Hip Hip Turntablism and Jazz Education

[White Lightning]

Hi Y'all.

I'm tepping out of my usual lurker position to ask for your opinion. You probably know of the on going debate in Berklee College of Music in Boston whether or not hip hop turntablism is ought to be taught alongside harmony, melody and improvisation.

Let's put the valid points pros and cons alike aside for a minute and think what would that genre benefit from becoming part of the school curricula?

And what about Jazz?

Did it benefit from this formal kind of Jazz education? In what ways? Did it lose from that formal education? In what ways?

Jazz as an art form is trying to boldly go where...etc.; to examine the boredrs of convencions; to constantly explore personal paths. Don't you think that that spirit is the exact opposite of every educational establishment?

Berklee introduced Jazz in their classrooms some 50 years ago. Did it sprout new conceptions? new styles? New pioneers?

I'm sure the music school graduates understand more what they are playing and why. They probably know a lot of Jazz history and they can get music day jobs more easily.

But can they PLAY better Jazz?

Edited May 21, 2003 by White Lightning

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Addressing the last part of your post - I am curious to know whether you have any experience or contact with graduates of collegiate jazz programs. Are your comments regarding what the students know or don't know based on fact or are they just suppositions? If you have had contact with such people, I think that specifics need to be addressed - which students and how many, what colleges - are we talking only of Berklee?, which teachers, when - during what years, etc. Such a huge idea as "institutional jazz education" cannot be accurately described or discussed in such general terms.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart, both as one who holds degrees in jazz studies and as a music educator who has sent students off to such programs (and also discouraged such a path, btw).

Mike

[J Larsen]

I don't see how one COULDN'T benefit from spending several hours per week receiving instruction from a master of one's craft. Now taking a class isn't going to turn someone who is rhythmless and/or tonedeaf into Eric B, but it seems that it would HAVE to benefit someone who had the potential but lacked a mentor.

[Rooster_Ties]

What a fascinating question, both the 'jazz education' angle, which I suspect will get adressed more in this thread. But also the other question, about whether "hip hop turntablism" ought to be taught at the school (by which I presume we're talking about 'scratching').

I'll give some thought to both questions, and post them here later....

....but I'd be especially curious to see what people here think of "turntablism" possibly being taught in music schools. I know there are plenty of people in the mainstream world, or even the mainstream music world --- who would recoil in horror at the thought of such an instrument be elevated to that of more trtaditional intruments.

BUT, surely there is a whole world of music out there that uses "scratching" as a very frequent and important component, and that world is influencing jazz and various syntheses of world music, even as we speak (and probably has been for at least a decade).

[Jad]

Yeah, but honing your craft in front of an audience and honing it in front of a master are going to give you two different results. IMHO, once people began to learn more jazz in school than in the nightclubs and bars, jazz began to lose some of it's fire.

[Rooster_Ties]

Ideally, I would agree with you Jad, but we all know in this day and age, that there aren't nearly enough performance opportunities for musicians. Look at Organissimo - within 75 miles of where they live, it sounds like they're lucky to get 3 gigs a month, and more like 2 possibly.

I think the question of whether learning jazz in an academic environment must recognise the realities of the world as it exists, and not how it might ideally be. Sure, learning on the bandstand back in the 40's, 50's, and early 60's would deffinitely be prefered as at least a strong component of any jazz "education". But absent that (and the opportunities for that), I guess the question is whether the 'academic' route is valuable, vs. what are the current options for going a non-'academic' route. Food for thought, hopefully.

[J Larsen]

RT beat me to part of my reply. You don't get gigs these days without some credibility (or at least some good connections). Another point I was going to raise is that NONE of the great DJs (with the possible exceptions of Bam and maybe a very small handful of others) learned their craft "in front of a crowd". First you learn hang around some good DJs as much as you possibly can, learning as many tricks and techniques as possible, then you go looking for a crowd. Such a program as being considered at Berklee would accomplish two things: it would provide people who aren't in the right circles to find a mentor with access to knowledgable DJs, and it would provide said mentors with a new and (hopefully) rewarding source of revenue.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

I question the allegation that "once people began to learn more jazz in school than in the nightclubs and bars, jazz began to lose some of it's fire."

First, I assume you mean to say "learn jazz more in school."

Secondly, there have always been stronger and weaker players. If one likes "fire" - look no further than someone like drummer Ralph Peterson, a product of a university jazz program, and currently a teacher in one. Many of the best players today attended such institutions. Many of the not-so-great did too, it's safe to say. Of the high quality players, that individuals as musically disparate as Tom Chapin and Harry Allen could come out of the *same* college jazz program is strong evidence that institutionalized jazz education isn't an albatross.

Any student who thinks that he will gain EVERYTHING necessary to succeed as a professional jazz musician just by attending a college is woefully naive. No one should assume that a jazz studies program is the be-all and end-all. Ditto for any kind of education.

Thirdly, since collegiate jazz education wasn't around much before the 1950s, it's misleading to compare the state of jazz pre- and post- because so many other factors come into play. Not only was how people learned jazz different, but jazz itself was different. Also, it's impossible to say whether players would have availed themselves of the resource had it existed. Plenty of top jazz musicians were alumni of college music programs - Sam Rivers, Benny Golson, Dave Brubeck, Wayne Shorter, Booker Little, Henry Grimes, the list goes on and on. I think that had courses in jazz been offered that they may well have enrolled. Certainly by the late 1950s, the Lenox School of Jazz summer program was attracting students who would go on to make a difference - Gary McFarland, Attila Zoller, Perry Robinson, David Baker, Don Ellis, J.R. Monterose, Jamey Aebersold, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, see my website for more.

BTW, I wonder if we have the same impressions about other performing arts - how about acting schools? I watch episode after episode of "Inside the Actors' Studio" and I hear a lot of big time folks talking about their positive experiences in school. I can't chalk *all* of it up just to the fact that they are talking to acting school students. I think these actors really did benefit from their institutional educations. But they didn't learn everything there.

Mike

[Noj]

Oddly enough, the notion of turntablism as an accepted instrument seems contrary to what this art is all about. Is there enough vinyl to churn out classroom after classroom of aspiring DJs? Perhaps there is enough artistic merit to the techniques of mixing, scratching, and transforming to support turntablism in this way, but watering down this field might be problematic...?

[Jad]

Alright, I feel like I'm stepping into it here, but here it goes:

There's a rule of science that says once you take something out of it's natural setting in order to study it, the nature of what you are studying changes. I feel that this was true for jazz, and I feel that it will happen to "turntablism" if it is taken out of the clubs and put into the classroom.

I realize that prior to jazz study programs many top jazz players were involved in music programs, but the emphasis there was on learning music, and it was up to the players themselves to apply what they learned to playing jazz. IMO, if they HAD been taking jazz classes instead of music classes, they would have ended up in different places, even if the goals were the same.

[J Larsen]

I fail to see that as an argument for why we shouldn't have music programs in jazz or hip hop. If a guy goes to music school and winds up making music you don't like, then don't listen to it. It seems paranoid and bizarre to think that all music will suffer by the offering of specific types of music instruction to a small group of people.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Works well for science, but art is different, I think. Art isn't the same - maybe ever. It's constantly changing and jazz is such a personal, individual thing that I don't think one could ever pinpoint it with any certainty the way that one can break down matter into molecules.

What goes on in the classrooms of college programs has been going on in jazz for decades. Musicians have been sharing information, people have been copying the masters, writing arrangements, rehearsing, analyzing, jamming, listening to records, meeting new players, hearing stories, discussing, etc. etc. The brilliant book "Thinking In Jazz" addresses this subject very well. It's a required text for all my private students.

One can make the statement that "jazz has changed since it went to college" but where is the evidence? Are you going to do a blindfold test and pick out the schooled player from the street player? I got some doozies for you - real curve balls. Does any difference you hear truly correspond to the influence of institutional education or is something else a factor?

I also wonder if the distinction being made between "jazz" and "music" studies is all that relevant. Contrary to what some folks would have you believe, jazz *is* music. There are a whole lot of principles from the "non-jazz" world that apply to jazz and studying aesthetics, or counterpoint, or learning about vertical precision in a concert band - all these transfer to the jazz area.

Going back to the original post - has Berklee produced new conceptions, new styles, new pioneers? Well, no and yes. How many "pioneers" have there been in jazz? How many after 1950? Is this the fault of Berklee? Everyone in jazz didn't attend. Berklee certainly has produced MANY influential jazz musicians.

http://www.berklee.edu/about/alumni.html

From that list, I'd point to Gary Burton as one hell of an influential musician. Jan Hammer and Joe Zawinul, too. Sonny Sharrock and John Scofield and Mick Goodrick and Mike Stern have certainly been widely listened to and emulated.

As I've said, Berklee shouldn't get all the credit for these great individuals - there isn't a course on "how to be Sonny Sharrock" - but Berklee shouldn't be ignored either.

Mike

[Jazzmoose]

Totally off the subject, but I'd much rather have basic music education in elementary and high schools the way it was when I was coming up than anything at the college level...

[J Larsen]

Just as a general FYI, the law of science being referred to is from animal behavior (which isn't always consdiered a science, but I guess I'm splitting hairs). The whole point of the physical sciences is to understand the laws of nature in such a way that no reference is made to a particular environment or position in space. I know this is somewhat uptight of me, but I find it hard to let things like this slip by.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Totally off the subject, but I'd much rather have basic music education in elementary and high schools the way it was when I was coming up than anything at the college level...

Well, that's what I do September to June.

But having quality public school music education might just encourage kids to continue into college. And there's no reason why it shouldn't. We need great education at all stages of the game.

Mike

Edited May 22, 2003 by Michael Fitzgerald