JAZZ JIVE...
Learning Jazz Styles Through Listening Rob Babel, Jazz Vice-President
Over the summer, I was giving a saxophone lesson to a freshman tenor player who is about to start his first year in high school jazz band. We were working on a swing etude and he was having some issues with style and articulation. He had chosen to wear a Metallica t-shirt to this lesson. In previous lessons, I remembered him wearing other t-shirts with the names of other metal bands. So instead of demonstrating again for him by playing my horn, I asked him if he could name me a jazz saxophone player. I said it could be past or present, anyone at all.
Unfortunately, he did not know of any saxophone players. He didn’t even throw out Kenny G’s name (often cited by previous students, regretfully). It was at that point that we ceased all reading out of the book and started exploring some sax players on the Internet. I gave him a few names to check out and the following week he came back having done some listening to John Coltrane. Three weeks later, the style and articulation issues had started to clear up. It was like magic. Or was it?
It really didn’t have anything to do with magic. It had everything to do with this student actively listening to a jazz style that he could now emulate, having listened to one of the greats performing in that style.
Now listening to jazz recordings to teach jazz style is hardly a novel idea. I can’t remember the last jazz festival my band performed at
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where the clinicians didn’t mention listening as part of their advice to the band. Yet most of us still have students in our groups that have little or no knowledge of jazz recordings.
What we too often forget is that, as their jazz director, we may be the only connection that students have to jazz listening. Sure, they can find tons of great examples on YouTube or ITunes. They can buy a classic Miles Davis recording for a buck and put it on their IPod. But most of them won’t, at least not without us providing the spark that makes them want to do that.
So it is up to us to not only play examples of great jazz recordings in our class, but to provide opportunities for our students to see live performances. If you live in a larger metro area, then set up an outing to go to a jazz club together. If you’re not close to a place where you can see live jazz, then call the nearest college or university and ask if they have any faculty willing to come out and play for your students. You might be surprised how many will say yes to that request.
Budget some money to go to a jazz festival. Don’t worry about if your instrumentation or ability level is “good enough to take out.” Just get your band there. Go for the clinic and play one or two charts if that’s all you have time to prepare. If there is a professional jazz musician performing at the festival, stay for the concert. Let me say that again... stay for the concert! If you’re going
to take the time and money to load up your kids on a bus and travel to a festival, then give a few more hours of your time and give your students an opportunity to be inspired by a live performance. Think about it... most students are not going to have many, if any, exposure to a live jazz performance in a given year, other than what you put in front of them. Attending a live one-hour concert by a professional player will have more impact on their ability to understand the jazz style than 185 days of listening to each other in the band room.
Here’s the best thing about that: When students get excited about music they experience live, they start to seek it out on their own. It has always been my experience that the students that get to witness live jazz performances by professional players start to add jazz recordings to their own listening libraries. They will start to talk about recordings to each other and suddenly, you won’t be their only resource for listening examples.
The first high school where I taught was literally surrounded by cornfields and nowhere near a place to hear live jazz. The first jazz festival to where I took that jazz band, the clinician spent 20 minutes of our
MISSOURI SCHOOL MUSIC
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