The Alternative Jazz Classroom: A High Schooler's Perspective

1: I play the alto saxophone and I love to do so very, very much.
2: I love jazz in all of its forms, but most of all in its progressive, modern direction, as exemplified by its merging with rock, funk, pop, electronic, and so much more.
3: I am seventeen years old, a junior in high school, and said age is not an ideal situation to be in for one who wants to explore the outer bounds of what jazz and collective improvised music can truly be. Usually...

The average jazz band classroom in high school plays mostly charts, and mostly within drawn genre lines that would surprise nobody: swing, bossa nova, some R&B perhaps, etc. I consider myself very, very lucky in the fact that I am not part of one of these average classrooms. The program at my high school is a very alternative and experimentally run shindig which works under neither of the above conditions. We rarely play charts, and we rarely play swing or bossa nova. We do, but not usually. It is a classroom in which ideas about what music, and more specifically jazz, can and should be run rampant and flourish. My band director plants the seed of free improv, of collective composition, of metal riffs and african drum grooves, and lets what happens happen. For this, I am grateful, for it has shaped me and helped me grow as a musician, composer, arranger, listener, band member, band leader, and human being over the last three years much more than anything I expected upon entering the program.
But my point here is to not sing the praises of how excellent my high school’s jazz band is, nor is it to say that after being in it for three years I possess the innovative, improvisatory soul of Ornette Coleman. My point is to relate what a typical day in such a classroom environment contains from a student’s perspective, and to point all the ways in which it is as or more profitable for those involved as would be a typical “read this chart and watch your intonation” situation. So here goes: what happens in this classroom when we begin a song?
It can actually begin in a number of ways, first depending on whether it is an original piece or an interpretation of someone else’s. As far as the covers go, the program has played as diverse works as Duke Ellington, Animal Collective, Charles Ives, The Dirty Projectors, Charles Mingus, Sam Rivers, Radiohead, Ben Allison, Beirut, Drew Gress, Tom Waits, The Bad Plus (winkwink Ethan I arranged that one), and much, much more. These arrangements can come in a varying degree of organization, from the rare student who takes the time to transcribe parts, use Finale or their hand and a pencil, and bring in charts for everyone, to the more often process: the listening happens in class, and the tune is picked apart, interpreted, and pieced back together again by the whole 15-piece ensemble music surgeon that we generally succeed in being. The interpretations can come out just like the recording, ripped up and spit out in an unrecognizable mess, or anywhere in between. More interesting, though, is how the ensemble goes about writing an original piece from scratch without a leader or even always a discernible starting point.
This year, for example, we were each instructed to come up with a 2 to 8 bar idea on any one instrument, and to bring it in to share with the class. In moving around the circle playing our ideas, we discussed until one was chosen to begin with and to build a piece around. By an insane and often frustrating few classes of talking and playing, we managed to write a sprawling, epic suite of a piece without ever resorting to “jamming”. Over time, the piece really took shape and condensed until it no longer seemed like a mess of ideas, but a coherent, through-composed form complete with melodies, changes, solos, transitions, and anything else that makes up a “real” song. This may not sound that impressive, but doing it with 15 people in about a week and making it sound good (you’re gonna have to trust me on that part) isn’t easy to do.
The chemistry of the classroom is infinitely important to how such pieces come about. The air in the classroom is relaxed and explorative, forcing us all to expand our musical horizons while allowing us to show what we know and love to the others around us and let it grow as well. There are those of us in the classroom who are geeks for “old man jazz”, those of us who rarely listen to non-pop or rock music, and everything in between, and this is the beauty of what comes about. When classroom free improvisation includes a piano player who emulates McCoy, a drummer who wants to be Neil Peart, and a trumpeter who rarely plays jazz but loves Lynyrd Skynyrd, the results are actually a joyous celebration of how music is all different and all the same. This whole “musical mixing pot” idea is hardly new or incredible, and as I type this I know that, but it is frustrating, then, to try to understand why it is not more abundant in high school classrooms across the country. And when I say that it isn’t, I am not just speculating: I’m sure there are other classrooms like ours, but at the Berklee High School Jazz Festival, where bands from all over the country travel to Boston to compete against other schools, we every year find another real book love fest. Each year in competing with songs by artists as diverse and interesting as listed above, as well as original compositions (*gasp* go the judges at Berklee, amazed. You wrote a song? How innovative), we are told by judges that they enjoy our risk-taking and see nothing else like it at the festival. I need both hands usually to count the number of songs played from Kind of Blue (not that there’s anything wrong with it, but come on...) at any given year of the festival. Berklee, of course, is world-renowned for its contemporary music and pushing the bounds of jazz and pop. Why, then, does its high school equivalent not reflect it? A mystery...
In writing this I again feel like I come off as if I think what I describe is profound and innovative in its highest form. This isn’t true, and I know it: innovation is really all around us in the world of music, which makes it all the more frustrating when it isn’t reflected in classrooms from an earlier age. Yes, a foundation is extremely important, but the program at my high school incorporates the foundation. The band director at my high school worships Ellington as the greatest composer of all time, and we play him at least once every year. She teaches us basic theory, even though some of us are up to our ears in it outside of school and some of us don’t know much more than our major and minor scales. She pushes conservative freshman to listen to thrash metal and improvise atonally, while forcing hippy-dippy seniors to learn their half-diminished scales and listen to Coltrane (one of the greatest moments in the jazz band this year was our teacher trying to convince us to play a Radiohead song we had been working on at the Berklee competition, and hearing the majority of the class say that they would prefer to play the Basie chart we had been reading...who woulda thunk it?).
The point is that there’s room for everything. Meeting four times a week and being bombarded with a thousand different songs, artists, genres, and opinions on what music and jazz is has been truly invaluable. I was one of those pencil-necked jazz geek freshmen, and now I worship the gods of Mike Lewis, Tim Berne, Can, Andrew D’Angelo, Martin Dosh, and Thom Yorke. And I do this without forgetting that my first CD was a jazz mix from my dad where I fell in love with Ella and Louis singing They Can’t Take That Way From Me and Kenny Garret playing Equinox (I later found out that he didn’t write it...who is John Coltrane anyway?). In being exposed to all of this new music, I went from someone who “didn’t get” anything dissonant or out of time to someone who basks in it and incorporates it into his playing. If high school students or even younger children are introduced to this music (instead of only being played swing when being introduced to jazz, thus forever imprinting on their brains what “jazz” music be), maybe they will actually like it, like me. Instead of having to dig for alternatives to pop music, the wide array of alternatives should be presented on a platter to students, not only, but including, the leftovers from decades far behind us.
There is so much more to say on this topic obviously, and a high schooler does not have the half of it in his sleep-deprived fingers. It seems anyway now that I’m just reflecting on my favorite music. And that makes me like most other bloggers in the universe right now, and that makes me want to go to sleep. But I think the point is made: all music good, jazz nazi bad, high school deserve this too.
And let me finish by saying that if next year, someone in the jazz band comes in with a Kelly Clarkson CD and desperately wants to cover track 6, I will be completely in favor. And I will probably ask if we can do it in 5/4 and have an atonal group improv section. And it will be wonderful. And when we play it, I will probably enjoy myself. And that’s because music is really fun to play.

I also leave you with a link to the trailer to a highly relevant documentary that should get released sooner rather than later because I don’t have dish network. I’ve watched the trailer too many times already: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLYogj8QpHA
Links to a recording of the song (that I described earlier composing as a group in class) should follow in not too long. Also, here is my band's MySpace page, in which, through very rough home recordings, you can (hopefully) hear some of the influences I've talked about above coming together (http://www.myspace.com/tortugaquartet). We wrote all of the songs on there...thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far. This is my first blog post of any type ever, hence the rambling, iffy writing, made up words, etc.