Australia’s Premier jazz music academy.
Join a jazz combo at the Jazz Workshop. Now enrolling.
We are a music school specialising in teaching jazz and improvised music. Our aim is music education of the highest quality: helping students achieve musical excellence through jazz.
Bands, Music Lessons & more
- Join one of our bands
- Take individual music lessons with a qualified teacher
- Enrol in a school holiday camp
- Take Jazz improvisation lessons
- Go to the famous annual JWA Jazz Camp
- Experience one of our Band tours
- We provide HSC accompaniment and preparation as an exclusive service to our private students
We offer a full range of bands and courses for everyone. See the bands page for details. Talented young musicians can also audition for our high performance program in one of the JWA Academy ensembles. These provide a fast-track to success for the most motivated and talented students in a stimulating, challenging environment.
Respected Teachers
The teaching faculty at the Jazz Workshop are all leading professionals: outstanding educators and performers, including some of the most well respected figures in Australian Jazz. Students of all ages and standards are welcome. We cater particularly to students who want to learn to play jazz or who are looking for an alternative to traditional exam-based teaching methods.
How to become a better jazz player
Our #1 tip for learning to play jazz well is to play in a jazz band. This is especially effective if you do it as well as regular lessons from a good teacher who can play (and teach) jazz and you practice on your own between lessons. You will improve much faster doing lessons and a band than if you do just one or the other. About twenty years of experience has proven to us that this is true. Lessons alone are all very well, but playing in a band puts it all into context and lets you put into practice all that theory and technique. Jazz is meant to be played in a band, that is the main point! Just playing in a band without lessons can work, but you will miss out on all the individual coaching a teacher can give you and your progress will be slower.
There are lots of jazz bands around, or you could form your own. If you join one of the combos here at Jazz Workshop Australia then you’ll benefit from a regular combination of improvisation training and rehearsing/playing. You’ll get this under the guidance of an expert teacher using an effective and proven system that is unique to JWA. So, if you are considering taking lessons with us, we’d advise this: instead of an hour lesson each week, do a thirty-minute private lesson plus a one hour combo session each week. It will cost you less, you’ll get more time for your money and you will make much faster progress than if you only did the lessons.
