Jazz as a learning community

As I often do on Tuesdays evenings, I was listening to Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz on the way home from dance class tonight. This will likely change once TI sessions start on Tuesdays (but after 16 years I guess I can miss a few classes). Ok.. focus... back to Piano Jazz. Marian's guest tonight was McCoy Tyner who is a wonderful composer and player (he created much of the piano music - both harmony and rhythm - heard on John Coltrane's recordings). In addition to Coltrane, he's worked with Sonny Rollins, Ron Carter, and Al Foster to name a few (Miles Davis is probably in there somewhere too). So, between the fabulous music on the show, Marian interviews her guests (well duh... it is an interview show... hehehe). Now - Tyner was also a band leader and during an early part of the interview he talked about how, as a leader, he always tried to create "an environment that was conducive to learning." That got my brain working; I'm always ready to follow a new thought tangent - especially while I'm driving.

Jazz and Distributed Learning... Jazz as a learning community.... Jazz as a community of practice... well.. obviously. Actually, all music is in some way a community of practice and a community of learning but I think Jazz is one of the better examples of this. Classical music follows a fairly strict score (there is some variety within the score but you don't change the fundamental notes, the time signature, the basic elements as written by the composer. To some extent that is true of other music genres like rock, folk, country, etc... the learning of the songs themselves can certainly be distributed but the actual songs, notes may change a bit but still keep the basic melody, rhythm, and words written by the original song-writers.

Jazz is different (I would lump Blues in with Jazz for this discussion)... (perhaps Hip-Hop and Rap are too... I haven't spent enough time listening to the same pieces by different groups to make an educated judgment there... that would be some fun research... heheheh).

With Jazz each member of the group contributes musically - not just in technique but also in composition. I suppose I should clarify here by saying that I'm referring mainly to Improve Jazz... although when I think of Jazz I tend to think of improve because even when a familiar tune is played there is (in my favorite pieces) a great deal of improvising around the theme, so to speak. Bebop is a good example of what I'm talking about. Free Jazz is another, different type of example as it is pure improvisation and not based on a known/favorite song/tune. Fusion is not as good an example since it involves less improvisation and more simple and repetitious passages. Anyhow - when improve is really working (IMHO), each player brings something to the table, each player has an opportunity to take the music somewhere, teach the other players by example what he/she is doing, and bring the whole group to a new level together. This to me is like distributed learning... no... rephrase... at it's best .. when it is working and when something wholly new and wonderful is created, it is distributed learning.

Or at least that's what I'm thinking right now. It will be interesting to see what I think a year from now.

Enough for tonight.