Jazz Goes to College

For a long time, campus dons, like a lot of other folk, took the view that jazz is best learned, if at all, as it used to be: in nightclubs, in Storeyville houses, at Mammy's knee or some other low joint. It took just one book, though, Gunther Schuller's lovingly scholastic Early Jazz, published in 1968, to confirm that jazz could stand up to the same kind of penetrating musical analysis usually accorded classics like the Beethoven quartets or the Wagner Ring cycle. Lately, jazz has swung into the academies like one of the old Woody Herman Herds thundering up Manhattan's 52nd Street.

As a case not necessarily in counterpoint, take the 1971 American College Jazz Festival, held recently on the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. While 15 groups from all over the country joined in, trumpets blared through sinus-shattering amplification, making it painfully clear that the young today seem to like their jazz every bit as loud as rock. Yet it was astounding to hear one band after another mix rock, the classics, or electronic compositions into fertile jazz blends. Even Guest Star Dizzy Gillespie, something of a master blender himself, had to take notice. The loudspeakers could not quite conceal the virtuosity of the young players and their apparent ability to make music out of anything and everything. Such a meeting of diverse idioms seemed to bear out Duke Ellington's famous prediction about the pop scene. "Soon," said the Duke, "it'll all be just music; you won't have to say whether it's jazz or not, just whether you like it."

Zero Absenteeism. The Illinois festival was only the tip of a jazz iceberg. From grad to grammar school, hot jazz is becoming the most popular thing since hot lunch. Even kindergartners and children in the first three grades are tapping their toes at Berkeley's Washington Elementary School, with rhythmic help from teachers like Saxophonist Bob Houlehan. In junior highs and high schools throughout the U.S., where old-fashioned swing over rock-rhythm sections is the vogue, an estimated 16,000 jazz bands are taking over from marching bands as an intramural way of life. Says Irving Bard, music director of the West Babylon Junior High School in Long Island: "My rehearsal band comes in every morning at 7:30 a.m., and the absenteeism is zero."

College campuses have led the way. In 1965, only 25 colleges gave accredited courses directly or indirectly related to jazz. By next September, some 500 will offer jazz as part of bona fide curriculums; the University of Utah has just instituted a Ph.D. in jazz composition. As recently as 1967, only one U.S. college--North Texas State--offered a major in jazz. This year ten colleges are awarding jazz degrees. Other schools offer swinging seminars by guest "professors" like Cannonball Adderley, Clark Terry and Billy Taylor who discuss such vital matters as the trumpet lip trill and, almost as important, how to sign a contract.

Staying in Tune. The fact that jazz is being marked and measured by the schools will lend it a certain stability that it never had before. The big danger, of course, is that, like so many other folkloric subjects in academia, jazz could wind up fully preserved but essentially dead on the page.

Indeed, there are some who worry whether jazz can (or should) be taught at all. "If you have to ask what jazz is," Louis Armstrong once observed, "you ain't got it." His view is both right on and slightly wrongheaded. Schooling alone can no more produce a creative jazz player than a novelist, poet or even an All-America fullback. Yet the nurturing of naturally gifted kids is a proud and longstanding challenge to the American academic scene. Any young jazz player can certainly stand some formal polishing of his delayed triplets, skimmed notes, quarter-tone vibratos and other "words" in the jazz vocabulary. Says Clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, head of the Jazz Ensemble at N.Y.U.'s School of Education: "It's amazing how many of them can benefit by being taught the little things--like staying in tune."

Jazz Stigma. With notable exceptions like the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory, the nation's great music schools are way behind the general universities. Only in the last year, for example, have conservatories like Eastman and Manhattan begun to offer jazz during regular semesters. Juilliard and Curtis still do not. Until very recently, a student could be evicted from conservatory practice rooms just for playing jazz. And that is as nothing compared to the astonishing neglect accorded jazz in black colleges. Major black schools like Fisk, Tuskegee and Wilberforce still do not condone it. Perhaps, suggests Saxophonist John Handy, an instructor at San Francisco State, that is because many black fundamentalist churches have stigmatized jazz as evil and sinful.

When North Texas State became the first U.S. college or university to offer a jazz degree back in 1947, most of the faculty protested on the grounds that jazz had no place in an academic program. Worse, it would automatically bring marijuana to the campus. Today, the school has no more pot than many others. But it does have eight romping jazz bands and 200 of the finest young jazz players in the country. Times have changed, even if North Texas State still has to award an anachronistically entitled degree in "Dance Band" because of a certain residual hostility in high places. Says Director Leon Breeden: "That sounds better than 'jazz band' to some members of the Texas State legislature, I guess. But jazz is what we do around here." Here and there, jazz is what a lot of other people are doing, too.

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