"If there is value in competition, it would be as a motivational tool for students. I am, however, strongly opposed to encouraging students to compete against each other. It's unhealthy, it destroys egos, it encourages the flawed concept of the arts as being objective - that one can have a "best" trumpet player. It is not a part of the professional jazz world."
Let's jump back in on this statement. OK - I get it, we can all agree to disagree, and maybe I perceived Acorn's post in the wrong light. I still stick to my first adage: if you're gonna pay alot of money, You should expect some kind of tangible result. That's all I was basically saying. If you study jazz performance, then this to me says you are
NOT planning on making payment on your bills by
teaching music. You want to do it as a
performer. With all due respect to those of you who teach music: that's great. But don't ever tell me you didn't want to be a
player first.
I explained it to some high school students like this: you don't go up to the counter at McDonald's to order a Big Mac and then as soon as you get it, throw it away without eating it. Yet, this is exactly what I see happening in colleges everywhere. We pay for these educations, and along the way, things change, or we decide to take another route. Proponents would say its an
expansion of horizons. Opponents would say that
reality set-in so you better find a way to get a job. So, if you go up to the counter at your college and say you want a Jazz Performance Degree, then four years later you have the degree but you're doing something else, what the heck did you just order? You paid for a Big Mac but ended up with a Happy Meal instead? Does that make sense?
I suppose what I say is controversial because I'm really calling
jazz education and
music education out on the floor. It has become such an institution in and of itself, and society has bought in to it, that to suggest there's another way would mean I'm tearing away at the system. And I am, in a way. All those great players who became educators - they like working the 9-to-5 and being able to stay home to raise families. Age sets in and going out on the road or slugging it out in clubs is really a game for the young, unless your Buddy Rich (or
insert still working jazz musician here).
(Wow, if
that doesn't anger some of you, eh?)
But getting back to the statement above: how can there
not be an objective measure of musician-artists when, as we all start out, we start out imitating and emulating the greats. Hell, in school you're taught to emulate the greats, because they are the greats. You only get noticed when you play something familiar that potential employers can use. I know we're all about being individuals and such, but how many of you have gone to play with a band and someone says,
play it like so-and-so? I'm sure jazz great Jimmy Haslip paid alot of dues playing the bass part to Marvin Gaye's
What's Goin' On more than he can remember. We are all encouraged in school to play like demons and to make those tunes in the Real Book our own, but until you've really played them to death by paying your dues, do you think people want to hear you experimenting with them too soon? I say no.
So this, in turn, kinda' turns John Clayton statement upside-down. We go to school to learn how to be great by emulating the greats, but you're not considered on the path to greatness until you can show you can do what has come before you. And this is expected of everybody going to music school? So Mr. Clayton disagrees with competitiveness in school, but the system itself negates that attitude, doesn't it? And how do you gauge when somebody has earned their degree then? There has to be an objective standard applied in order to earn the degree: you put in the hours, you've taken the lab courses, you played in the requisite amount of college bands, you gave blood at the nurses office....if there is no objective standard, how do you figure it's time? Do they make you walk on rice paper without breaking it? Do you snatch the pebble out of the masters' hand? Who then can be the master? The very act of offering a degree in
any artform means
somebody came up with an objective standard. And if you ask me,
somebody's making an awful lot of money. And it ain't the students, eh?
