by Nate Chinen
So he presented Anthony Braxton. He hosted a seventy-fifth-anniversary celebration for Blue Note Records, pairing Wayne Shorter with Norah Jones in an experiment that birthed the premise of Jones’s 2016 album, Day Breaks. And he presented his own works, including In My Mind and the Fats Waller Dance Party, a funk-inflected take on 1930s swing, made in partnership with the bassist and singer Meshell Ndegeocello. A project called Finding a Line, first commissioned by SFJAZZ, had the Bandwagon collaborating with skateboarders on the Kennedy Center plaza. (A special skate ramp was built for the occasion.) Moran’s influence on the institution was substantive, and not just with respect to jazz programming. He was instrumental in the appointment of Q-Tip as the Kennedy Center’s first artistic director for hip-hop culture. “We’ve brought people and types of music to the center that we wouldn’t have thought about bringing if it hadn’t been for Jason,” said Kevin Struthers, the director of jazz programming, in a Washington Post Magazine story announcing Moran’s second contract renewal, through 2021.11
The high-minded aim of an institutionally supported contemporary artist and the ground-level stir of a musician reaching for an audience—those two things can be at odds; but as he entered his early forties, Moran seemed closer than ever to reconciling them within his ongoing practice. He composed the mournful, dignified score for Selma, Ava DuVernay’s film about the voting-rights marches of 1965; at his instigation, a live screening of the film, with orchestral backing, was held at the Kennedy Center. He also scored DuVernay’s documentary 13th, working with a minimalist, percussive strain of pianism. Moran also collaborated with Kara Walker on a piece originally conceived for the 2017 contemporary-art triennial Prospect New Orleans, creating music for a custom, steam-powered calliope, meant to feel like a ghostly hallucination of the old river boats.
Moran’s brand of pan-artistic outreach extended beyond his own projects, becoming a sort of progressive norm. The trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire is one shining exemplar of this: his 2014 album, The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint, features several original art songs, and addresses a welter of sociopolitical themes from a place of reflective interiority. (When NPR Music’s pop critic Ann Powers named it one of the best albums of the year, she noted that “Akinmusire’s compositions are like Mark Rothko paintings: large, filling every corner of the frame, yet calm, spacious, their colors connected in subtle gradations.”)
Another ruminative horn player, the lyrical cornetist Ron Miles, released a standout 2017 album, I Am a Man, inspired not only by that civil rights slogan but also by Condition Report, a diptych painting by Glenn Ligon, whose annotative scrawl is reprinted as a poem in the CD booklet. Moran is a part of Miles’s soulful, shadowy ensemble on the album, alongside Brian Blade, Bill Frisell, and the bassist Thomas Morgan. Miles himself is the driving intellectual force behind I Am a Man—on his website, he linked to an art-historical essay about Ligon, as if to explain his analogous intentions—but there’s no question that the project owes some of its fuel to the eloquent example set by Moran.
Along with his Kennedy Center duties, Moran began programming a concert series closer to home in 2016, at the Park Avenue Armory. This was a series he called “Artists Studio,” in the ornately restored Veterans Room. He kicked things off with a deep-focus solo piano recital later released as The Armory Concert—the auspicious first release on Yes Records, which he formed after ending his long affiliation with Blue Note.
The Armory Concert is a solitary statement, but it reverberates with echoes of collaboration. Most of the tracks are distilled from larger works like Looks of a Lot, a suite forged in partnership with the Chicago installation artist Theaster Gates, and originally staged with contributions from the avant-garde saxophonist Ken Vandermark, the bassist and singer Katie Ernst, and a high-school jazz band from the South Side. On the album Moran plays “South Side Digging,” a tune from the suite guided by a manic, percussive atonality that gradually melts into gospel reassurances.
As he typically does with pieces from his large-scale works, Moran adapted “South Side Digging” to a jazz-club lexicon as well, including it at the Vanguard during a weeklong run late in 2016. A new iteration of the “Gangsterism” series made an appearance, too. On closing night, the Bandwagon sounded ferocious, almost as if still proving something to itself. Moran was recording the gig for a future release on his label—Thanksgiving at the Vanguard, released the following spring. Maybe it was posterity he had in mind when he began the set with a friendly, deceivingly simple disclosure: “We’re going to play some music that tells where we are.”
Ron Miles, I Am a Man (Yellowbird)
Jason Moran, Black Stars (Blue Note)
Jason Moran, Ten (Blue Note)
Jason Moran, The Armory Concert (Yes)
Greg Osby, Banned in New York (Blue Note)
7
Learning Jazz
The most influential book in the history of jazz education—some would say the history of jazz—is The Real Book, which was published in five editions over the course of three decades before it could legally be sold. A dun-colored, spiral-bound slab of sheet music, marked with chord symbols in a whimsical scrawl, The Real Book served as a gateway resource for many thousands of aspiring and working jazz musicians, some of whom never left it behind.
Many established players disparaged it as a crutch, a childish thing to be put away. But its basic utility was undeniable. Neither a bible nor a blasphemy precisely, its reputation lay somewhere in the lumpy middle. And it was ubiquitous: the must-have accessory for any player establishing his or her relationship to the active jazz repertory and modern harmonic vocabulary.
For thirty years it was also contraband, thanks to flagrant copyright violations. You went out and bought The Real Book with furtive intention, cash in hand—either from under the counter at a music shop, like pornography, or out of the trunk of a car, like stolen goods. In that regard it was the latest manifestation of a fake book, which had been favored for ages by professionals in the Broadway pit or various other musical trenches. The very name Real Book was a winking acknowledgment as well as a shrewd bit of brand differentiation. But the origins of the thing might lead you to believe that realness—an authentication of the intel, if not the intellectual property—was also a motivating aim.
In his 2006 history The Story of Fake Books: Bootlegging Songs to Musicians, the musician and archivist Barry Kernfeld traces The Real Book’s origins to the 1974–75 academic year at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Bassist Steve Swallow had recently started teaching there, on a referral from the vibraphonist Gary Burton, in whose band he was playing at the time. Swallow recalls that a couple of students came up with the idea of a better fake book, one that wasn’t quite so riddled with sloppy inaccuracies. Clearing the rights was an insurmountable obstacle, so they skipped it, printing the book up at local copy shops.
And The Real Book was a runaway success, spreading fast beyond Berklee to become a black-market bestseller. (The identities of the two enterprising students behind the project has remained shrouded in secrecy, protected by Kernfeld and others.) Its story is a reminder of how much looser and more piratical the whole enterprise of jazz education was at the time.
Gary Burton’s path through formalized jazz education is also illustrative. A former child prodigy, he ended up devoting more than three decades to a professional career at Berklee, starting out as an instructor and retiring as vice president of the college. He left the place in quite a different condition than when he’d first arrived there, as a student, in 1960.
Recalling that era from a distance of many years, he painted a scrappy picture. “There were only two schools in America where you were welcome as a jazz player: Berklee, which wasn’t even accredited at the time, and the University of North Texas, which was a big-band place. But that was it, in the whole country.”
There had
in fact been a few other early stirrings of jazz education—notably the Lenox School of Jazz, a summer program at the Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts. Though it only lasted from 1957 to 1960, this program was remembered by all involved in terms befitting an Eden. The faculty was spearheaded by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and included a handful of other leading modernists—like Dizzy Gillespie and the composer and theorist George Russell—who mingled freely with the students, in an atmosphere more closely resembling a salon than a formal school. Because some of the leading jazz critics of the day attended as auditors, the Lenox School of Jazz garnered an outsize reputation. In 1959, the year that Atlantic Records subsidized Ornette Coleman’s tuition, Martin Williams reported back with “A Letter From Lenox, Mass.” for The Jazz Review, declaring that “what Ornette Coleman is doing on alto will affect the whole character of jazz music profoundly and pervasively.”1
Still, the Lenox School of Jazz was a three-week intensive, not a fully functioning institution, and it was over by the time Burton applied to Berklee, sight unseen. He was stunned to discover that the school inhabited a brownstone, with fewer than two hundred students. “Jazz education exploded during the next decade,” he said. “By the seventies there were two thousand jazz programs in schools around the country, and it kept growing.”2
The Real Book played a role in this expansion of jazz education, because it democratized a vast amount of information, especially in the realm of harmony. At times, the result was a myopic distortion: on certain songbook standards, the book might defer to the pastel chord substitutions of a widely admired interpreter like Bill Evans, rather than the original architecture of the song. A tune by someone like Thelonious Monk might be pockmarked with incorrect chords, shaped mainly by guesswork. The most accurate transcriptions were for contemporary pieces procured directly from the source: Swallow, for one, gave the book’s compilers access to his lead sheets. So did his partner, pianist and composer Carla Bley. Guitarist Pat Metheny, then in the process of refining the songs for Bright Size Life, his groundbreaking debut album, provided a couple of pieces that had yet to be titled.
And so, because of an accident of place and time, this small circle of musical contemporaries had a disproportionate representation among the book’s four hundred compositions, which made up a new canon. A handful of Swallow’s tunes, like “Hullo Bolinas” and “Falling Grace,” became staples of the jazz literature partly on the basis of their inclusion. In similar fashion, when Metheny released Bright Size Life on ECM in 1976, any attentive young musician would easily have figured out that the graceful, diatonic title track was listed in The Real Book as “Exercise #3.”
Metheny, who had so named that piece because it was a teaching exercise he used at Berklee, told Kernfeld that he regarded The Real Book as both a time capsule and a catalyst.
This was a fertile period where suddenly there were many young musicians who felt very comfortable with a vast array of harmonic vocabularies (from standards to Joe Henderson and beyond) and were at home with modern rhythmic styles as well as even things that looked to the rock music of the time as sources of material. In this sense I feel The Real Book has had an enormous impact. It has certainly caused a few generations of players now to have to develop skills that were rare at that time—only the very best players of that era would be able to go pretty much from start to finish in that book and be able to generally deal with the intrinsic musical requirements that such a book would demand. Nowadays, it is pretty common, and in fact, sort of required.3
As successive editions of The Real Book were published in the 1980s and ’90s, some compositions were added and others removed, while a handful of corrections were made. In 1994 Swallow released an album called Real Book, with a tan cover emblazed by the familiar lettering and even a faded coffee ring. (The liner notes included lead sheets for each of its ten tracks.)
Then the series went legit: the Hal Leonard Corporation, a leading music publishing and distribution company, began securing the rights to almost all of the songs. In 2004, Hal Leonard published The Real Book—Volume 1, billing it as the first legitimate resource of its kind, while attempting to preserve the outlaw copy-shop charm of its predecessors. (Though it was “Volume 1,” the cover bore a stamp reading “Sixth Edition.”) The lead sheets featured a familiar typeface and hand-drawn notation. “You won’t even notice the difference,” read an advertising spiel.
To the extent that The Real Book amounted to a clandestine literature for the self-motivated young jazz musician, Jamey Aebersold’s Play-A-Longs represented a do-it-yourself training regimen. Aebersold was a midwestern music educator in his late twenties when, in 1967, he first published How to Play Jazz and Improvise—a play-along album and method book designed to demystify the fundamentals of jazz harmony. The recording featured a rhythm section (with Aebersold on piano) sketching out a series of common musical scenarios, like “Cycle of Dominant Seventh Chords.” A player could solo over these tracks, using what’s known as the chord-scale approach as a strategy for navigating harmonic progressions.
Aebersold originally conceived How to Play Jazz and Improvise as a practical aid for hobbyist musicians, especially those with no access to a peer group or a scene. “I had no intention of doing Volume 2, let alone Volume 133,”4 he later marveled. But he was quick to realize that there was not only a commercial demand for the series but also a pedagogical vacuum that it helped to fill. As the Play-A-Long series took off—known in musician circles by a shorthand, as “Aebersolds”—their level of professionalism rose accordingly. Volume Six, a Charlie Parker immersion first published in 1976, features an all-star rhythm team with Kenny Barron on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Ben Riley on drums. Later installments came similarly stacked. (Barron, an impeccable bebop paragon, played on more than half a dozen of them.)
The appeal of the Aebersolds was obvious: even for a fledgling jazz musician who wasn’t stranded in the hinterlands, there was something both wildly aspirational and warmly self-affirming about the practice of sitting in with giants (without risk of humiliation, and with the substantial benefit of a pause button). There was something missing, of course: actual human interaction, the real-time flow of information that gives jazz its lifeblood. As with The Real Book, there was also a potential downside in overreliance on the training wheels. But as Aebersold always hastened to point out, his Play-A-Longs were designed to give any interested party the keys to jazz improvisation, at least on a fundamental level. No other product, not even The Real Book, better encapsulates the mass commercialization of jazz instruction.
That is, unless you count as a product the many jazz camps, workshops, and retreats around the globe. Before the proliferation of programs at institutions of higher learning, jazz instruction flourished in this vein. The composer and arranger Stan Kenton, whose postwar big band was a laboratory of what he called “progressive jazz,” established the first Stan Kenton Jazz Camp in 1959, under the auspices of the National Stage Band Camp. As that affiliation implies, it was an intensive for big bands, with substantial emphasis on the mechanics of ensemble work. But there were so few other options at the time that Kenton’s program, rooted as it was in preprofessional practical knowledge, was an instant magnet. Burton attended the inaugural Stan Kenton Jazz Camp at sixteen, after seeing an ad in DownBeat. (It was at a Kenton camp that he first met Keith Jarrett, his equal in precocity.)
By 1967 Kenton had splintered off from the National Stage Band Camp, rebranding his event the Stan Kenton Band Clinic, whose name had an intentionally serious ring. Other summer jazz camps were cropping up by then, some more focused than others. The Stanford Jazz Workshop, still a gold standard, was founded in California in 1972. The Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop, a one-week program at the University of Louisville, began in 1977. Aebersold, who had been among the small number of attendees at the Lenox School of Jazz, understood the value of a focused environment with hands-on instruction, e
ven if his core teaching philosophy could make jazz feel more like a craft than an art.
The composer and conductor David Baker—another veteran of the Lenox School of Jazz, where he had a formative experience studying with George Russell—took his insight in another direction. After joining the music faculty at his alma mater, Indiana University, in 1966, he directed the jazz program there for forty-five years. His example set a high standard, and not just among the many students he instructed: in 1979 he published David Baker’s Jazz Pedagogy: A Comprehensive Method of Jazz Education for Teacher and Student, a book combining functional utility with philosophical reflection. (Chapter One, “Myths,” amounts to a corrective overture.) Jazz Pedagogy became a bedrock resource, and Baker was hailed, long before his death in 2016, at eighty-four, as one of the most important figures in the history of jazz education.
Jazz’s place in the conservatory expanded and deepened over the course of his half-century career. What was once an exotic pursuit in the academy became a booming industry, and an essential part of the picture. Whereas jazz musicians of a bygone era could support themselves entirely through record sales and tour revenues, the prevailing model now involves an institutional perch and a teaching gig. The implications for the art form aren’t clear and simple, but one result of this shift is a boost in overall proficiency, because of the level of available instruction. Not every fine jazz instructor has to be an accomplished artist, and many accomplished artists make poor pedagogues. But when a notable musician turns out to be an excellent teacher besides, the benefit is large.
