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As jazz education has expanded, have jazz audiences increased any?

iStockPhoto

As jazz education has expanded, have jazz audiences increased any?

In a recent Huffington Post submission, pianist and composer Kurt Ellenberger writes about what he calls "the education fallacy": the premise that an increase in music education will lead to increased audiences. He's writing here about classical music, but draws a parallel with jazz:

On the education spending issue, it's common to hear musicians say, "well, we're not spending enough, that's why we're not building classical music audiences — we need to spend more on education." I return to Jazz Education, where we went from spending very little, to spending hundreds of millions, with nothing to show for it in regards to audience development. Why did the jazz audience decline, not grow, as the spending rapidly increased? Is there any reason to think that more spending would succeed with classical music where it has failed with jazz?

As evidence that jazz education has "failed" to produce new audiences, Ellenberger cites data demonstrating the proliferation of jazz education in colleges, summer camps and high schools. At the same time, he also states that discussions like the Jazz Audiences Initiative are responses to declining jazz audiences.

Ellenberger, I gather, is also on faculty at Grand Valley State University, and from that perch once helped to produce jazz concerts himself. (He plays in the Grand Valley State New Music Ensemble once featured on NPR's Weekend Edition.) That is, he's seen the shifts in education spending and audience decline in person. As he is paid to be a jazz educator, it seems unlikely that he's attacking the entire system that supports him — just its efficacy at seeding jazz audiences.

I find this perspective compelling, but also a bit frustrating.

Enlarge Diane Labommbarbe/iStockPhoto

Do conservatories produce "cookie cutter" musicians? (At least they'll be able to play a certain Jimmy Heath blues well.)

Diane Labommbarbe/iStockPhoto

Do conservatories produce "cookie cutter" musicians? (At least they'll be able to play a certain Jimmy Heath blues well.)

More links from this week:

• Interesting discussions at George Colligan's blog this week. An informed opinion on the charge that music schools produce "cookie cutter" musicians. Some thoughts on sight reading, that misunderstood skill among the jazz community. And a low brass forum erupts.
• At the WBGO blog, there are interviews with master drummer and educator Charlie Persip and saxophonist Kenny Garrett, who you may know has recently put out a new studio album. Also, memories of Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette from the JazzSet vaults.
• Capsulocity is a short video interview series with young (mostly jazz) musicians in New York. We mentioned it earlier this week but only in passing.
• This week in Esperanza Spalding: JazzTimes cover story. From one of A Blog Supreme's newest contributors.
• Guitarist Vernon Reid briefly talks Spectrum Road, the new jazz-rock supergroup with Jack Bruce (of Cream), John Medeski and Cindy Blackman Santana.
• Pianist Myra Melford is one of five winners of the 2012 Alpert Awards in the Arts. The award is worth $75,000.
• Lester Young, clarinetist. He was known as a tenor saxophonist, of course, but also kept a cheap metal clarinet on his arsenal. From Aesthetic, Not Anesthetic, who also recontextualizes, say, early cornetist Red Nichols.
• A new film about jazz in India is out. And the Times article manages to avoid all "Calcutta Cutie" references.
• The Jazz Gallery, a New York venue supporting emerging artists, needs to move and raise a whole bunch of money to do it. (NPR Music has recorded live from the Gallery in recent years.) Howard Mandel reports.
• More on Cecil Taylor, who is being feted this month in New York. Seth Colter Walls reviews an early tribute.
• At last, an obituary for iconic jazz matron Phoebe Jacobs.
• Bix Beiderbecke's prep school dorm room is being destroyed.
• Destination: Out posts a rare Cecil Taylor bit.
• The Jazz Session spoke with pianist George Colligan and saxophonist Steve Lehman.
• The Checkout features student jazz ensemble recordings, from WBGO's celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

Enlarge Courtesy of the artist

The Fringe is Bob Gullotti, drums; John Lockwood, bass; and George Garzone, saxophone.

Courtesy of the artist

The Fringe is Bob Gullotti, drums; John Lockwood, bass; and George Garzone, saxophone.

I was an 18-year-old saxophone student at Berklee College of Music when my new best friend, a trumpeter named Willy Olenick, told me about The Fringe. "You've got to hear this band," he said. "They're an amazing trio. You can hear them any Monday night at Michael's and you're nuts not to go."

Willy didn't mention anything about what style they played, and I didn't ask. I just took his advice and went.

Michael's was a small, narrow bar behind Symphony Hall in Boston. There was a WPA mural on the wall. They only served beer and wine, and let's just say a contingent of a few regulars might have been there just for the Rolling Rocks. (In fact, they may have been there all day for the Rolling Rocks.) A man named Bill was at the front door at night, collecting the $2 cover charge. Michael himself manned the bar.

Frankly, on first hearing The Fringe, I wasn't sure what was happening. The trio took the stage, and I don't think I was even sure when the set started. At some point, I realized that this music was not like the other jazz I had heard. Until that time, my jazz listening had been mostly big bands and straight-ahead, swinging jazz groups.

I'd never really heard so-called avant-garde music before, but I stayed for the set, trying to make sense of the sounds. I remember thinking, "I've got to check this out more. There's something here and I don't understand it." I didn't know why, but I found myself looking forward to the next Monday. And then the next Monday, and the next.

After about a year of Mondays, Michael spoke to me: "You're here every week — why don't you be the bartender?" I thought for two seconds and said, "Sure."

Enlarge Giovanni Russonello/Courtesy of Capitalbop

Mad Curious, with drummer Lenny Robinson, saxophonist Brian Settles and bassist Tarus Mateen, performs at a Capitalbop house show.

Giovanni Russonello/Courtesy of Capitalbop

Mad Curious, with drummer Lenny Robinson, saxophonist Brian Settles and bassist Tarus Mateen, performs at a Capitalbop house show.

The Undead Music Festival, which lifted off last night, has grown every year. On Friday, it will outgrow New York City.

Now in its third year, this jazz festival typically seizes small pockets of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, as it did yesterday, building immersive urban playgrounds where largely young audiences flood venues with colored admissions bracelets. It is jazz as both heady experience and social happening. But on Friday's Night of the Living DIY, the venues scatter across five Brooklyn neighborhoods, as well as a half-dozen cities across the U.S.

Still, the festival's expansion — and its use of "do-it-yourself" spaces rather than traditional clubs — is really a way of asking audiences to think smaller, to look closer to home. To turn off (computers and stereos), tune out (from your MP3 collection) and drop in (on a snug, local gathering).

As the head of Capitalbop, an organization that seeks to engage local jazz audiences in Washington, D.C., and presents informal shows in service of that goal, I find this development exciting. Search & Restore, one of the groups responsible for Undead, has decided to feature living-room venues simply because they are already thriving: A quiet movement of artist-produced, anti-corporate jazz concerts is creeping across the country. Here are a few of the motivations that I've perceived for this idea, and for Undead's decision to embrace it.

As a follow-up to yesterday's thoughts around BADBADNOTGOOD, the improvising band that many folks are talking about, I'd like to submit this brief video interview with young pianist Christian Sands.

Sands is a product of the modern jazz education system — he graduated from the Manhattan School of Music, one of the most prestigious jazz programs out there, and studied with both Jason Moran and Dr. Billy Taylor. He got his first big break when he joined Christian McBride's Inside Straight, which brought him on tour around the world. He's currently studying composition with Vijay Iyer — he was literally in the middle of a lesson when All Things Considered interviewed Iyer in March.

As you can see, Sands carries himself with a soft-spoken humility. He also happens to be a very good and very in-demand musician. I met him briefly when he stopped by NPR with Ben Williams' band, and you can hear him on Piano Jazz and playing with the Olatuja Project.

All this would seem to make him the anti-BBNG musician: possesses a music school pedigree, is polite, demonstrates competence in straight-ahead jazz, plays a lot of seated shows in suits, actually looks up to older musicians. But he's but a 23-year-old with a voice that occasionally cracks — merely two years older than BBNG's oldest member. And check out the tune Sands is playing throughout in the background: Kanye West's "Runaway." (It becomes more obvious around 6:21, when you can hear Sands' riff on the signature "repeating single note on beat three" motif.)

Like BBNG's members, who cover Kanye's "Flashing Lights," Sands came of age musically as Kanye West rose to pop culture superstardom. Naturally, Kanye's beats are part of Sands' musical lexicon too. (So is the popular hip-hop duo OutKast, whose song "Prototype" Sands also briefly talks about arranging.) Just because he came up in jazz's mainstream doesn't mean that Sands doesn't think about how his art interfaces with pop culture today. I like to think it's given him more tools to deal with that, actually.

I'd like to point out one more bit of this interview I find revealing:

Enlarge Sean Berrigan

BADBADNOTGOOD.

Sean Berrigan

BADBADNOTGOOD.

Hello, fans of the Toronto band BADBADNOTGOOD. Thanks for stopping by, truly. I'm delighted that somebody turned you on to the joys of improvised instrumental music; as you can see, it's an experience like none other.

The three young band members — "No one above the age of 21 was involved in the making of this album," their new mixtape claims — create music that could theoretically be called "jazz," but you probably heard about them from a friend or media outlet for whom jazz isn't a top priority. (In fact, the consensus among professional jazz musicians and journalists seems to be notably against them, and further remarks still trickle in.) Their repertoire merges jazz training with their musical milieu: covers of songs by au courant musicians, extrapolations upon hip-hop beats and a few original compositions too.

BBNG is currently on a short U.S. tour, including a New York City stop and a gig backing singer Frank Ocean at Coachella. That's led to another wave of press about the band's connection to the music of today. Being a jazz journalist, I'd like to point out that this connection essentially describes the entire history of jazz: Musicians have always adapted pop music of the age to their own ends. So if you're into what BBNG is doing, here are five other bands who think similarly, but aren't as well-known outside the jazz world. For the sake of simplicity, I've picked only trios of keyboards, bass and drums — just like BADBADNOTGOOD itself.

From the first downbeat of the first Center City Jazz Festival in Philadelphia, you could hear history in the air — and maybe history being made.

The Wade Dean Enspiration, a gutsy young quintet, led off the festival with "Gingerbread Boy" by Jimmy Heath, one of Philly's many homegrown jazz legends. It was 1 p.m. last Saturday, and the dim carpeted room upstairs at Fergie's Pub was starting to fill up.

For the next six hours, Dean, a saxophonist, and his fellow bandleaders would strive not only to honor the legacy embodied by Heath and others, but also to bring forward their own art, a music of today. There was a larger goal as well: to revive a year-round jazz presence in Philadelphia, where the jazz club scene has all but collapsed.

The Center City Jazz Festival is the brainchild of trombonist Ernest Stuart, 28. Buoyed by a Kickstarter campaign, which exceeded its goal of $16,000, Stuart took a cue from New York's Undead and Winter Jazzfests. On Saturday afternoon, he booked 16 bands at four venues within short walking distance.

Of these, Chris's Jazz Café and Time Restaurant book jazz regularly. Fergie's, an old-school Irish bar, and Milkboy, a coffee shop and rock venue, do not. But for one day — possibly the most significant day for Philly jazz in years — these establishments came together for a grassroots showcase of one of the city's greatest cultural assets.

"I'm so proud of my good friend Ernest," said drummer Justin Faulkner as the day ended. "This festival was what we needed to lift our spirits."

Wade Dean concurred: "He did a damn good job. Ernest came through."

Enlarge Rick Diamond/Getty Images

A new profile of Blue Note Records head Don Was, pictured here at the 2009 BMI Country Awards, reveals some interesting signings.

Rick Diamond/Getty Images

A new profile of Blue Note Records head Don Was, pictured here at the 2009 BMI Country Awards, reveals some interesting signings.

More from this week:

• International Jazz Day concert videos are up. JazzTimes had a writeup. So did Jazz Beyond Jazz.
• Cecil Taylor in The New York Times. Ben Ratliff sits down with the great pianist for "five hours over two days," and then some with his artistic progeny. There's also a series of Taylor solo and tribute performances coming up soon in New York.
• Don Was, new head of Blue Note Records, is profiled by Nate Chinen in the Times. Public revelations: The label has signed Wayne Shorter, Terence Blanchard, Derrick Hodge, Jose James, Aaron Neville, Van Morrison. New Ravi Coltrane, Lionel Loueke and Joe Lovano records are in the works.
• An alternate list of 50 great jazz albums, from Phil Freeman. New, old, both.
• Cuban pianist Omar Sosa is coming "home" to the San Francisco Bay Area for a gig. Here's a look at how musicians meet musicians and make themselves feel at "home."
• Dan Morgenstern, eminent jazz critic/historian, speaks with WBGO after retiring from the Institute of Jazz Studies. Also: For a look at some throwbacks, check out "This week in JazzSet history."
• Three Monk Competition winners, all vocalists, talk about the effect of the award on their careers. This story is actually written by a jazz vocalist for the Washington Post.
• A new documentary film paints a portrait of jazz in Washington, D.C. right now. A trailer is up.
• Neneh Cherry (daughter of Don Cherry) and The Thing (Scandinavian free-jazz trio) cover rapper MF Doom. Wild, no?
• Lessons for all teachers, from jazz-band instructors.
• JazzWax spoke with composer-arranger Van Alexander.
• The Jazz Session spoke with guitarist Anders Nilsson and pianist Dan Cray.
• The Checkout replayed this gig.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

Enlarge Beti Niemeyer

Legendary bassist Ron Carter turns 75 today.

Beti Niemeyer

Legendary bassist Ron Carter turns 75 today.

Today is the 75th birthday of Ron Carter, one of the most influential and widely recorded bassists in jazz history. With appearances on more than 2,000 records, his career has spanned the past six decades and is still going strong today.

Carter achieved international attention as a member of Miles Davis' legendary "second great quintet" during the mid- to late 1960s. With nimble and accurate technique, his clear lines always kept the pulse steadily moving and synchronized perfectly with everyone on stage. This reliability landed him sideman gigs with countless other musicians: McCoy Tyner, Eric Dolphy, Herbie Hancock and Horace Silver, just to name a few legends.

Carter's soloing ability is not to be ignored, of course, and he has made his mark as a bandleader since the 1970s. Nevertheless, the biggest legacy he leaves today for younger generations of bass players can be summed up in an anecdote that I've heard from him, via D.C.-area bassist Herman Burney: A $100 bill slipped under the strings of an upright bass stays under the upper section of the neck (the instrument's lower pitch range), but falls if placed farther down the neck (in the higher pitch range). It's symbolic — bassists make the bulk of their money by supporting groups, not by taking solos in the higher register.

Five recordings are not enough to fully reflect the entirety of a career spanning more than half a century, but the following selections provide an adequate sample.

Columbia/Legacy

NPR Music intern extraordinaire Dominic Martinez is soon to graduate college and leave us with a lot more work. But before his last day tomorrow (sob), he also left us with some of his own writing.

Our friends at the All Songs Considered blog have "a recurring series in which we ask our unimaginably young interns to review classic albums they've never heard before." Because we have awesome interns, and because everyone has lacunae in their listening histories, the series lends fresh perspective to the classics. Young Dominic is a jazz bassist — a quite capable one, I say — so he decided to put his ear to Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. As he tells it, he may have just learned to like jazz fusion. Sort of.

More from Dominic soon. Hooray Dominic! [NPR Music: "You've Never Heard Miles Davis' 'Bitches Brew'!?"]

P.S. Oh, like you had heard every single great canonical jazz record when you were a senior in college. Come now.

Enlarge Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

The United Nations General Assembly Hall, pictured here hosting a speech by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is the venue for tonight's International Jazz Day concert.

Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

The United Nations General Assembly Hall, pictured here hosting a speech by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is the venue for tonight's International Jazz Day concert.

Today is International Jazz Day, as decreed by Herbie Hancock and UNESCO. The centerpiece events are two all-star concerts, held at sunrise and sunset. The sunrise show was held in Congo Square in New Orleans, seemingly a nod to the dawn of jazz. Tonight's evening program takes the "international" part of International Jazz Day quite literally:

The worldwide programs and events will conclude in New York City at the United Nations General Assembly Hall with an historic sunset concert certain to be one of the most heralded jazz celebrations of all time, with confirmed artists including Herbie Hancock, Tony Bennett, Terence Blanchard, Richard Bona, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Candido, Ron Carter, Vinnie Colaiuta, Robert Cray, Eli Degibri, Jack DeJohnette, Sheila E., Jimmy Heath, Hiromi, Zakir Hussain, Chaka Khan, Angelique Kidjo, Lang Lang, Joe Lovano, Romero Lubambo, Shankar Mahadevan, Wynton Marsalis, Hugh Masekela, Christian McBride, Danilo Pérez, Tineke Postma, Dianne Reeves, Troy Roberts, Bobby Sanabria, Wayne Shorter, Esperanza Spalding, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks and Tarek Yamani. George Duke will serve as Musical Director. Confirmed Co-Hosts include Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Quincy Jones.

That lineup promises improvising musicians from Cameroon, Cuba, Israel, Japan, India, Benin, China, Brazil, South Africa, Panama, The Netherlands, Australia, Lebanon and, of course, the multicultural United States.

Tonight's show begins at 7:30 p.m. ET and can be streamed live online at jazzday.com. This morning's show is already archived, along with the International Jazz Day kickoff event last week in Paris.

Enlarge Douglas Kirkland/Courtesy of the artist

Herbie Hancock's International Jazz Day initiative will be celebrated in two all-star concerts on Monday.

Douglas Kirkland/Courtesy of the artist

Herbie Hancock's International Jazz Day initiative will be celebrated in two all-star concerts on Monday.

An informal poll on Twitter reveals that 18 followers prefer the version of "Watermelon Man" from Herbie Hancock's debut album Takin' Off, and 16 prefer the electric funk version of "Watermelon Man" on Head Hunters. Several others registered a "both" vote. And now, these news:

• International Jazz Day, Herbie Hancock's global jazz initiative, is Monday. Their jazzday.com website has a free stream of the New Orleans and New York all-star concerts. Plus, the event is encouraging all to play "Watermelon Man," and even made lead sheets available for a quintet arrangement. (Sounds a lot like the Takin' Off version.)
• Eddie Gomez, bassist with Bill Evans for years (among many other associations), is the subject of a JazzTimes story. Earlier this year, he was on a Bill Evans tribute recording with Chick Corea and Paul Motian.
• Bassist Mark Dresser is profiled in a San Diego music blog. The piece makes the interesting observation that internationally-known musicians like Dresser often have trouble gigging in their home towns, especially if they don't live in a major jazz town.
• Wayne Shorter on his current quartet, which has played over 600 shows together. "Danilo [Perez] is involved in humanity."
• The Ars Nova Workshop blog has commissioned a series of posts about the collaboration between composer Muhal Richard Abrams and Philadelphia bandleader Bobby Zankel. It all coincides with the premiere of a new big band piece this weekend.
• On "ghost bands": groups that continue on after their famous leaders' deaths. This is from the L.A. Times in 1998, but I thought of it when it was announced that Brian McKnight would tour with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Yes, that Brian McKnight.
• A new executive director is in at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Greg Scholl is a former NBC Universal executive with a history with independent record labels and a huge collection of 78 rpm records. Wynton Marsalis appears poised to take on a greater management role too.
• Bird Is The Worm is a new blog I've been following, from a guy who deals with a lot of relatively unknown musicians for AllAboutJazz and eMusic. Mostly new stuff.
• Critic John Fordham of The Guardian has a new monthly column. Here's the first edition, featuring 50 years of The Bridge, Tineke Postma and the New York Standards Quartet.
• The National Jazz Museum in Harlem is making a push to expand, with a $22 million capital campaign. The plan is to grow into a new space near the Apollo Theater. Related: Willard Jenkins on modern jazz at the Apollo.
• New album from pianist Romain Collin, The Calling, is streaming now at Nextbop. It's with fellow young players Luques Curtis (bass) and Kendrick Scott (drums).
• New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest is back. The Times-Picayune has wall-to-wall coverage. Local music mag OffBeat has some items too.
• The Black Hawk, a long-gone San Francisco club where Monk, Miles and Brubeck once recorded live albums, is finally recognized by the city. Doug Ramsey has the scoop.
• Another biography on Baroness Pannonica, the great modern jazz patron, is out. This one is from her niece, Hannah Rothschild, who has already made a documentary film on the subject. Last year, author David Kastin released Nica's Dream.
• RIP Joe Muranyi, Louis Armstrong's last clarinetist. Remembrance is from biographer Ricky Riccardi. Also, you may have heard that Armstrong's last recorded concert has finally been re-issued, with a booklet of his favorite recipes. Really.
• Destination: Out has posted tunes from clarinetist Perry Robinson's 1962 Funk Dumpling, with Kenny Barron, Henry Grimes and Paul Motian.
• The Jazz Session spoke with bassist/bass trombonist Chris Brubeck and pianist Romain Collin.
• The Checkout has a studio session with Mike Moreno, plus a look at three intertwined albums out this week.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

Note: This video could be considered slightly NSFW, for scantily-clad people and very brief partial nudity.

It's often pointed out that long ago, jazz was once dance music. It's usually a way of lamenting its current reputation as a cerebral art for seated contemplation. But nothing says music can't be for both hips and head.

Here are two music videos which, in their own ways, visually convey the dance roots found in even modern jazz. Neither are choreographed dance routines in the way of Michael Jackson or Beyonce, but I think both represent a strong movement imperative. Incidentally, NPR Music and WBGO will carry a live video webcast of both bands tonight at 8 p.m. ET, if you can join us.

Enlarge iStockPhoto

For jazz musicians, transcribing from recordings is often a huge part of learning the craft.

iStockPhoto

For jazz musicians, transcribing from recordings is often a huge part of learning the craft.

The headline of this feature story in the Green Bay Press-Gazette is "Saxophonist transcribes jazz to printed notes." Especially if you're not familiar with the mechanics of the craft, it is a rather amazing thing:

"There will be one measure with 65 notes in it," he said. "First of all, I have to write out every note and then divide each beat into however many notes until it hits on the next beat.

"And you have to do this in real time. So I'm doing it by pressing the pause button."

Now, the musicians reading this are saying, "big deal," and wondering why this is the basis of a feature story. For most jazz improvisers, transcribing recorded solos is a valuable way of studying the greats in depth. Writing down every single note and rest in even the simplest solo forces you to listen closely and repeatedly. And because musical notation has inherent limitations — how to represent that trumpet growl, or that tricky flurry of notes? — you must translate with great precision. (Sixty-five notes in a measure seems like a bit of hyperbole, but you get the picture.)

Of course, the saxophonist in this story, a one Woody Mankowski, does this as his day job. He works for Hal Leonard, a sheet music publishing company which sells books of transcribed solos by jazz greats. He's also a performing musician, of course, including an ongoing stint with a Genesis tribute band. The profile on him and his home studio is one of many on artists' workplaces in the East Central Wisconsin region.

Still, it's a nice reminder that what is obligatory for musicians is sometimes quite astounding to those outside the community. For an improvising musician, listening closely is more than a pleasurable activity. Of his vinyl and CD collection, Mankowski says: "That's my education right there, mainly. I got my degree from UW-Green Bay, but this is also my education." [Green Bay Press-Gazette: "Saxophonist transcribes jazz to printed notes"]