In the fall of 2003, I was a participant in a symposium convened by Harvard University’s Law and Business Schools called Improvisation and Negotiation. Perhaps ironically given the theme, jazz musicians comprised a distinct minority at the event, with the majority consisting of psychologists, sociologists, lawyers, corporate leaders, and colleagues from other fields beyond music in which interest in improvisation as key to optimal performance has been on the rise. I was deeply impressed by the level of dialogue about a process that I, and much of the jazz community, tend to take for granted as unique to our domain. As a jazz musician who teaches at a classically oriented institution, moreover, I greatly appreciated being part of an academic gathering in which my work was not viewed as peripheral but central to the discourse. I commonly stress to my graduate students that the marginalized status of jazz and improvised music in musical academe is not a clear barometer of the rising appreciation for this kind of creativity not only in the broader academic world but also in an increasing number of professional circles. Thus, my students are exposed to their share of commentary similar to this chapter’s epigraph from Maslow in hopes of inspiring them to appreciate the importance of what they do in the broader scope of things. Maslow, indeed, is a treasure trove for such inspiration, as when he further exhorts the need for educational systems to “create a new kind of human being who is comfortable with change, who enjoys change, who is able to improvise, who is able to face with confidence, strength, and courage a situation of which he has absolutely no forewarning.” And nothing tops my all-time favorite: “We must develop a race of improvisers, of here-now creators.”
From an integral perspective, it might also be argued that we need to develop a race of “peak experiencers,” to invoke another important aspect of Maslow’s thought, this pertaining to the experience of transformed episodes of consciousness in which sense of self, clarity, wholeness, mind-body integration, inner calm and well-being, and a variety of other faculties are heightened. Hence, the interior dimensions of the creativity-consciousness relationship, at which point the New Jazz Studies—championing the creativity component—gives rise to what I propose as Integral Jazz Studies. As previously discussed, jazz musicians report vivid episodes of such heightened states, and it is thus no surprise that the tradition boasts a long legacy of leading artists who have significantly delved into contemplative practices and studies in order to enhance this dimension of their work and lives. And thus in addition to the common acknowledgment of Maslow as the founder of the humanist psychology movement, his work might also be regarded as important to the emergence of the integral jazz movement.
It is from the standpoint of the creativity-consciousness relationship and its interior-exterior, integral dimensions that this chapter explores jazz’s journey into the academic world, the arena in which its integral properties, if harnessed, have the capacity to yield considerable impact on the broader educational mission, and by extension, society. In so exploring, we will make full use of our integral delineative and diagnostic faculties. For, as we are about to see, as rich as jazz might be in its inherent integral properties, academic approaches to the discipline have been strongly shaped by the overarching materialist patterns inherited from the broader musical and extramusical academic knowledge base. These will need to be identified and addressed if the field is to uphold the transformational function of which it is capable.
Overview of Jazz Education
In order to understand how materialist or self-confining third-person tendencies have taken hold in jazz study, it is first essential to acknowledge how the marginalized status of the idiom in musical academe, at least in part, contributed to them. Jazz not only brought to the academy a vastly different and expanded process spectrum that departed from the norm, it also introduced Afrological musicocultural features to which the prevailing Eurological culture was not receptive. To ignore the issue of race in any assessment of the situation would be a significant oversight. Between what LeRoi Jones reminds us was the “unbelievably cruel” circumstance of slavery dating back several centuries and reminders to what Karlton Hester candidly identifies as a musical “bigotry” still evident well into the twenty-first century, a topic to be explored in some depth, the dynamics of race in the broader society have clearly played out in musical academe. It is thus not surprising that jazz was overtly scorned and at times entirely forbidden, as Bruno Nettl points out, in university music departments. Oliver Lake recounts that this even included extracurricular jam sessions: “They didn’t consider jazz as music, and if they heard you playing jazz, you would be admonished. We would have to wait until all the instructors were gone, and then we would start jamming.” Dave Brubeck, reflecting on the early days of his college circuit performances, recalls “controversies at the institutions as to whether or not we should be allowed to play.” Underscoring entirely uninformed notions that playing jazz is somehow damaging to musical instruments, Brubeck adds that “[s]ometimes I would be led to an old, beat-up piano for the performance when there’d also be a great grand piano backstage that they wouldn’t let me go near.”
While nowadays it is difficult to imagine a music department or school that forbids its students from curricular or extracurricular jazz activity, ample indicators of continued institutional marginalization may be cited. Perhaps most notable is the fact that, despite the idiom’s rich foundational skills, jazz remains largely excluded from musical academe’s core curriculum. Short units on jazz, which generally do not involve hands-on contact with the music, may be found in core music theory and history sequences, but full semester coursework in jazz improvisation, theory, composition, or arranging are relegated to elective status for all but jazz majors. Because music curricula tend to be filled to the brim with conventional requirements, leaving little time, space, or energy for electives, the result is that the majority of music majors—for whom interpretive performance and analysis of European classical repertory is the focus—continue to graduate with little or no hands-on engagement with jazz. This is most conspicuous in the case of American music students gaining certification to teach music in American public schools. As David Baker points out, “one or two courses in jazz”—which appears to be the best-case scenario, with many teacher certification programs including no jazz training—is not sufficient “to be able to adequately teach this music.”
~~Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness:Jazz as Integral Template for Music, Education, and Society -by- Edward W. Sarath
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