16 September 2009 — Why Study Jazz?
I was sitting in my local café this morning, talking to a friend of mine who is in a couple of bands I've shared a bill with, and who is currently studying music. We got talking about school, and about jazz, and it started to kind of tie in with what I was writing in the post below this one: that the skills we learn from playing jazz aren't necessarily useful for playing more popular styles of music. Which got me wondering why so many institutions teach jazz, and why so many people study it.
I love jazz, and I basically always have, thanks to a sister who dragged me and my family to Freeboppers gigs when I was about 9. It was only when I got to uni that I actively started building a jazz record collection though, and I was 22 by the time I enrolled in the jazz program at Monash. Although there were plenty of other people my age and older, the vast majority of students in the course started their first year when they were 18 and fresh out of high school. I quickly became friends with several people who also loved jazz the way I did, but they were in a surprisingly small minority. A large number of people enrolled in the course wanted to play other styles of music much more, such as reggae, hip hop, funk, drum and bass, and other groove-based music. So there was a kind of link, but it was often frustrating for these students to be told that they had to learn how to improvise over Charlie Parker tunes.
By and large, the music conservatories in Melbourne fall into two basic categories: those that train classical musicians – often know as "repertoire" students - and those that train jazz musicians - or "improvisation" students. There are certainly differences between schools, but even the more popular-leaning schools teach a lot of jazz. Which is all well and good if, like me, you decided that you wanted to be the next Bill Frisell. But for those people who wanted to play in rock bands, their courses would often be incredibly frustrating. While learning transcriptions of Wes Montgomery solos might be useful even if you wanted to do something more akin to Jimi Hendrix, if you were more interested in Animal Collective it might actually hinder your progress.
So, why are courses so biased towards jazz? The obvious answer is that it's easier to teach. Jazz requires countless hours of technical practise to master, and rewards deep study of classical harmony - which is relatively easily adapted to cover the harmonic frameworks more usually associated with jazz. Given the rate of harmonic change in most traditional jazz tunes, the level of complexity in the performance is extremely high, and requires a lot of knowledge of scales and chords in particular. If you wanted to fully come to grips with John Coltrane's "Giant Steps", you could easily spend several years investigating it. I know this, because people have done it.
But what if that level of attention was given to Talking Heads? Would the music wither under such scrutiny? Would the simplicity of the chord progressions bore the student after mere weeks? Would the techniques required for playing "I Zimbra" be mastered in a single technical workshop? Quite possibly. But what if the opposite happened? If I'd spent three years studying Talking Heads, what kind of musician would I be now?