Enough with the fake jazz education

Just because you have memorised a phrase in a language, let’s say Latin, it doesn’t mean that you can speak that language fluently or have a functional conversation in Latin. Lawyers learn a few Latin phrases, as do Catholics and even medical doctors. Anybody might be able to read and sound out a bit of Latin too. But those aren’t at all the same as learning, speaking, or understanding the language.

Similarly, memorising or reading a jazz melody or a solo is not in any way the same as being able to play jazz.

Being able to play jazz involves a whole “language” (or languages, really), with grammar, concepts, genres, skills, procedures, contexts, idioms, subtleties, history, forms, and meanings. Playing jazz involves fluency in these kinds of thing, in real-time, interacting with other musicians, chord progressions, audiences, and contexts. It is based on improvised, responsive interactions – like a conversation in Latin, or whatever language.

Young children and other new language learners rarely sound very “good”. We don’t expect the average two-year-old to be able to match the world’s great orators. New jazz learners are like that too. It takes time, it takes prolonged effort, and it takes consistent practice. As an aside, the good news is that it can take a lot less time to learn jazz fluently than English, or Latin. This brings us to a peculiar kind of misconception or educational fraud that exists around the edges of jazz education: fake jazz.

Fake jazz in music education

Fake jazz is playing music that sounds like jazz but is just played verbatim from a written score or is rote-learned. Fake jazz is often found in two educational contexts. First, music exams or other rote learning situations. Second, fake jazz is found in school bands where everything is fully notated including most pernicious of all, written solos.

Someone might learn a melody that jazz musicians often perform. Let’s say, for example, ‘In a sentimental mood’. Just because someone plays that melody note-for-note off a score, doesn’t mean they are playing jazz: they aren’t. There aren’t “jazz pieces”. Jazz is a way of playing and improvising music in which playing just the written notes is only the tiniest and least important part.

Written solos – an anti-educational fraud

The written-solos-in-school-band situation is worse, for it is deceptive. Obviously, if someone plays a written solo, they are not improvising. But to the audience, it can sound like it was improvised. It can sound like jazz, without being jazz at all.

Currently in the online world of social media, there are evolving scandals over Instagram-famous musicians faking or even stealing other people’s playing and solos and passing them off as their own improvisations. Similarly with fake polyglots. Attempting to mislead audiences, including parents and other stakeholders, into thinking that written solos performed by a student are improvisations is similarly dishonest and deserves equally to be called out.

Equally wrong is an obsession with music education fixated on product rather than process. It is easy to imagine an insecure or unskilled school band conductor leading a “jazz” band in which no improvisation is allowed. After all, like a two-year-old who struggles with complex and fluent speech, a beginner or inexperienced student improviser is unlikely to sound great. Conductors put in a lot of effort to make their ensemble sound as good as possible. Why “ruin” that with bad-sounding solos when there’s a “perfectly good written solo” available?

Because of education, that’s why. Because of process over product. Because of integrity and because of honesty.

A better approach

If you want students to become good at playing music, you need to help them build skills, concepts, and other knowledge over time so that they are equipped to play anything. Not just rote learn a few things that sound good in a performative illusion, but overarching skills that can be applied independently in diverse contexts. So too with jazz specifically. Jazz education is for equipping students with the skills they need to play and improvise anything fluently, not just one thing in a single context. In early stages, that will involve enduring the fumbling efforts of beginners but, like language learning, that is a natural and understandable stage in mastering the process.

Written solos can be used as a tool for study, or an example of the kind of thing an improviser might do, but to use them in performance is misleading, unnecessary, and unfair to students.

Not every school band conductor is an expert jazz improviser, and that’s fine. But if they aren’t then they could perhaps not take on work as jazz educators or could get help teaching the aspects of the music they can’t teach. Pride, face, and insecurity shouldn’t come into it.

Teach & learn the process: no more fake jazz deceptions

When we hear jazz played by professional players, it sounds wonderful. It is a great product. But that product is the result of a process employing skills developed over time. Jazz is the process; it isn’t the product.

Enough with the fake jazz. Jazz education should be conducted with integrity and without misleading students and stakeholders into thinking they are learning jazz when really, they are just playing jazzy-sounding band music. Teach and learn the process.