Over the years, as I have assumed the role of “Jazz Educator”,

both within and outside of “institutions of higher learning”, I

have often been approached by students seeking help along
the path of learning to be a jazz musician. In order to
understand the student’s direction and to gain some
perspective about the background that stimulates their desire, I
have learned to ask a revealing question. “Who is your favorite
musician?”

It is remarkable that more often than not, I get no clear

answer. There is sometimes a period of uncomfortable silence
broken by occasional throat clearing noises, while the
prospective student searches for a name or perhaps tries to
guess what name might create the most effective impression.
Sometimes an embarrassed silence yields nothing and
occasionally there is an equally uncommitted claim to have
listened to and liked “everything”.

How different this is from the response one might expect from a
budding athlete. Can you imagine similar vagueness and
evasion from a budding young ballplayer? “Well, gee I just like
the game.” What game? Whose game? The game as played
by your school contemporaries; by some older players in your
neighborhood; by the local semi-pro team; by a major league
team; by players or a particular player of a major league team?
Have you seen that player on television; in person? How does
that player hold the bat; run; throw; catch; pitch? What
characteristics make up that player’s style and what about that
style attracts your attention?

These would seem a straightforward and simple series of

questions for any ambitious young athlete to answer and could,
with appropriate modifications of course, be applied to any
sport. The ability to answer such questions easily would seem
to provide a minimum standard by which to establish a young
athlete’s genuine interest in the pursuit of a chosen sport.

How then, are we to assess the student musician’s inability to

answer? Perhaps the student’s desire comes from an idea of
the potential pleasures of performing with and for other people,
with the attendant rewards of attention and shared activity.
These are certainly worthwhile values and have served as a
part of the motivation of many artists. But this is a broad
image which is insufficiently concrete to serve as a focus for
attainment. There is no clear place to begin and the mentor is
reduced to helping the applicant to find something to love. Get
a model. Find a prototype. Without this there is no image and
no passion.

A poor model is better than none. The budding saxophone

player whose listening experience is so under developed that
Kenny Gorelick can be a hero, can be expected to trade Kenny
in for some reasonably sophisticated model as listening
experience deepens. Get a grip, any grip; then move on to a
firmer one.
This acquisition of personal prototypes is an essential first step
in the learning process. Without it, there is no foundation on
which to build technique. A student can only be helped to learn
to emulate an art for which the student has a clearly held
image. Attempts to assimilate a more abstract process of
technical practice without a sufficiently ingrained model are
likely to prove frustrating, if not futile. Imitation is primary. The
more highly developed the model and the more exact the
imitation, the more successful will be the results.

In general, jazz educators tend to underestimate the length of

time that needs to be spent in imitation order for a student to
assimilate traditional techniques. It is an intuitive process of
incorporation; literally “putting it into the body”. This requires
admitting music in through intense listening and a long process
of practice and comparison until what comes out of the student
begins to resemble what has gone in. Outside guidance in this
activity can be helpful, but it is essentially the student’s
intuition which must propel and energize it.

There are some cultures in which this process of unabashed

imitation is traditionally carried on for 20 or 30 years before an
artist is encouraged to attempt a conscious effort at a more
personal expression. This would be excessive in the training of
a jazz musician but interestingly, personal expression will
emerge unbidden and of its own volition in all but the most
exceptional cases of great talent for mimicry.

Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of “original

thought” is the most fraudulent and destructive element in the
institutionalized process of jazz education. Students are
encouraged, sometimes even forced to engage in a frenzied
“real time” search for “what to play”, resulting in frustration for
the student and the audience. The usual result is awful
gibberish which ought to be embarrassing to all parties but
which seems to be not only condoned but encouraged by those
jazz educators who misunderstand the process of
improvisation.

Under prepared students are rewarded for incoherent public

attempts at improvisation at officially sanctioned contests and
festivals with the result that the students are reinforced in the
expression of anxiety and insecurity. Memorization of solo
passages is discouraged by unwise educators who never heard
or realized how often the appropriate solos were repeated by
Ellington band members in successive performances of his
compositions. Members of the audience have no way of
knowing whether or not a solo is improvised or memorized,
they only know if it sounds good or not and that’s the only thing
that should matter to them.
It is not only unimportant that the selection of notes and
patterns in a given “improvised” solo passage be “new”, it
borders on the impossible. What is essential is that in the
performance of controlled and familiar passages, an emotional
process of rediscovery of the beauty and excitement inherent in
the performer’s experience of that music communicates itself
to the audience, imbuing the music with those spontaneous
elements of expression that give it its life and breath. This
vitality bears no relation to the frantic groping that passes for
most beginning jazz solos, which communicate only the sense
that the performer is careening out of control. Being on the
edge is exciting only when one rarely goes over it.

Students need to be taught to listen to how great jazz

musicians perform their improvisations before their attention is
directed at the improviser’s choices ofwhat to play. What to
play needs to be a “given” so that the anxiety created by the
challenge of that more sophisticated element of the creative
process is temporarily removed. Then the young musician can
focus on developing reliable performance habits which will not
be disturbed by the additional problems involved in selecting
what to play. This part of the learning curve is necessarily a
long one and ignoring or underestimating it can lead to
discouraging and sometimes disastrous results.

There is a well known and successful classical instrumentalist

whose performances of Mozart, Schubert, Weber and Bartok
rank among the best, but who loses control of those elements
that give his music its communicative beauty when he performs
what he considers to be jazz. He becomes so preoccupied with
the under prepared process of selecting appropriate things to
play that there is no room in his otherwise sensitive musical
consciousness for dealing with the elements of beautiful jazz
interpretation and “performance values”. Even his normally
liquid and expressive sound becomes unrelentingly strident and
strained as he relinquishes control of it in his anxiety ridden
effort to find what to play. No other explanation justifies the
difference in the quality of performance of such a fine musician
in jazz and “classical” music. It can only be attributed to an
inability to deal with the selection of un-predetermined
passages.

All this suggests that the problems of note selection be

minimized in the early stages of learning to improvise. In this
way, deeply ingrained performance habits can be developed
which will withstand the added strain of the “real time” problem
of choosing what to play. A separation of elements may be
necessary in order to gain control of all that must eventually be
integrated into the highest level of the improviser’s art.
Nothing is so well prepared as a great “spontaneous”
performance.

Chuck Israels