Mission Statement

  “ The Jazz String Caucus is dedicated to assuring the continued growth and development of string jazz and jazz education by promoting improvisational skills for all string players, and by providing specialized string curriculum, training, and resource
information to string and jazz educators.

The Jazz String Caucus provides guidance to educators regarding curricula and performance; assists teachers and practitioners with relevant resources; and takes an active role in organizing clinics, festivals and symposia at local, regional, national and international levels. The Jazz String Caucus makes its services available both
within the auspices of IAJE programs as well as to the community of string teachers and players at large.

The Jazz String Caucus believes that interest in jazz on strings is greater than ever before, and that there exists a tremendous and largely unmet demand for educational resources. The Jazz String Caucus therefore strives to make a basic improvisational fluency available to every string player: a skill that we believe is essential in nurturing
the complete musical development of the twenty-first century string player.”

You can join our email forum at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IAJEStrings/

The IAJE String list is a forum for discussion of improvising strings, and the primary means of disseminating IAJE String Caucus information to its membership.

You can read some the history and the streams of emails associated with the Jazz String Caucus/IAJE String Board here:

www.darolanger.com/iajestringcaucus.html
  
Thanks to our networking, we have seen many new methods, compositions and articles written for jazz strings utilizing the standards concept. The creation of improvisational goals for each level of string student helps non-jazz string educators teach beginning jazz techniques. We are creating guidelines for non-string jazz educators that specifically address string issues such as bowing articulation, finger patterns and such concepts. Those and other problems unique to the instruments will be addressed in supplements to existing improvisation material.

Here is the new National Standards for the Arts in Music K-12 text, specifically #3; Creating Music.
http://www.menc.org/publication/books/prek12st.html

The Jazz String Caucus has creating an annotated bibliography of jazz string and related methods, and is in the process of finding or generating jazz compositions with strings. We have created a "string presence" for the International Association for Music Educator’s  conference with clinics, panels and concerts on a variety of topics, and a jazz presence for the American string Teachers Association’s national conference. Our members teach improvisational concepts at IAJE, ASTA, MENC, TODA,  SAA conferences and all over the world.

Please feel free to ask any questions that you may have about our aims,

Renata Bratt

President IAJE String Caucus

for the Jazz String Caucus

renatabratt@earthlink.com