The learning of jazz musicians
Throughout the history of jazz, musicians who have wanted to play this type of music have gone through a learning process that has evolved over the years. To simplify, we will say that this learning occurs in two ways: first, learning to play the instrument that the musician has chosen; second, learning the particular musical language that is jazz with its own rules of improvisation and forms of expression.
In the early decades of jazz history, when very few African Americans had received musical instruction, musicians were largely self-taught. Except in schools where there was a band with its own teacher or director. In the best of cases, the young apprentice was instructed by a nearby musician who gave private lessons or, in other cases, learned on his own, receiving advice from an experienced musician or directly copying his procedures. This lack of regulation in the learning of the instrument led to very diverse and personalized results depending on the abilities and intuition of each musician. As for the learning of musical language, a young man, who normally lived surrounded by jazz day and night in his neighborhood or city, learned it the way children learn to speak, that is, by listening to those who were part of his immediate environment. This also resulted in different forms of expression depending on the environment or region where the musician was trained.
Over the years, the possibilities of receiving musical training increased among the black population, but the musical language continued to be learned within their most immediate environment and, with the emergence of records, through recordings made by the most famous and creative. Without being able to establish a direct causal effect, it is a fact that, from a certain moment on, the progressive increase in musicians’ tendency to study in schools coincides with a progressive decrease in the popularity of jazz among the black population, so much so that the natural environment where these young men had learned the “language of jazz” had been diminishing.
In this context, it would be up to the schools to provide training elements that would replace that “natural environment” where the young person learned the “language of jazz.” However, things have not gone in this direction. The learning of the instrument is carried out with academic, rigid, regulated, standardizing methods and the learning of the language basically addresses those technical aspects that can be codified and fixed in a method (harmony, scales), ignoring the purely expressive, that can only be transmitted by direct contact. The Result: young musicians, formed in the same mold, sound very similar, impersonal, and lack spontaneity and expressiveness. Along with the advances that academic teaching undoubtedly entails, it is necessary to promote the critical study of the jazz legacy of all periods and styles that reaches us through the disc.
