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 as a surrogate for the neighborhood 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