Within a few years, he had built the college's Rainbow Band into one of the country's most important incubators for jazz talent. After contributing compositions, arrangements and superb trombone solos to the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra, Kenton's band, Herman's Thundering Herd and many others, he joined the faculty at Berklee College of Music in 1965. Now, Lovano also teaches at Berklee Giuffre taught at New York University, The New School and New England Conservatory. Tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, who trained at Berklee earlier in the decade, was just one of many jazz school alumni on the bandstand - he also shared the stage with one of North Texas State's first jazz grads, Jimmy Giuffre.īig bands also fed back into the educational system, with outstanding veterans becoming renowned educators. Woody Herman, in particular, took advantage of this new generation's skills, bringing his "Young Thundering Herd" to Carnegie Hall in 1976 to celebrate his 40th year as a bandleader. The One O'Clock Lab Band, the top jazz orchestra at the school now known as the University of North Texas, performs in front of ABC network cameras.Ĭourtesy of the University of North Texasīy the 1970s, this model had turned out a bumper crop of stellar players, many of whom spent parts of their early careers bringing a fresh take to the longstanding big bands of musicians such as Kenton, Buddy Rich and Woody Herman. The success of Breeden's One O'Clock Lab Band established a paradigm that dominated jazz pedagogy for the next 20 years, with big-band ensemble technique at the core. Throughout the 1960s, Kenton went out of his way to hire North Texas alumni, such as trumpeter Marvin Stamm. The following year, Kenton heard Breeden's One O'Clock Lab Band - the college's premier student ensemble at the time, and still very prominent today - perform at the nearby Notre Dame Jazz Festival. Gene Hall and Leon Breeden, who had both been instrumental in forming the Dance Band Arranging program at North Texas State College (now the University of North Texas), assisted Kenton in organizing the first clinic. led at the time by a former Kenton clinician, alto saxophonist Bud Shank - provided many unforgettable moments throughout high school.) Two of today's largest summer programs, the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshops and Stanford Jazz Workshop, take place on university campuses. (For me, the Centrum Jazz Workshop in Port Townsend, Wash. The legacy of this clinic spread quickly, with new clinics added throughout the 1960s and former clinicians starting their own summer camps. Students played in big bands organized by age and skill, and studied improvisation and composition from established performers and arrangers. Whereas the Lenox School of Jazz was a fascinating anomaly in the 1950s, Kenton's clinic started a popular trend - the summer jazz camp - that was replicated across the country. One important moment in this massive growth passed when popular bandleader Stan Kenton hosted the Stan Kenton Band Clinic at Indiana University in 1959. Whether driven by a desire to legitimize jazz improvisation as more than mere entertainment, to cultivate a new generation of jazz listeners or simply to land a steady gig in a shaky economy, the music's advocates increasingly turned to educational institutions. In 1960, there were 30 college jazz ensembles and approximately 5,000 high-school bands by the end of the decade, those numbers had increased to 450 and 15,000. When I began to trace the history of these institutions for the first half of this story, it became clear that the jazz landscape was changing in the 1960s, with high schools and colleges taking on an increasingly important role as jazz performance spaces. Last weekend, hundreds of dedicated jazz students, teachers, performers and advocates converged upon the annual Jazz Education Network (JEN) conference - held this year in Atlanta - to celebrate the central role that "Jazz Ed" has come to play in how these groups overlap in the 21st century. University musical communities have become an unavoidable part of today's jazz world, interacting with other elements of the jazz scene in many ways. Recent headliners include the Robert Glasper Experiment, the Vijay Iyer Trio, and the Ron Carter Quartet. Meanwhile, the Center for the Art of Performance books the campus' resplendent concert venue, Royce Hall, with high-profile jazz artists from the international touring circuit. UCLA is also home to the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, a highly selective graduate program where students receive mentorship from legends like Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, who have just been named UCLA professors. A Blog Supreme A Brief History Of Jazz Education, Pt.
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