Digging For Paradigms: Jazz Education

Introduction

This project sought to capture tertiary jazz educators’ perspectives on the current state of play in their fields. With teaching and learning having largely found a new equilibrium post-Covid, this research asks what insights might be gleaned in hindsight from the disruptions faced by the arts and tertiary training sectors during and in the aftermath of the pandemic, and the implications of those impacts on the design of jazz curriculum and careers going forward into our “age of accelerations” (Friedman, 2016).

Goals

The project was underpinned by a set of key questions, intended to coax out different lenses of perspectives:

• Benefits: What is great about tertiary jazz education? About your degree specifically?

• Challenges: Especially in light of the pandemic, what are the challenges faced by jazz degree programs?

• Futures: What are the ideal futures we imagine for our graduates?

• Infrastructure: What learning networks currently exist? How might we better learn from each other?

Methodology

To seek a cross-section of perspectives, I drew up a longlist of potential interviewees from the teaching faculties of jazz degrees from across Australia and New Zealand. I identified potential interviewees in large part on the basis of their experience and seniority; 7 of the 8 lecturers interviewed were the heads of their program, with one also in an Associate Dean role.

I approached interviewees via email with a list of sample questions (see Appendix A). Interviews were conducted either on Zoom or over the phone according to the interviewee’s preference, and lasted for between 1 and 2½ hours.

I recorded each interview via voice-memo, and documented key points over the course of each conversation in a mind-map format (see Appendix B) that I have found useful for drawing preliminary system maps and highlighting links between themes.

In a grounded theory approach to the subsequent analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1999), I consolidated the recorded interviews and my preliminary mind-maps into open codes for each interview via Miro (see Appendix C), which then allowed for axial codes to be more readily identified. The axial codes from each interview were then compared and synthesised, producing four key themes or selective codes: Past & Future, Identity & Agency, Skills & Training and Systems & Ecology.

Key Findings

These four themes can also be seen as a sampling of key values and principles that jazz educators believe to underpin their work. While any attempt to demarcate categories in this way risks deemphasising the intertwined relationships between the themes themselves, it does offer a set of valuable lenses through which to examine the complex system (Snowden & Boone, 2007) of teaching, learning and performing jazz (see, e.g. Goodman, 2011).

Past & Future

Jazz, like all disciplines, is in a constant symbiosis with its past. Several interviewees pointed out that the “hands on transmission of knowledge from generation to generation” (Sennett, 2008, p. 57) typical of craftsmanship – complete with the preferences, personalities and power hierarchies (Brookfield, 2017) such transmission entails – still plays a vital role in teaching and learning jazz improvisation.

While some scholars have cautioned against the celebrated notion of jazz as solely an “oral tradition” (Prouty, 2006), and jazz practice has over the years become more codified into written/notated theories and curriculum, institutional jazz education still lives by the metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) of oral, aural and experiential learning (Murphy, 2009). In fact, one interviewee commented that this “informality” is in fact one of the most effective learning tools, and that sense-making through listening sessions, “hangs” and jam sessions can appear to stand at odds with the prioritisation of formalisation and assessment common in Western-style education.

There was widespread acknowledgement amongst interviewees that some of this inherited archaeology underpinning their curriculums was increasingly out of step with the current realities of the music industry post-pandemic – as one teacher put it: “the old model has to change”. Even one teacher who self-identified as a “traditionalist” recognised that “there was no need to stay there” – that there was “room for balance” and that tradition was a vital springboard through which innovation can and should be unearthed.

In particular, several interviewees recognised that their repertoire-list model of curriculum had undergone only limited changes since its first design (in some cases decades earlier), and that what was once a reflection of the music popular in working jazz bands no longer reflected a breadth of stylistic and methodological approaches present amongst contemporary (or even past) practitioners. Ironically, it seemed the model was squeezing out the kind of spontaneity, agility and collaboration in teaching and learning that jazz is so celebrated for in practice.

Further emphasising the co-existence of past and present, teachers that either had an active hand in shaping those initial curriculums or learnt through more informal (read: traditional) methods were also occasionally identified as being those most resistant to changing the status quo.

One educator believed that the emphasis on re-enacting creative products of the past – with the associated implicit de-emphasis of process or the teaching of localised knowledges – created a “fake world” that students then find difficult to reconcile with the demands of the world that they emerge into. This need for this kind of career-oriented (and thus, future-centric) pragmatism in tertiary teaching has been discussed at length over recent decades, particularly in the Australian context (Bennett, 2009; Bennett & Bridgstock, 2015; Canham, 2022).

This future-centric ethos was directly amplified by some interviewees. One educator highlighted that their classes had undertaken a futures exercise to imagine what their careers might look like in 2050, based on recent provocations (Tolmie, 2020). Another mentioned that a large majority of their students were also enrolled in double degrees – one approach to future-proofing their careers that also challenges the “elite jazz musician” or “gladiatorial” metaphors that were identified as still being celebrated in certain corners of the industry. One educator used the example of an alumni of his program that was a “brilliant bass player” who had pivoted to become the head of an IT company, and pointed out that the feeling of “selling out” – of giving up on the “noble struggle” of being an artist – was still prevalent amongst students that transitioned to other careers.

Identity & Agency

All interviewees were united in the view that a key aim of jazz education was to foster students’ identity and agency. They highlighted the vital role of mentorship in supporting that aim, and the value of and need for curriculum that incentivises and rewards individual interpretation: What does this mean to you? What’s your story? What’s in your musical heart? Dive into your music. As one teacher put it, learning music is “a very personal journey of truth-seeking”, in which teachers must “let the music be what it wants to be for the student”.

In its classic form, that mentorship model sees the student first learn the ways of the master – whose authority lies in the quality of their skills – and then learn to utilise or break those rules in the formation of their own personalised craft (Sennett, 2008, pp. 58-61). One teacher highlighted the extra-musical aspects of this process, too – they saw their role as guiding students towards “just being better people”, especially given how much of the industry runs on goodwill: “you want to work with good humans”.

Sadly, this dynamic has been historically open to abuse by teachers, who seek to mould the student into a model of their own aesthetic priorities in the service of their own ego rather than in the service of the student’s individual needs, interests and learning priorities. Canham (2022, p. 83) describes this as “…the clash between an ideal self…and the ought self [that is] promoted by the teacher.”

One educator highlighted the crippling effect this approach to teaching can have on students’ sense of identity and agency – it “sows the seed of self-doubt” and truncates their belief that “my idea has meaning”. Another believed that students’ sense of the “realm of permissibility” was confined by both the volume and the narrow stylistic range of the curriculum – that they were “boxed in” or “unable to explore ideas without outcome pressure”. This inability for teachers or students to explore outside, or even see outside of the frame (see, e.g. Dorst, 2015) of the repertoire list was seen by interviewees as a central barrier to their ability to foster students’ diverse creative identities. While one teacher identified the usefulness of the canon as “common ground”, they also highlighted that it “does need to change” and that the hegemony of the canon “kills this [diverse creative identities] unless we are very careful”. Furthermore, several interviewees highlighted the heightened risk of poor mental health amongst performing artists, and that negative learning experiences that hinder self-actualisation can have significant impacts on students’ wellbeing.

A number of strategies were implemented by teachers to foster students’ ability to “trust your ideas”. The “traditionalist” teacher encouraged his students to write their own repertoire in particular canonic styles, or to write new melodies over existing harmonic frameworks (commonly known as contrafacts). Another teacher similarly identified the power of composing, even something very brief (“micro-ideas”), as a tool to foster greater empowerment and fight negativity or self-critique, stating (perhaps in an allusion to the emphasis of Western education on “Great Works” by “Great Composers”) that “composition doesn’t have to be serious”. One educator suggested that a key way to help mitigate the power dynamic between teacher and student was to “make mistakes around students” – to demonstrate one’s humility and acknowledge that learning is a life-long pursuit.

The importance of identity and agency also extended to staff as well. One educator highlighted the need to “take everyone on the journey” with any attempts to change long-established models of curriculum. Another pointed to the need for teaching to celebrate each individual teacher’s perspectives and factor these into curriculum design – to demarcate “clear roles as lecturers” that highlight “what we do uniquely”. One institution had sought to amplify tutors’ agency in this way by requiring them to design and teach their own 6 week modules, resulting in a unit curriculum that was described as “open, weird and beautifully chaotic”. Affording tutor agency in this way could certainly lead to unintegrated chaos that in fact reaffirms ego-teaching, but well-led it also opens the door to move from a top down, hegemonic teaching architecture to a green-print “learning organisation” or white-print approach to “restoring vitality” (Vermaak & de Caluwé, 2018).

Skills & Training

Taking such an approach to designing teaching delivery, however, brings a pedagogical conundrum to the surface – namely, how jazz education balances fostering individual identity & agency while also ensuring a consistency of learning experience that equips students with a future-centric set of skills.

One educator identified that there was a “push-pull” relationship between “openness and feeding curiosity” and “specifics, requirements and curriculum”. At its worst, they suggested, this leads to a kind of “chaos” as each teacher delivers the content they see fit, with little to no feedback loop between staff or overarching design of how that content fits together in a holistic curriculum of skills.

Barrett (2012), however, suggests that this chaos in fact an essential component to fostering emergent knowledge:

…systems are the most creative when they operate with a combination of order and chaos [emphasis in original]. When systems are at the edge of chaos, they are most able to abandon inappropriate or undesirable behaviours and structures and discover new patterns more suitable for changing circumstances. (Barrett, 2012, p. 70)

Some interviewees suggested that ironically, the shape of their curriculums contained both too much chaos where consistent content and learning outcomes were needed, and too much order that tutors’ agency and student-led learning was quashed. Sennett (2008, p. 21) highlights the latter as a predictable outcome when “technical skill has been removed from imagination” by “attempts of institutions to motivate people to work well” (p. 52).

For example, one educator emphasised that too much informality or chaos in learning can come to the detriment of students ability to effectively self-teach: that “the scene isn’t going to teach you to practice”. They suggested that instrumental technique and embodied musicality (see, e.g. Iyer, 2002) was largely being ignored by the current focus on theory and repertoire – that “top down is a killer”, and that their teaching philosophy had become focussed on creating more meaningful order in skill development which enabled students to play competently in any stylistic context. Another teacher advocated for the role of highly ordered approaches to teaching and learning such as that common in Hindustani classical music, which they identified to reflect a “systemisation of rhythm…depersonalisation of knowledge…[a] grounding in craft [that is] very specific.”

The value of deep learning was also frequently identified as a key meaning-making process – digging into the “depth of why for each tune” to “paint the story behind it”. One educator suggested that the current volume of repertoire in their curriculum created too much order in a way that was prohibiting deep learning and “find[ing] new applications” of existing knowledge. Several interviewees echoed this need to allow for a little more chaos in curriculum design, that allowed teachers the agency to design novel learning experiences tailored to the needs of their students – to build on core repertoire in a way that better expresses their own, and fosters their students’ identity & agency. Echoing this sentiment, Ramsden (2003, p. 80) highlights how “...breakneck attempts to ‘cover the ground’ in the absence of a clear structure focused on key concepts intensify [students’] confusion and deaden their excitement” (p. 97).

One teacher also pointed out while the ordering nature of theory is undoubtedly useful for fostering student comprehension, over-intellectualising jazz improvisation can have a negative impact on student’s ability to perform freely and spontaneously, and that teachers should also encourage “feeling over thinking”.

Systems & Ecology

All interviewees recognised that their role as educators formed just one part of students’ ecology – both of their learning and performing jazz and their life more broadly. One educator recognised that there was a paradigm shift in thinking under way from an attitude of “let’s prepare artists” to “let’s prepare musicians for a career” – an ethos that also necessitates more proactive systems- and futuresthinking.

Several interviewees advocated for the need to bring extra musical and extra-University life into the classroom, and to “break the world open” in a way that directly links teaching to likely real-world performance scenarios. Trans-disciplinary initiatives were occasionally highlighted as productive ways to “break open” students’ world of perspectives and practices. One interviewee indicated that such initiatives were a strong feature of their program, and collaborative projects between jazz students and fine arts, poetry, literature, game music and even local hospitals had involved students even in the very early stages of their degrees.

The value of such initiatives in equipping students with work-ready, transferrable skills has been increasingly promoted in recent years (Austin et al., 2021). However, one educator recognised that the physical sites of teaching and learning could also catalyse or hinder these transdisciplinary collaborations, and used the metaphor of “where’s the foosball table?” to reflect a need for spaces on campus that can foster serendipitous meetings and exploratory play. Another emphasised the benefits of curating “gatherings” and fostering a learning network of “frequent feedbacks between teachers” (see, e.g. Ehrlichman, 2021).

One interviewee suggested that the shift towards trans-disciplinarity would also benefit from considering how collaboration can be fostered at all scales. To adopt Bartlett’s (2018) terminologies: both amongst tutor and student peers (i.e. partnerships), tutors within degrees (crews), musicians and the audience community (congregations), and between Universities and local councils or high schools (crowds). In fact, another educator indicated that situating learning outcomes as public performance and audience engagement was a central part of their curriculum – that it was essential to ask “who is it [the music] serving” and reflect the New Orleans roots of jazz and “take it to the street”.

It was also apparent that the ecology of learning extended beyond the sphere of music, too. One educator used the example of an alumni that had since moved overseas and started their own bakery business, but who had told him recently that “so much of this bakery has been inspired by what I learned in the jazz degree”.

Summary

Music-making rarely occurs in a vacuum – it is a fundamentally social act of collective and experiential sense-making. Just as music education involves an ecosystem of students, teachers, audiences, venues and institutions, so too does it contain an overlapping set of practices and values that inform the day to day structures and methods of teaching and learning.

By highlighting the themes of Past & Future, Identity & Agency, Skills & Training, and Systems & Ecology, this paper also identifies a number of opportunities for innovation that may significantly amplify the reach and impact of jazz pedagogy, philosophy and practice.

For example, the challenge of balancing tradition and innovation, or personalisation with the standardisation of skills training is certainly not one that is solely faced by jazz education. However, many interviewees seemed to be approaching this question from scratch in the design of curriculum. No precedent examples were cited of other degrees or that disciplines that seemed to be succeeding in this regard. It may be simply that the dynamic nature of education ecosystems means that such a balance is always in flux, however this study suggests that the jazz education ecosystem would significantly benefit from a greater awareness of successful exemplars of training – both from within and outside the field.

Similarly, there also seemed to be both an appetite and opportunity for a more open learning network between degree programs – and as one interviewee put it, a reticence to open up that network in fear of exacerbating a the brain drain experienced by their smaller city.

Several interviewees also appeared to identify a missing link or flow of information between the skills currently being taught in their programs and those in demand by the industry. One educator in particular highlighted the value that might be gleaned from surveying alumni about how their degrees had or had not prepared them for a career – both to help design curriculum that mitigates a risk of being “accountable to the pressure later for them not being able to work”, and to celebrate the broader ways in which “music enriches your life”, especially where alumni had transitioned to other fields. The latter seems to be one of the most potent and most underutilised angles through which arts degrees stand to advocate for their value in the post-normal world.

References

Austin, C., Cornell, C., Jenkins, G., Pedersen, C., & Sade, G. (2021). Creativity at Work: Interdisciplinary learning in industry and community settings.

Barrett, F. J. (2012). Yes To The Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz. Harvard Business Review Press.

Bartlett, R. D. (2018). Microsolidarity Part 2: A Theory of Groups and Groups of Groups. https://medium.com/microsolidarity/microsolidarity-part-2-a-theory-of-groups-and-groupsof-groups-7c6e7ce63eda

Bennett, D. (2009). Academy and the Real World: Developing realistic notions of career in the performing arts. Arts and humanities in higher education, 8(3), 309-327. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022209339953

Bennett, D., & Bridgstock, R. (2015). The urgent need for career preview: Student expectations and graduate realities in music and dance. International journal of music education, 33(3), 263-277. https://doi.org/10.1177/0255761414558653

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

Canham, N. (2022). Preparing Musicians for Precarious Work: Transformational Approaches to Music Careers Education. Routledge.

Dorst, K. (2015). Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. MIT Press.

Ehrlichman, D. (2021). Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Friedman, T. L. (2016). Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide To Thriving in the Age of Accellerations. Penguin.

Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1999). Discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203793206

Goodman, D. (2011). Tony Williams' drumset ideology to 1969 Synergistic emergence from an adaptive modeling of feel, technique and creativity as an archetype for cultivating originality in jazz drumset performance studies University of Sydney].

Iyer, V. (2002). Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition, and Expressive Microtiming in African- American Music. Music perception, 19(3), 387-414. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2002.19.3.387

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.

Murphy, J. P. (2009). Beyond the improvisation class: Learning to improvise in a university jazz studies program. Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society., , 171-184.

Prouty, K. E. (2006). Orality, Literacy, and Mediating Musical Experience: Rethinking Oral

Tradition in the Learning of Jazz Improvisation. Popular music and society, 29(3), 317-334. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007760600670372

Ramsden, P. (2003). Learning to teach in higher education (2nd ed.). RoutledgeFalmer.

Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. Penguin.

Smoker, T. J., Murphy, C. E., & Rockwell, A. K. (2009). Comparing Memory for Handwriting versus

Typing. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 53(22), 1744-1747. https://doi.org/10.1177/154193120905302218

Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007, November). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making

Tolmie, D. (2020). 2050 And beyond: A futurist perspective on musicians' livelihoods. Music education research, 22(5), 596-610. https://doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2020.1841133

Vermaak, H., & de Caluwé, L. (2018). The Colors of Change Revisited: Situating and Describing the Theory and its Practical Applications. In (Vol. 26,