Is There a European style of Jazz Education?

The American International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE) is said to be the fastest growing music education organisation in the world. Attracting 7,000 delegates, the IAJE annual conference takes place in a different American city every January. Each four-day event features hundreds of presentations, workshops, clinics and concerts, and an extensive music-industry trade section.

Enthusiasts describe the IAJE conference as awe-inspiring. Critics call it madness, a zoo! Personally, I love it. During the last decade I have attended IAJE conferences in various North American cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and New Orleans. Twice I've presented academic papers in New York, each time regretting being unable to catch more than a fraction of the other available lectures and concerts. At peak periods, during the middle of the day, there can be as many as nine simultaneous events. I've heard memorable talks by Quincy Jones, Pat Metheny, Joe Morello, Artie Shaw and many other jazz legends. I've enjoyed concerts by Dave Brubeck, Herbie Hancock, Wynton Marsalis, Maria Schneider and a hundred more.

Wonderful as this is, even the greatest enthusiast would admit that the workshops and masterclasses are not all exemplary. Leading practitioners such as Jamie Aebersold, Jerry Coker, David Baker and Mark Levine are acclaimed. Most teachers and students find these outstanding educators inspirational and influential. But some other musicians delivering IAJE conference workshops and master classes have been less impressive. Admittedly they are in a minority, but one sees unprepared sessions, educators who can't explain, those who don't understand student needs, and many who demonstrate rather than teach. While a teacher may be an sublimely advanced player, simultaneously he may be a beginner in his grasp of classroom techniques. This has led some British musicians to criticise what they regard as the American approach. They even posit the existence of a new and separate school of jazz education, a European movement.

Recently, as far as performance is concerned, there has been a move away from America as the source of jazz innovation. Jazz is developing in interesting and exciting fashions beyond the cultural jet stream from the USA. The rise of the Munich-based ECM record label is a good example. ECM has supported such innovations as saxophonist Jan Garbarek's collaboration, Officium, with the Hilliard singers. Commentators as disparate as critic Mike Zwerin and saxophonist Dave Liebman have written of this phenomenon of jazz away from home, of 'Europeanisation', observing that America is no longer the only place where new styles arise. But this is the finished music. What of the preparation, the process of jazz education?

Educator Peter Sklaroff (admissions tutor at Leeds College of Music) has observed that some students now wish to sound more contemporary or even 'European', to focus less on bebop or standard songs, to emphasise modal harmony and inner lines. "They often associate this style with artists allied to the ECM label," guitarist Sklaroff told me, adding that the learning and use of traditional methodologies within jazz education seems less popular with some students than once it was. "This has been put to me as a way of avoiding sounding old-fashioned," says Sklaroff. But despite this he observes that most of his students still prefer the American school of jazz education. "Bypassing traditional methods when learning can cause more harm than good unless students are fully aware of their own development processes," he suggests, though acknowledging that the desire to sound contemporary is understandable.

Looking at British jazz departments, it's true to say that the methodology, the classroom techniques, the literature and the most widely-used pedagogical materials are American in origin. The body of jazz repertoire on which the teaching is based, including an abundant legacy of songs and the very best historic jazz recordings, comes from the USA. Despite the epithet 'International', and despite a policy of welcoming members from overseas, the IAJE is strongly American. At their best, American educators have brought innovation and freshness to jazz in the classroom. The American jazz vernacular is a source of vitality. The terminology, from a Sears Roebuck bridge to shirttail endings, via charts, chops and changes - and including fake book, comping, head, standard and play-along - is American. Even some of the prominent jazz educators around the world - Scott Stroman and Frank Griffiths in Britain, Darius Brubeck in South Africa, Jiggs Whigham in Cologne - are American. American methods and literature are not beyond criticism, as I=ve said. But if there is a distinctly European approach to teaching, I have yet to see it.

A recent major initiative in British jazz education has been the introduction of the ABRSM jazz syllabus. The ABRSM has achieved innovation by introducing jazz at lower grades (in itself a controversial step - can there really be jazz piano at Grade I?), by introducing specially-written material and by further codifying, analysing and demystifying the approach to jazz. But none of this constitutes a characteristically European style of methodology. When it comes to dealing with melody, harmony and rhythm, European jazz educators use the best of the proven approaches from America. These include the use of the pentatonic scale, the blues scale, shell voicings, the II-V-I progression, play-along records, the making and study of transcriptions, and so on. As long as jazz is dealing with chromatic harmony, with 'time-and-changes', surely this will be the case? Even the little practical wrinkles, such as tapping one's foot on the back beat to cure rushing, seem to be born in the USA.

Maybe the emergence of the Europeanisation postulated by Zwerin and Liebman, Sklaroff's observance of his students' laudable desire to avoid sounding old-fashioned, together with the the ABRSM jazz grades, are together heralding the possibility of a truly non-American approach to jazz education? Time will tell.