Blog #5 The unconventional classroom

Before studying jazz in depth in this class, I definitely was under the impression that jazz was a talent that needed to be fostered outside of the traditional classroom.  Jazz as an art form requires one to do more than to simply play the right notes with the right timing.  Rather, playing jazz requires one to put his or her soul into the music, therefore taking the audience on a journey with them.  This is not necessarily a skill that can be refined in a classroom.  This skill comes only from the experience of playing for a room full of people, from playing music until you have made them all hang on your every note, and from being in the audience and being taken on another musicians journey with them.  This was definitely the case for Miles Davis when he moved to New York City to attend Juilliard. 

Right when Davis arrived in New York he began to look for the legends, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker (52).  He knew that the places he was going to gain the most knowledge were the places where these talented musicians were playing.  Additionally, Davis was unhappy trying to learn jazz in the academic setting of Juilliard (52).  While he complained that it was too “white” for him, I think that this can be expanded to mean that he was trying to learn jazz from people who had never truly played jazz.  Davis claimed that he learned more in one session at Minton’s than he would learn in two years at Juilliard (59).  Miles eventually dropped out of school and decided to spend all his time in jazz clubs playing and jamming with other jazz musicians.  I would argue that this is still a classroom in a sense, just not the traditional classroom that one generally thinks of. 

According to Bill Evans, jazz is a creative process rather than a musical style.  If we consider this to be true, than how could one learn about jazz without immersing oneself into the culture of it?  If jazz is a process, than one must become a part of this process in order to truly learn about it.  Miles Davis’ presentation of how he chose to learn to play jazz music and to be a jazz musician reaffirmed my conception that jazz is an art form that one must nurture outside of the conventional classroom and rather in a more “real-world” setting. 

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