I've been privy to a couple of fantastic "controversies" in the last several months - both sparked by an established player "dishing" about up-and-comers.
Here is the first - it's a couple of years old, and has "made the rounds" already:
For those not able to view this (such as people reading this at work or on mobile devices), this is former Young Lion (and now Middle Aged Lion?) Branford Marsalis talking about his students. I've transcribed it (abridged) below-
"What I've learned from my students is that students today are completely full of shit. The only thing they're really interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are. The idea of what you are is more important than you actually being that. All they want to hear is how good they are and how talented they are and...most of them aren't really willing to work to the degree to live up to that."
Branford has already taken his fair share of flack for this statement so I won't belabor it.
A well established drummer who has played with Joshua Redman for the last two decades (as well as Joe Lovano, Dianne Reaves and a who's who of major-label jazz stars) posted a similar, though more focussed message the other day. I'll paraphrase:
"Let's bring the music back where it belongs. If you can't play don't put out a record. It's that simple...When Betty Carter, Ray Brown and Art Blakey were here we had a higher standard [but now some people don't] take pride in their music."
As I've commented earlier there is a certain spirit in which both comments ring true. (Though Branford's is a little harder to defend because he strays into paranoia - you'll see if you watch the clip.) Even twenty years ago there were "gatekeepers." Branford himself came up through Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and the other commenter through both Betty Carter's and Ray Brown's bands. Until about 2001 there was a "market" - albeit a limited one - for graduates of these leaders' bands, and with Carter, Blakey or Brown on the resume you could be assured the artists had a pedigree, and had been "vetted."
Now, for better or worse, those "kingmakers" are gone. The "jazz" rosters of the major labels have dwindled to a handful of aging stars (who - don't get me wrong - are still innovating and killing it, but the labels are slow to add "new" artists). Many of the current generation's most talented - wait I don't like that word - accomplished artists have realized that if the labels aren't promoting new artists they can get a better deal by releasing things on their own labels. And the proliferation of small recording studios and online sales potential of iTunes and CD Baby have made it possible for anyone with the budget to put out a record.
SO - no more gatekeepers.
At a certain level it must get annoying if you're Branford, or my unnamed "colleague" (a term that overstates my importance in the relationship by orders of magnitude) - you have people approaching you all the time for lessons and you're bound to notice something's changed. Everybody has a CD now, and a website, and a press kit, and a mailing list, and a "fan" site. And everyone's using business language - "networking", "contacts". So you've got a crop of little self-starting entrepreneurs running around releasing records and there's just one problem - a great many can't play. Somebody's got a record and a website and gigs, and he pulls his horn out, and he can't play a blues.
That's gotta get you thinking some dark thoughts. The temptation to "vent" must have been overwhelming, and who could resist using a platform of influence to inveigh against what you see as the "dumbing down" of the music? Surely the jazz world is in need of some arbiter of artistic validity, some influential figure who will say, "the buck stops here." There's just one problem - "artistic validity" may be harder to pin down than we think.
In the real world of jazz/music/art education teachers often have to make judgment calls about their students' potential very early in those students' development. (And while when I used to teach I dealt primarily with people who never intended to make a career out of music, influential figures teach students who - by and large - do.) Is there a risk that by setting the bar "too high", (or defining competence too narrowly) people with the potential to become great artists are getting "turned off" before they can develop?
I'll come back to that - first let me talk a bit about my own experience in the education system. The first day of Jazz History in grad school, a well known historian was adminstering a placement test, and called on a volunteer, asking him, "how many Louis Armstrong records do you own?" The poor soul, who had doubtless listened to a great deal of Satchmo's near ubiquitous music but never spent money to acquire any records, sat mute while the professor proceeded to lambaste him - and by extension all of us - for not knowing our fundamentals. By contrast in undergrad I took Jazz History from an equally distinguished teacher - a well known composer and close associate with Gunther Schuller and classmate/bandmate of John Medeski. He took a far less confrontational approach to the subject, approaching Duke Ellington as if no one had heard of him, treating every detail of his biography as revelatory.
Similarly I've had drum teachers who told me not to talk to them about polyrhythms until I had "mastered" Jo Jones and Warren Dodds (as if such a thing were possible, or even desirable), and those who approached them - and Roy Haynes, Jack Dejohnette and Tony Williams - with youthful enthusiasm (assuming, correctly, that the greats didn't need anyone else to "sell" them). The latter bunch were no less reverent of the early greats - they just felt it wasn't THEIR role to insist that I master them FIRST, to the exclusion of all else. The ironic thing is all these guys absolutely liked the same music, played similarly - indeed many played TOGETHER - and ultimately held the same goal as teachers: to help their students achieve the highest level of artistry possible.
In teaching you're always trying to balance encouragement with challenge - to give the student enough encouragement so he/she doesn't give up, all the while offering enough stinging reality to motivate him/her to keep climbing. Jazz offers a unique challenge, as a highly technical improvisational music - its practitioners, by definition, must have BOTH confidence and humility in spades. It's been my experience, however, that most teachers are either confidence builders or gatekeepers, and rarely both.
Which brings us back to the central question: is there a role for "gatekeeping" as we teach jazz? The goal - that an influential teacher can take a meandering, slightly lazy student and "forge" him/her into a competent artist - is a laudable one, and anecdotes of such transformations abound. Just pick up a copy of Arthur Taylor's fantastic piece of jazz stenography, "Notes and Tones", to see what I mean - artists from Philly Joe to Abbey Lincoln to Miles all talk about finding that one great teacher who kicked their ass and whooped them into shape. We have ample testimonial from successful artists who developed and thrived under the watchful guidance of a "no bullshit" teacher who emphasized sequential learning.
But what if sequential learning doesn't work equally well for everyone? Developmental psychologists have long agreed that learning styles are highly varied and highly individual. By forcing everyone to follow a linear path of development (first master this, then this, don't try playing those Dolphy licks until you can play like Lester Young) do we ignore someone with the potential for great talent who might develop in a more associative way - indeed in the way many of us discover and gain aptitude for things we're not being "graded on", like wine? (Example of this would be, you like Mark Turner [sax player in this clip and composer of the tune]? Cool, transcribe him, but check out these Warne Marsh records [that's Warne on the tenor sax - the larger of the two horns]. You like Brecker? Cool, but he got that lick from Trane - check out this record...) Are there not artists just as talented who learned less formally?
(No less relevant is this question: do Philly Joe, Miles, Abby, Tony Williams, and the subjects of Art Taylor's interviews REALLY have only their TEACHERS to thank? Were these not people of both exceptional intrinsic motivation - who would have succeeded in gleaning the knowledge necessary to ply their craft from any source available, whether or not that source was a taskmaster - and unusual opportunities (the time and place they came up, the existence of "the street", the musical families many were born into with the notable exceptions of Coltrane and Miles)? Finally, how can we be sure they're telling the truth? Miles, Coltrane, and Bird may have had great teachers at points in their lives, but they also succeeded because of their ability to IGNORE people telling them they were "doing it wrong" and to strike fearlessly out on their own in pursuit of the "next step.")
More broadly, what if someone will NEVER master Bird, but will nonetheless become a powerful and convincing player of the alto saxophone? Everyone agrees in hindsight on the genius of Ornette Coleman but many were FAR from convinced in the early '60s. What if some teacher had so discouraged Ornette that he hung up the horn for good. Similarly, what if Ringo Starr had taken a lesson with Jim Chapin and been so discouraged he gave up the drums? Everyone now agrees Ringo exerted tremendous influence on drumming and on music, but his potential to do that was probably not evident to everyone who met him in 1950.
It is this danger that should give us the greatest pause - for while teachers have tremendous power to motivate, inspire and encourage, they also have more power than they realize to DIScourage, to turn off, to dishearten.
Is the potential benefit to the music from "gatekeeping" great enough to justify "turning off" at a time when jazz so desperately needs NEW voices and FRESH perspectives? If even one more late-bloomer makes his/her way through music or art school and proceeds to make creative, refreshing, deep art, is it not worth the thousands upon thousands of lackluster records (which probably won't sell very well anyway) made by artists who will never understand the degree of hard work necessary to achieve greatness?
This question I'll leave to the reader.
