices. For example, Duke Ellington’s orchestra was employed as the house band at the Cotton Club in Harlem from 1927 to 1931 (Frankl 1988). Besides the musicians’ need to entertain and the implicit influence of the space’s aesthetics, there were no explicit stipulations that prescribed what music the group performed. Due to the frequency with which his band performed, this period in Ellington’s career was one of rapid artistic development and growth, and it remains an inseverable aspect of his career and enduring legacy. Without sufficient access to similar spaces (whether performance driven or not), students will be left unable to conceptualize or participate in the incremental refining of their own voices.
The absence of such musical spaces in institutional environments renders the workshopping and refining of students’ artistic voices near impossible. When exposed to canonical jazz works, students engage with the final product of a long artistic process, rather than the process themselves. Consequentially, students tend to interpret these works as the result of innately possessed or unattainable “talent” absent an experiential lens with which to imagine their creation. Without a proper “bridge” in place through which students understand the process of discovering and refining their own voice, a divide develops between a student’s voice and the potency and clarity of a canonical figure’s artistic voice. Over time, this encourages students to devalue or even deny the possibility of embarking upon their own creative journeys. The absence of such experiences does not necessarily preclude students from wishing for the possession of such individual voices; however, the resulting lack of confidence in one’s own voice due to their unfamiliarity with open, unstructured spaces can at times lead to alienation between students and the music which they study.
A lack of open institutional spaces solidifies students’ comprehension of jazz as a “closed form” itself, where the boundaries of their education prescribe the limits of the genre. Since forms of music not interpreted as “jazz” by the institution become devalued in the eyes of students as mere distractions, they lose the potential to become critical artistic research that students may meaningfully incorporate into their future practice. Although the possibilities for future iterations of “jazz” are constricted, students still inevitably bring diverse musical upbringings, identities, and cultural experiences to their education. Each student’s relationship with canonical “jazz” involves an element of distance, whether temporally, geographically, culturally, or otherwise. An “open” understanding of jazz performs a crucial function in creating opportunities for students to celebrate such diversity through their individual relationships with jazz. The divide between “jazz” and “non-jazz” in institutional spaces and the inability to reconcile these worlds drives further alienation between students, their education, and their ability to participate in institutional jazz culture. An open and accessible artistic space is therefore one in which students are encouraged not only to understand what has been historically interpreted as “jazz,” but also to imagine what “jazz” may sound like in the future.
The consequences of a “closed form” educational model are further illuminated through application of Michel Foucault’s work. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1975) famously invoked the image of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison to describe the internalization of power structures in the subjects of a system of governance. Bentham’s prison is built in a circular room, where all prison cells face the center of the room. A guard tower stands in the center, built with a one-way mirror so that prisoners are unaware of when a guard is inside the tower monitoring them, and when it is empty. Consequently, the prisoners learn to monitor and conduct themselves as if they are constantly being watched, as they can never be certain that they are not. Foucault’s study of the panopticon led to his assertion that subjects of a system of governance internalize the gaze of their superiors, so that even outside of overt surveillance, they continue conducting themselves in accordance with the state.
As applied to collegiate jazz education, Foucault’s theory highlights the ways in which students internalize the gaze of their institutional curricula. Subject to the institution’s gaze from their first audition, students become aware of a culture of musical values and philosophies endorsed by the institution as well as their antitheses, which are overtly or covertly condemned. The institution evaluates students on their ability to embody these cultures and valued skills, and their outcomes become publicized through processes such as ensemble placements. Even before commencing collegiate music education, students are asked to “assess their skill level”: in their 2023 Education Guide, DownBeat warns prospective students against attending a school as the “weakest player,” “never getting any attention from their faculty member … and never hav[ing] a solo” (Kato 2023, 114). Students’ internalization of the institution’s gaze occurs not only through interactions with faculty and administrators but with other students. In this way, institutional musical culture becomes “automatized and dis-individualized” (Foucault 1977, 6); students learn to value themselves through this gaze, often losing alternative lenses through which to view their musicianship in this process.
One difference between Foucault’s panopticon prisoners and collegiate music institutions is a student’s ability to leave the institution’s walls after class or graduation. On its face, it may seem that at these junctures, students are free from institutional constraints and can cultivate their own musical philosophies and practices in spite of their education, should they so choose. However, when the institution’s influence in the broader jazz community is considered, things may not be so simple. Due to the rising popularity of jazz educational institutions, the distinction between an “institutional space” and a “non-institutional space” is muddied, and institutional philosophies are increasingly adopted outside its walls. In this way, choosing to reject particular institutional philosophical tenets may distance or otherize a musician from even extra-institutional communities. As Foucault (1977) observes, “the panoptic scheme … was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function” (11).
Furthermore, prominent musical institutions often select faculty members because of their extra-institutional fame and influence (usually as performers, composers or recording artists). Due to this simultaneous power as both institutional figures and successful musicians, faculty members tend to amplify or fast-track the career development of students who reflect their values. Inversely, should a student fail to meet the standards set by the institution or by a faculty member, or if they reject the values or teachings they offer, faculty can consciously or subconsciously stall a student’s career once they leave the institution. Regardless of their relationships with faculty members, students can still reasonably expect to continue to regularly encounter them outside the walls of the institution—whether after class in the “scene,” or post-graduation in other interlinked communities—regardless of their geographical distance. It is therefore unclear whether a student can ever wholly expect to escape the gaze of their institution, should they wish to build a career as a jazz musician.
Once the gaze of the institution has been internalized both subconsciously and consciously by students, the troubling consequences of a closed-form curriculum become exceedingly difficult to unlearn. As such, institutions have a responsibility to avoid promoting alienation between students and jazz, which may occur through balancing closed and open educational forms. Iconoclasts and courageous, explorative thinkers have historically shaped jazz, but without education that embodies these values, their continued presence becomes uncertain. If the jazz profession is to continue to value artistic integrity and individuality in jazz more broadly, realigning institutional curricula on a written and hidden level where appropriate to reflect this is essential.
However, the importance of “re-opening” collegiate jazz education runs deeper than simply reinforcing and reflecting historical values. As external mediators and gatekeepers of jazz communities, collegiate institutions have a responsibility to ensure that these historical values remain central to the education they provide. An embedded contradiction in the notion of an institutionally “closed” presentation of jazz education is that such institutions do not own or lay cultural claim to the music or skills they often present to students. Rather, historical Black communities of musicians possess this claim, both in the present day and the future. Though on its face an institutionally “closed” jazz education will equip students to perform historically Black music to a high standard, it cannot offer them cultural claim in the music they have learned to create. Consequently, if institutions offer closed-form skills to students without room for them to authentically develop an individual voice, the risk of cultural appropriation and dispossession innate in the institutionalization of jazz education intensifies.
III: Closed-Form Education, Appropriation, and Dispossession
Like much of the modern Western world, most characteristics of jazz education can be traced to their role and function within a larger capitalist economy. At the simplest level, institutional leaders and marketing campaigns routinely assert the value of such programs through the “mobilizing [of] education around industrial concerns” (Apple 2014, 28): graduation from these institutions maximizes the future employability of their students. Given the often turbulent and uncertain working life of a freelance jazz musician, institutions easily and readily commandeer the possibility of a consistent and fruitful working life; they offer students and parents a closed picture of “jazz culture” and the “gigging economy” that reinforces the inclusions and exclusions of a closed curriculum they have set, regardless of the accuracy or relevancy of this picture to students’ future employment. Though relationships between collegiate education and the economy are unavoidable, the irresponsible navigation of their various intersections forms the foundation upon which cultural appropriation and oppression of Black culture can take place. Unfettered implementation of closed-form educational models in primarily white, middle class jazz institutions encourage such action.
Prior to dissecting the ways in which capitalistic structures alienate jazz education from Black culture at this foundational level, it is essential to articulate jazz’s fundamental relationship to and function within Black history and culture. As previously discussed, from its earliest iterations, jazz formed a radical marriage of disparate musical cultures and languages. In jazz, European art music and military marches collided with the rhythmic language of the West African and Latinx diasporas, as well as the blues, gospel, and field holler. The placement of these particular musical aesthetics alongside each other is no coincidence: in their contradiction and disparity, jazz has always contained a radical depiction of the joy, suffering, alienation, and displacement emblematic of the Black American experience of its creators. Its artistic process is fundamentally one where “raw experience is stylized into aesthetic statement” (Murray 1976, v), and as such, its associated cultural experience is inseverable from the music itself. Jazz’s existence is an “aesthetic form of resistance” that gives voice to “protest and opposition” (Dixson 2006, 215–16).
Jazz’s profound influence across the American landscape (both Black and white) has resulted in claims of it being “America’s classical music” (Taylor 1986, 21), and the performance spaces, cultures, affiliations, and institutionalization of jazz more generally have aligned jazz ever-increasingly with academic, European art music. The concept of a “common body of knowledge and skills” (NASM 2024, 105) that requires jazz programs to assimilate elements of its curricula with other (likely European) institutional music concentrations reflects this tendency. Given the danger of losing jazz’s original culture and spirit, it remains crucial then that jazz educators and students interpret it as an inherently political statement from Black American voices, separate from the European music world.
The root of an institution’s ability to engage in the cultural appropriation and hijacking of Black culture stems from central “contradictions” within capitalistic systems. One foundational contradiction as defined by David Harvey (2014) concerns the relationship between what Karl Marx termed the “use value” and “exchange value” of a product sold in a capitalist economy. Simply put, while goods in capitalist societies possess a temporary monetary “exchange value,” their “use value” exists independently; for instance, though a ticket to a concert may have a quantifiable cost, it benefits and enriches the concertgoer in ways the monetary value could never fully capture. As a result, an unbridgeable gap exists between “money and the value which it represents” (Harvey 2014, 27). Consequently, a second contradiction comes into focus: that between the “social value of labour and its representation by money” (Harvey 2014, 27). Though capitalist economies continue to rely on the labor of workers, whose time and effort (similar to “use value”) have no material connection to a monetary value, their work is readily and handily rendered “immaterial and invisible” (Harvey 2014, 26) by its monetary representation. In other words, “money hides the immateriality of social labor (value) behind its material form” (Harvey 2014, 27).
As applied to jazz education, Harvey’s contradictions unveil a central tension in the presentation of a collegiate jazz education: that between its “use value”—the power and extra-musical importance of jazz, and the initiation of a student into the broader jazz community—and its “exchange value”—the unavoidable reality that jazz education constitutes a product that is bought by students when they choose to attend university. For example, the Berklee Global Jazz Institute (n.d.) names its mission as the “advance[ment of] the power of music as a tool for the betterment of society,” and the “connect[ion of] musical creative thinking with the natural environment.” Whilst these objectives appear to exist outside of a narrative of employability, and even acknowledge the political foundations of the music, prospective students of the program must still consider employability and career-based factors when deciding whether or not to invest in such education. These factors often limit how much jazz educators choose to focus on the extra-fiscal aspects of their curriculum. Jazz education’s status as a product—where its “use value” is fundamentally at odds with its “exchange value”—contradicts the immateriality of the purposes it should ideally strive to achieve: students’ initiation and immersion into a fundamentally Black culture and tradition.
Consequently, a secondary parallel can be drawn utilizing Harvey’s (2014) contradiction of “social value of labor” (25). The product of a jazz performance encases the centuries of labor undertaken by Black communities that brought this music into being. Thus, each jazz performance represents a “crystallization or reification of labor exerted to create it” (Abramo 2017, 153) as well as the Black experience which enabled it. Given this reality, an institutional curriculum which fails to name, acknowledge, and honor this Black labor and history seriously risks its erasure through their avoidance. Institutions and organizations have implemented a broad spectrum of methods and strategies to address this need. For instance, the Jazz Education Network (JEN) (n.d.) offers free educational curriculum online that is intended to create “heightened appreciation and awareness of traditional jazz among music educators” and the “revitalization of traditional jazz styles through the increased participation of young people.” Additionally, JEN’s current strategic plan (2021) includes an objective to “enhance recruitment and retention of membership from underrepresented populations.” These initiatives convey an effort to treat the Black origins of jazz with care.
Yet, this responsibility works in tension with jazz educational institutions’ status as a capitalist venture, and as a result, they often deprioritize such practices because it may encroach upon their fiscal interests. As a culmination of a prior educational experience, all curricular performance opportunities in jazz programs act as a “crystallization” (Abramo 2017, 153) of students’ broader educational experience. Performances function as a valuable marketing tool through their public demonstration of the quality of a music program, as perceived through the virtuosity, technique, and craft of its students. In this way, practical performance skills tend to have a much closer connection to the “exchange value” of the education than the “use value” of an acknowledgement of Black history and communities. Therefore, in the interests of capital (which is often difficult to obtain in collegiate level jazz programs), the efficiency of a program’s ability to maximize students’ raw performing ability becomes incentivized, at the expense of honoring Black history, culture, and labor.
Under these circumstances, jazz education comes to revere uniquely the closed-form systems offered by chord-scale theory, as one of the most successful curricula for rapidly expanding and maximizing students’ technical proficiency in jazz performance. By applying these systems, anyone can outwardly demonstrate the qualities of an effective jazz performance, but doing so in a decontextualized fashion omits the Blackness of the music it so neatly codifies. Though isolated application of chord-scale theory obscures one’s relationship with Black communities and histories, it does not remove them; instead, it simply silences the original cultural custodians in the interests of maximizing the efficiency and viability of the educational product. As a result, the exclusive application of system-driven pedagogies risks upholding a centuries-old American tradition of white middle- and upper-class individuals capitalizing on and selling unpaid and unacknowledged Black labor. The irony of this occurring within the field of jazz—a fundamentally Black expression and perspective of this very history—renders this occurrence even more disgraceful.
In unmasking the ways in which social labor and “use values” are hidden behind a material product, Harvey (2014) observes that a fundamental engine of the capitalist economy is the “dispossession” of social labour, and the “private accumulation of common wealth” (53). Because no quantifiable and tangible relationship between human labor and monetary value exists, the labor itself is “inherently appropriable by private persons” (55). As the seller of a product does not have to be (and in most instances is not) the worker themselves, the seller can devalue the social labor that created their product by underpaying and otherwise exploiting their workers. This exploitation opens an opportunity for the capitalist class to continue to sell their product at a premium, thus maximizing their private opportunity for profit. Irresponsible collegiate jazz education creates this dispossession. The prioritization of practical performance driven skills dispossesses a Black art from its custodians for the sake of profit.
All jazz educational institutions risk engaging in the dispossession and private accumulation of Black cultural wealth and experience due to their status as private entities, separate from the cultures and communities that created jazz in the first place. Should their programs not appropriately acknowledge, credit, and champion Black culture and history, they will effectively appropriate a culture and product that they neither created nor can claim ownership over. This risk becomes even more salient when considering the predominantly white student body of most collegiate jazz programs around the world. Jazz programs may set a precedent of tacitly endorsing the continued dispossession and appropriation of Black culture, as the institutions’ conduct unavoidably becomes the example students inherit and embody in their lives both in and outside the institution. If jazz educators wish to preserve the original political intent and integrity of the music, as well as ensure the continued dissemination of its project in the present day, this cannot happen.
IV: Re-Imagining: Closed and Open-Form Education and Transculturalism
Thus far I identified two major problems associated with exclusively closed-form educational models. First, this approach significantly constricts students’ ability to discover and nurture an original creative voice, which alienates them from developing an authentic individual connection to jazz. Second, closed-form educational models may tend to fixate on practical performance skills, thus obscuring and in some cases failing to engage with the Black history and culture that created jazz. In doing so, they run the risk of appropriating the Black labor that created jazz, dispossessing Black communities of art they retain custodianship over, and selling it for the sake of capital.
On its face, these two problems are scarcely seen to be interlinked. In modern-day jazz communities a cultural divide exists between tending to the past and looking towards the future: those who prioritize keeping the tradition of jazz alive tend to de-emphasize the possibilities for developing an original creative voice and pushing forward the medium. Conversely, those who choose to embrace critical thinking and individual creative voices run the risk of deemphasizing the cultural traditions and context of jazz, distancing themselves from a Black cultural context.
I contend that both these problems are addressed hand-in-hand through the selective opening of educational forms within jazz curricula; instances of both open and closed forms are essential to balanced music education. While critiquing closed-form educational systems, Allsup (2016) acknowledges the “pleasure of submission” they offer (135). The undeniable commitment to craft and emulation of prior innovators was integral to celebrated musicians such as Coltrane, who acted in this fashion independently and prior to any “making of the Law” (10). In jazz education, an “open” process of developing one’s original voice through the hybridization of disparate musical and cultural forms—of crystallizing “raw experience … into aesthetic statement” (Murray 1976, v) —involves an unavoidable engagement with the Black history of jazz. Teaching jazz with this in mind opens students to the infinite possibilities of creative voices within the world of jazz, whilst directing them to engage with the Black histories and experience of past jazz musicians, including how those experiences led them to the voices they ultimately embraced and are remembered for.
One possible lens through which such an approach to jazz education can be further defined is Edward Sarath’s (2021) definition of “transculturalism.” In identifying the transcultural pedagogical approach, Sarath contrasts it against a “multicultural” understanding of musical diversity. To Sarath, multiculturalism is “rooted in a view of the musical world as an infinite spectrum of generally discrete, cultural compartments to be approached,” and so “multicultural engagement with improvising and composing is typically from an emulative, culture-bound perspective” (27). In contrast, transcultural frameworks choose not to fixate upon “established genre or cultural categories,” but instead in “improvisatory and compositional creativity that transcends labels, and from which the terrain of the compartments took hold in the first place” (Sarath 2021, 27). In this way, Sarath’s transcultural model holds clear parallels to open-form pedagogy’s emphasis on “self-driven” education, where all genres and cultures of music are equally rich and available for research and implementation in future creative endeavours.
As Sarath (2021) identifies, the processes by which the “compartment” of jazz as a musical culture and genre formed was fundamentally transcultural. The formation of jazz as a hybridization of disparate cultural and aesthetic practices clearly presupposed understanding contradictory musical perspectives as “self-transcending tributaries” rather than “self-confining destinations” (28). In the earliest iterations of New Orleans “jazz,” Eurocentric art music and popular music such as military marches lead to jazz’s implementation of the Western twelve-tone system and functional harmony. The rhythmic vocabulary of the West African and Latinx diasporas, and pre-existing Black music cultures such as gospel, blues, ragtime (itself a hybrid genre), and field holler also constitute part of the early “jazz” sound.
Though the sound of this hybrid form calcified and canonized through jazz’s historiography as a static object, jazz has always been in essence post genre. In the 1960s, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians formed in part to reject any creative boundaries that a singular genre may erect, and co-founder Muhal Richard Adams clarified that “we’re not really jazz musicians” (Lewis 2008, 39). To this day, creating original “jazz” requires the reconciliation between a multitude of musical and cultural contradictions. For example, music critic Alex Ross (2017) lauded the composer-performer Tyshawn Sorey, who teaches on faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as “among the most formidable denizens of the in-between zone.… An extraordinary talent who can see across the entire musical landscape.”
However, it remains crucial that this “transcultural” reading of jazz continues to interpret it as a fundamentally Black cultural expression and a “compartment” of sorts itself. A hasty or rash application of Sarath’s vision of transculturalism to jazz pedagogy may seem to focus upon individual creativity rather than the appreciation of preexisting artistic and cultural forms. Instead, Sarath (2021) contends that “cultural-specific engagement” (28) remains an integral part of transcultural pedagogical models, and that a “new understanding of rigor” can be derived from the “interplay of exploratory and emulative experience” (11).
While largely advocating for a transcultural perspective in jazz pedagogy, thus “re-opening” its pedagogy, jazz educators and students must approach this process in ways that reassert and delineate some “closed” settings. I wish to qualify Sarath’s line of argument by reiterating that the unqualified or de-contextualized education of jazz aesthetics and musical languages can result in cultural appropriation and the dispossessing of a Black art from its creators. Applying a transcultural approach to jazz pedagogy does not inherently prevent all instances and dangers of cultural appropriation. One weakness of transcultural theory is its lack of clarity on a simple issue: in order to authentically engage with and contribute to a culture (especially one outside of one’s natural experience), students must have critically engaged and understood the preexisting culture on its own terms. This understanding and respect for a culture offers students a license to then create within, contribute to, and otherwise engage with it. Should students remain naïve in their understanding of a culture, or internalize a relationship with its music that does not truthfully represent its broader philosophical and political attributes, the risk for appropriation persists. In this way, “closed forms” (Allsup 2016) of education can become helpful; any respectful and authentic engagement with a musical culture must necessarily be a closed form engagement with its creators. Students can form their foundational understandings of selected musical traditions and aesthetics through prioritizing the voices of its creators. Respectfully engaging with music necessitates endeavouring to understand it on its own cultural terms.
One justification for the application of this principle can be found in the life and music of Duke Ellington. One of the most celebrated and distinctive voices within big band history, Ellington left a tremendous mark on jazz and occupies a central position in the jazz education, most notably within an annual high school jazz competition hosted by Jazz at Lincoln Center, revolving around the performance of his work.
However, despite the ubiquity of his influence across jazz history and education, Ellington’s perceptions of his music and cultural contributions may differ from students’ ones. Should this be the case, it exposes a major shortcoming of modern-day pedagogy in relation to Ellington’s work. For instance, instead of being invested in the development of a musical genre, Ellington himself said that he was “not playing jazz … [he was] trying to play the natural feelings of a people” (Porter 2012, 19). Herein lies a clear allusion to an extra-musical interpretation of Ellington’s music that he tried to articulate for audiences. If Ellington prioritized the “natural feelings of a people” in his compositional practice, then it behoves all performers of his music to understand these feelings and their root causes. Respectfully and accurately teaching Ellington’s music on his terms necessitates a closed-form experience in which students learn about Ellington’s upbringing, musical experiences, and politics in order to offer as much agency to Ellington himself as possible. Though this extra-musical information transcends the educational experiences conventionally offered within a large jazz ensemble rehearsal, due to its inextricability from the music itself, a compelling educational experience performing such music necessitates such engagement.
In attempting to understand art on its creator’s terms, jazz educators might select theories and resources of a sufficiently close philosophical or cultural nexus to the work at hand. In the case of understanding Ellington’s own perception of his music, Du Bois (1903) may be helpful. In his writing on the Black experience at the turn of the 20th century, Du Bois developed a theory of “double consciousness,” which spoke to the Black experience of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (45). Du Bois described this corroded sense of self-perception as a “veil” affording “no true self-consciousness,” but instead a feeling of “twoness—an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (45).
Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness illuminates Ellington’s claim that “dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part” (Dixson 2006, 219). Understood in this way, Ellington’s music contains not only the “unreconciled strivings” of Black and Eurocentric music, but also a number of opposed and discrete musical aesthetic languages—including military marches, show tunes, and Latinx and West African rhythmic devices—whose “warring ideals” all compete for attention in his musical world. Furthermore, Ellington’s long-form suites such as Black, Brown and Beige (1943) speak to his aspiration to elevate jazz’s presentation from nightclubs such as the Cotton Club in Harlem to Carnegie Hall, a world-famous concert hall mostly reserved for European music. Although the reasoning and experiences leading to these artistic choices remain unclear, Ellington’s simultaneous embrace of European structural forms and spaces and unapologetically Black American stories may speak to how the “veil” of double consciousness tore him between two musical ideals in the pursuit of success and artistic impact. At the very least, the juxtaposition of these Eurocentric and Black elements in Ellington’s music shows the importance of understanding and honouring Ellington’s experience as a Black American in a white America when performing his music, as this struggle formed the basis for his own understanding of his work’s vitality. Within jazz pedagogy, it is crucial that educators and students marry Ellington’s raw notes and rhythms with the experiences and messages. Even if a such an educational experience culminates in the performance of Ellington’s works, a comprehensive recreation of his art requires this extra-musical context and reflection (often reserved for the history classroom).
Although any jazz education necessitates these rigorous, closed-form educational experiences centered on specific histories, cultures, and political projects, it remains important (as discussed elsewhere in this article) that these experiences happen alongside open-form pedagogies that engage, develop, and deepen students’ individual creative voices throughout collegiate study. In curating these experiences, Sarath’s (2021) model of transculturalism suggests two key principles for the appropriate formation of open settings.
First, this open pedagogy, whether or not it directly incorporates the aesthetics and vocabulary of Black music, will involve students learning to stylize “raw experience … into aesthetic statement” (Murray 1976, v). This process of aestheticizing experiences connects any music made with it to the Black history and experience in which this process was born. Therefore, regardless of the aesthetics of the music students may create, the process with which they found their individual voice in the first place was Black, and should be acknowledged as such.
Secondly, when developing their artistic voices, students could draw upon the musical cultures and aesthetics of proximal distance to their individual experiences. Even if a student has been rigorously educated on a musical culture foreign to their experience, the music of that culture can still not be fully claimed as their own in an authentic expression of that student. For such a student, it is the artistic process which Ellington embarked upon that should inspire them, not Ellington’s final product per se. In this way, an invocation of Ellington may not involve the use of Ellington’s specific aesthetics or techniques; for instance, inspiration may stem from the boldness and elegance with which Ellington connected disparate musical influences in aestheticizing his own experience. In this sense, when it comes time for students to locate their own voice, it is more respectful for them to honor their own positionality, drawing upon their own musical and cultural past, than to recreate the aesthetics of canonized figures.
Consequentially, in a transcultural education, all students would ideally become critical and self-sufficient learners who engage actively with the praxis of being a jazz musician, in a way that is culturally and historically informed. It is to this end that the process of transcultural “artistic research” becomes crucial, insofar as it is not bound by the genre, time period, or any status of “academic” or “popular” art. The broader and more open a students’ knowledge and listening experience is with music and its socio-cultural contexts, the more likely it will be that the vantage point from which they develop their voice is true and honest to them. It is through this process that such students may invoke the spirit of Ellington (or other canonical jazz figures).
Stemming from these principles is the conclusion that an effective jazz pedagogy requires both open and closed forms of educational settings (Allsup 2016), and the appropriate delineation and application of both. Closed-form models are crucial in ensuring students receive a culturally informed and respectful understanding of jazz styles and eras of history—they must be well-versed not only in the musical aesthetics of the style, but also in the politics and cultures that created it. The parallel application of open-form settings, offering platforms for students to engage in individual, transcultural artistic research and apply it on the bandstand, will engage students in finding their authentic, individual voice within a jazz setting whilst connecting it to the artistic and political praxis of jazz’s canonical figures. Though this educational model can neither independently end the cultural appropriation of Black art from its cultural custodians nor guarantee all students’ formation of a unique and artistically informed voice, it offers strategies and recommendations through which such aims may become reality.
Conclusion
As jazz communities and cultures continue to broaden, develop, and evolve in the 21st century, it becomes increasingly important to consider the socio-political context and experience that led to their initial creation. To this end, we (as jazz educators with varying positionalities to jazz itself) must be mindful of the way we present jazz to students. Successful jazz pedagogies should both honor and uphold the Blackness of this artform, whilst acknowledging the radical openness and creative thinking that allowed jazz to flourish. Though often seen as opposing ideals, these projects may be interconnected: to authentically engage with the Black tradition of jazz is to be openly creative, and so an effective collegiate jazz curricula will satisfy both requirements simultaneously. Appropriately closing and opening aspects of jazz education, and engaging in the constant navigation between them, affords students more opportunities to develop an authentic connection with the music through finding an individual voice, whilst understanding the circumstances and struggles that lead to its creation. Since it remains impossible to predict the “future of jazz,” jazz educators might refrain where possible from prescribing artificial limits in their curricula, and consequently in the music. Through the processes described here, educators may seek to protect and nurture the cultures and communities of jazz, rather than the historical object of jazz itself.
About the Author
Brendan Keller-Tuberg (he/him/his) is a current student at Indiana University, pursuing a DMA in Jazz Studies, including a minor in music education. Brendan received his master’s degree from Indiana University, and a Bachelor of Music from the Australian National University. Brendan worked as an associate instructor for Indiana University’s jazz department from 2021–2024 and served on faculty for Indiana University’s inaugural Summer Jazz Workshop in 2024. His scholarly interests revolve around the critical and progressive evaluation of jazz pedagogy and historiography. He remains an active performer and composer, having released two full-length albums as a leader (most recently in 2021), and worked as composer in residence for the West Australian Youth Jazz Orchestra in 2021. https://www.brendankellertuberg.com/
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