[ReneCM]

I don't know how you can understand be-bop without being thoroughly schooled in the blues, but for some reason, the curriculum STARTS with be-bop. We end up with players who know all about Sonny Stitt and Bird, and nothing about Johnny Hodges or Ben Webster... let alone Robert Johnson or Howlin' Wolf. I hear very little understanding of the blues in a lot of my peers (musicians under 25), and I know players.... young players who I think are great musicians... who play the snot out of their instruments and write great tunes, and whom I love playing with... who can't really have a conversation about Art Tatum or Errol Garner or even MONK!???! This is a serious deficiency, in my opinion. We have young musicians that are either unable, or for some reason UNSATISFIED with playing tastefully, or slowly, or playing old tunes... instead of being able to do everything, they can do 1 or 2 things, and stick to it as if that's the "only" thing.

I can't stand dogma... whether it be traditionalist dogma or modernist dogma. "Man, you must swing your 8th notes LIKE THIS...WE MUST COPY THE MASTERS... NOTHING AFTER 1955 IS WORTH ANYTHING" VS "Fuck all that OLD SHIT... ANYTHING BEFORE 1955 IS A WASTE OF MY TIME!" Both are boring, facist, and ultimately unneccessary and uninteresting concepts to me. There is, of course, a time and place for everything... you want to play a whole set of be-bop tunes because it feels right? I'm all for it. But I expect an openess from modern musicians... and an ability and a desire to try everything they can, in the hope of finding some musical common ground where you can really try to say something. I hold musicians like Brad Turner and Ross Taggart up as examples of this archetype. Sure, when they play, they have to make decisions about what they're going to include and exclude at any given moment... but when they play, they do it with such passion, and such a unique point of view, that WHAT they're playing becomes secondary to what they're SAYING. "Stylistic" considerations are really just boxes that they can step in and out of at will, if that's what the music calls for. Their personal voice is never subjegated.

At this point in time, "jazz" music should be about choosing your aesthetic for the moment, and running with it with intensity and a purpose. I don't think it's neccessary for everything to swing all the time. But, if you're going to swing, just like if you're going to funk, or if you're going to rock... you have to deeply consider what these things mean, and be versed and grounded enough in the music to know when something is and something isn't doing what it is that you want it to do (does that make sense?). The institution tends to impart the idea upon people that either "jazz swings all the time" or "don't even try to swing... it's all been done". The complexities of what makes the music great are not addressed.

Everything is put in boxes. "This is bebop"... and what is presented is a bunch of licks over II V I progressions with altered dominant chords. No, that is not be-bop. I'm sorry, there's a fuck of a lot more to it than that. Just from a musical perspective, to begin with. What about the way Bird and Diz would end tunes? What about the attention to dynamics they had? What about the sense of humour of somebody like Sonny Rollins? What about the importance of Thelonious Monk's rhythmic vocabulary to the development of the music (not once was Monk ever considered in my school years as anything other than iconoclastic and "strange"... not by anyone except for Blaine Wikjord, who told me to listen to Monk and try to play the drums like Monk played piano-- perhaps the best advice I ever got). What about the ability to play on a ballad and play deeply from the heart? Then there's the fact that the social elements of the music never EVER EVER get talked about. What about fucking slavery and segregation and racism and oppression and the concerted effort of the white establishment to imprison, murder, destroy, devalue and debase the efforts of African American artists at that time? I never heard ONE THING about Bird's institutionalization, or Bud Powell's shock therapy, or the fact that these people that we hold up on pedastals, that we lionize, could not walk the streets at night in mixed race company, with a white woman OR a man, without being called a nigger. Where is THAT in "jazz school"? Is everyone just afraid to address the fact that these are the real roots of the music?

Jazz is supposed to come from struggle... from the pain and also the joy of living a real life. Where are the students living? Are they locked up in practice rooms 'shedding Giant Steps while their older mentors are down the street playing? That's wrong. That's missing the point. And nobody ever stresses this to anybody. I was lucky enough to have picked it up honestly, by hearing the stories, by hanging out and by being lucky enough to have great teachers who knew the real deal, and told me about it. But most students don't have that. They get caught up in jazz nerdiness and snobbery, and they don't know that Cannonball loved the Beatles, or that Herbie was a classically schooled musician. They would rather watch a Will Ferrell movie than listen to a Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor record. They don't know anything about the anti-consumerist, anti-war ethic of musicians like Charles Mingus or Eric Dolphy or Ornette Coleman. They don't know how to match a shirt with a tie. They learn about the value of things by attatching some sort of iconoclastic value to EVERYTHING, instead of finding about what makes it tick. Muhammed Ali... "oh yeah, he was that boxer that made funny jokes" Thelonious Monk... "oh yeah, funny hats and weird dancing, man.... whole tone scales"... George Carlin "7 words you can't say on TV..." The 1960's "hippys and acid and woodstock".... The Ku Klux Klan "white hoods and burning crosses...." Everything is geared towards consuming the aesthetic instead of understanding it.

And maybe that's OK. Maybe jazz school is meant to be a place where the technical and theoretical aspects of the music are stressed, to the detriment of all other concepts. Maybe the point is to lead the horse to water and let him decide whether or not they want to drink. The ones that drink will get that depth... the ones that don't... will not be musicians. Impossible to stress that to somebody that doesn't inheritly "get" it.

Sorry if that was self serving, incoherent, rambling, or pessimistic. It's not meant to be. Just my observations.