IAJE Post-Secondary Education for Improvising Strings Transcript 1/11/02

Renata Bratt, Moderator. Darol Anger, Bert Ligon, Martin Norgaard, Lesa Terry, Paula Zeitlin, Matt Glaser in absentia

Q. Why Is Jazz Good For A String Player?

DA. This is the kind of questions that’s like (when you ask a jazz musician), “why is water good for fish?”. But, you step back a couple of steps and then;  at the very least it can certainly contribute to your knowledge and enjoyment of music when you’re actually helping to create the music. In a wider way, you become a composer, you become a theoretician. Your knowledge of music has to take so many wider forms and deepen in so many areas. You wind up, usually, getting more out of not only playing music but listening to music, all kinds of music. And that’s only the beginning. I’d really be interested to hear some other people’s ideas.

RB. I heard from Matt Glaser that he believes that “the development of improvisational skills is a returning to a concept. In the Baroque through Romantic eras, composer/performers developed their own cadenzas and compositions. They were not just automatons, or robots, reciting other people’s music. Musically literate players manipulate musical materials and have an awareness of harmony and theory as applied to their own instrument. They use their brain and not just their eyes.

LT. That’s a difficult statement to follow. For me, I think it’s vitally important that we study the music of our own country, and jazz certainly is America’s classical music. So just that alone is a  good reason for string players’ involvement in jazz; it’s American music. And it also takes it out of that stereotypical perspective of being “that music over there, that music that is not legit”. All of those terms get tossed to the wayside when we really refer to it as American music. So I start there in my jazz education; it’s American music and we should know it, we should study it, and we should understand it. It helps everything about a  student’s playing. It helps their rhythm, it helps their time, it helps their sense of ensemble. It helps them listen to other musicians and understand how their part fits into everything else that’s going on. As violinists we always play melody and we think we are the most important all the time. Which isn’t true in the jazz setting, certainly. The time is the most important thing. So, to be able to let that melody line become secondary and let the time come through and then to learn how your role relates to that understanding is a marvelous insight and development for a string player. And then student’s go back and play a Beethoven Sonata or a Brahms Concerto in an entirely different way, with that same understanding. So it doesn’t take anything away from their experience, it just adds to it. And I think that’s the one thing that is the concern, that if you study jazz as a string player you suddenly can’t play as a classical musician anymore. Which is ridiculous as I do it each and every day of my life. It just, as I said, adds to your experience, it doesn’t take anything away.

MN. I agree with Lesa in a lot of ways. I think it can be boiled down to one word, which is the word “ear-training”. You can not improvise unless you listen. And listening is the most elementary, basic foundation of music. Like Pat Harbison was saying so eloquently in his presentation yesterday, “Language is connected with music. And in learning language we learn by listening. Learning music we also learn by listening. Learning jazz, you listen in completely new ways that you’ve never done before”. I believe that jazz string players will have better intonation because of it. I had a student that was involved with classical, jazz and fiddling. In about her Junior year I felt that she was behind some of her peers. She had a very hard time remembering chords and she always got lost in jazz tunes. This girl was extremely musical. She was very good at transcription work.  It turned out that she had never listened to the bass lines. I realized that she had no idea that bass lines in jazz outline chords. The moment she started listening to the bass line everything fell into place for her and it was one lesson. I can specifically look in my book and point to one lesson where she realized this and the world opened up to her. This is just one example of a player that listened in a new way because of jazz education.

PZ. I would agree with everything that has been said so far and would only add that I think studying jazz is one way that string musicians in particular get an inner map of their instrument, a harmonic map. On a keyboard you can see the chords and visualize them. I think a lot of string players who start playing jazz  are at a disadvantage because we haven’t been trained to have this kind of inner map. It isn’t something you read; you play and then you learn it.

BL. Some of the classical teachers are worried that if they play jazz it’ll ruin their classical playing. I’ve encountered this with piano teachers too, somehow beating on  the instrument wildly ruins them for playing Mozart. I think these teachers find out that everything everybody here has said is true, that they come back to their classical music and they’ve got a better sense of their instrument, they have a better sense of memory, they have studied, as improvisers, being composers themselves so they understand compositions more when they play compositions. They recognize what they are playing and aware of where they fit in with the chord structure of whatever pieces of music they are playing. The other thing about improvisers on any instrument is that they end up playing music for longer periods of time in their life. There are studies on this (I can’t quote them right now). But if a high school kid leaves high school and he’s just played the second clarinet part in the band he probably puts it away and never sees it again. But if he improvises he ends up playing the rest of his life. I think that’s more important, to be involved in the music. The other thing that’s really odd about our educational system is that we grant degrees in art and the artists are expected to create things. They have a portfolio at the end of every semester. But for years students have been awarded music degrees without ever creating any music. We all know that there is a great deal of art to re-creating music, but creating something of their own, either composing or improvising, gives them the opportunity to identify personally with music.

Q. Are There Specific Techniques Unique to Jazz That Would Benefit A String Player?

PZ. Articulation and  time. I think most people really get good time by playing jazz. You have a different sense of time and you have a different sense of where the pulse and the beat start and end as well as the smaller subdivisions of time. I think intonation, as I said before, harmonic knowledge and also the range of possibilities on the instrument which include slides, double-stops, particular types of effects that you might or might not get in a classical piece.

BL. A lot of what I said before addresses this; the time, the intonation, the fact that they are recognizing more groups of notes rather than just one note at a time when they are playing their classical music. They are recognizing notes as part of chords and they are recognizing notes as arpeggios. They know that, “ I happen to be playing the fifth or the ninth”, or “look at that, it’s a sharp nine in the middle of this chord”. They are a little bit more aware of where they fit in the bigger picture.

RB. When I spoke with Matt Glaser he said that, “Artist teachers such as Isaac Stern often have their students sing melodies and then perform them on their instruments. If a student can hear a melody and then play it, they will be a better player. Students who learn how to play a simple melody in all twelve keys can easily transfer that knowledge to classical compositions. When I teach, I often give a student a simple melody that must end in improvisation for a student to play in all twelve keys. This mimics a true playing situation, where a player can travel from a fixed melody or lick to a fixed melody, using their own inventions in between.” So Matt is talking about actual jazz situations, but those kinds of things can also happen if you have a memory slip. You really have to get from A to B and not have the audience know that you had the memory slip. This has happened to me in Beethoven Sonatas and it’s good to have a little bit of technique under your belt.

DA. What is that, the art of recovery.

MN. I remember when I first walked into a class of four students at Vanderbilt. I think two of them were seniors. This was at  Blair School of Music, and their straight classical technique was very well developed. The first thing I did was put on a recording of Stuff Smith from 1936. The students said, “The guy has no technique, this is easy.” I had to explain to them that there is technique as in how to move your hands and change positions. There is also the technique of playing the right notes to the right chords. After I went through some of the first lessons in my book about playing specific notes on the beat and threw all these rules at them, by the third week they were walking in with hang dog expressions. Then later I played Jean-Luc Ponty and other people that have a very developed classical technique, but I think they realized that that’s not what’s important. Be it string player or be it the difference between Clifford Brown and Chet Baker. They are both great players and one had more technique than the other in the classical sense. But the word “technique” relates to jazz completely differently because it’s a technique of improvising.

LT. To continue with what you were saying as well, we speak of playing jazz music as having an ability to tell a story. As classical musicians we aren’t as encouraged to do that as we are in jazz.  And what that means: telling your story, and having something to say. And having all the necessary tools to tell that story in a really interesting way, in an individual way. I certainly believe that the study of jazz technique gives you that - your own voice from which to tell a story. Another approach that I’ve been using recently in my jazz education for strings, is to take them completely away from the string instrument all together. Because it seems that, as classical musicians, we have a certain reference point that we always go to and it’s really hard to get past that wall. So I completely eliminate the instrument all together. We’ll go to a drum, or a table or something entirely different and we’ll just deal with time. It’s really interesting what comes out. They’re much less inhibited, their rhythmic ideas are better, and it’s free of all of that stuff that we put on ourselves as string players. Then we take those ideas and put them on the instrument. It’s much more immediate. I have found this method to be very effective in teaching, to approach it in that way. Also, when we talk about teaching harmony and understanding chords, it’s good to be able to play a pattern, say a scale, in studying the modes. I had a student that was able to grasp the whole concept of the mixolydian mode. She took that concept, put it in a solo that she had and she was amazed because it freed her mind of having to think of specific notes all the way through her solo. Which if you do, you get bogged down, and then your creativity is hampered. But she just utilized that mixolydian scale and she could hear the sound that that scale produced over the chords and she flipped out. It was great. Students certainly gain a much stronger harmonic sense, rhythmic sense, all of those things are enhanced in studying jazz.

DA. Certainly classical music is late in its development as an art form. Usually when you get towards the end of a cycle in art forms you get a situation where there’s a lot of “bad” sounds and there’s one “good” sound. In jazz, although we seem to be moving towards that idea, still there are a lot of sounds. There are sounds and then there’s your sound. There are a lot of great sounds and of course that touches upon the whole idea of America.

Q. I’d like to talk about recruitment of string players to a jazz program without the assistance of their artist teachers. One method that has been promulgated lately has been encouraging a jazz string band to help pull in students who are already in orchestra or who may not have a larger organization that they are interested in. If I might, I’d like to have Paula address this first.

PZ. My situation is unique in that Wellesley is a small college of about twenty five hundred and has a strong music program but not at conservatory level. There are a few music graduates every year, but not large numbers. Getting any courses and particularly courses for credit is really hard. At the moment, there’s a moratorium on this at this school. On the other hand, there are lots of students who are interested, and some of the things that we’ve done to recruit students could be done at any place and in a school of any size. The first is in using workshops, inviting artists in. In my case I was hired in to teach one student jazz violin. She was in the band. There is one jazz band that has been in existence for a long time but has always allowed or encouraged one string player to be a “horn”. Periodically there will be a string player that will show up who wants to play jazz in the band, so I was hired to give private lessons to this string player. In the first year that I was there I did a jazz improvisation clinic for strings and a lot of people signed up and were very interested. Then I still only had one slot to teach (for the one string player in the jazz band).  As I loved playing jazz string quartets and had done it for a long time, I publicized a jazz string ensemble. For the last two years we’ve had a jazz string ensemble which the first year existed as an “interest group”. I gave a workshop at the very beginning of the year. I think this is important. Ideally, you get the freshman, the ones who are just coming in, who haven’t been overwhelmed by how much work they have to do and all of their other requirements. Get them playing and learning something about our own history of jazz strings. In the back I left a few promo flyers for these clinics. So this informal first year “club” did two performances. This year they are an “official club” which means I get paid through the student activities fund. In situations where you can’t really start a string group as an official ensemble, either in the string department or in the jazz department, it’s useful to start out as a club. At Wellesley you have to prove there is interest for at least three or four years before you get to be an official ensemble. Our hope is that we will get to be official later. Meanwhile, there is publicity on the music department website, on the music department handouts at the beginning of the year. Again, the main way of recruiting the first year was through the workshop. Since then there’s been more word of mouth and students asking about the club.

Once a student group gets established you should perform often and become very visible. Especially at prospective student events in the spring. A lot of  schools bring students on campus, and we have gotten students just by performing at these prospective student events. Students get interested and decide they want to go. Distribute flyers and sign-ups at the beginning of the year, have open meetings and jam sessions. We also did joint performances with other performing groups. The first semester the group was in existence, we joined with the fiddle club and had a great performance that then attracted other people. This year we performed with the fiddle club and the jazz vocal group and did a big blues arrangement at the very end that everybody could solo on. I think these kind of joint performances and linking up with other kinds of groups on campus, dance groups, poetry groups, and art exhibits, anything that you do that helps you be visible and connect with other people are very important.

The last thing I would add is to bring in more jazz string players and artist groups. We had Mimi Rabson last year do a clinic on jazz improvisation for all instrumentalists and vocalists, and she did a wonderful job. We’ve tried to get other groups; Matt Maneri and the group who is a kind of microtonal improviser and also works in a different kind of a jazz ensemble. As much as possible, go on field trips, but visibility and outreach is the main thing.

BL I’m not sure how we keep the University of South Carolina String Jazz Band going. I agree with everything that Paula said and I think the kids are what keep it going. They have a sustained interest in it, they tell their friends, their friends see them an I think that’s what keeps it afloat. At this time I just have a quartet. A lot of my kids have graduated and moved on. In fact I saw three of them this morning in the Mancini Orchestra. So if you send your kids there they don’t come back sometimes. But you’re welcome to them. It’s word of mouth. I have encountered before, and I think we’ve mentioned this, that some of the classical teachers are a little hesitant to give up their kids, they’ll tell them that “you can practice jazz, but that doesn’t count as real practice”. You get these kinds of statements. But they quickly find out that that’s not true, that these kids come back to their studios a little bit better prepared. Then you get the support of the non-jazz faculty. They actually start recommending to their students to play jazz because they benefit.

MN. It’s important to realize that there’s two types of programs. I went to William Patterson, which is a straight ahead be-bop jazz program. I think it’s a little more difficult to ask a violinist to totally focus on jazz and nothing else. I think the pitch in a mixed setting, which I think Bert is talking about, and is certainly the case at Belmont, is the one the Mancini Institute is using: Do you want to work? Do you want to work in not just orchestras but in small bands?  Do you want to play society music, do you want to be able to improvise at a wedding? I think that’s a great pitch and that our line of attack should be especially schools that have strong string programs and jazz programs and so pulling students over.

LT. I think it’s important to remember that we have to make this music, jazz, accessible to string players. For so long they have believed that they are not a part of it, they can’t be a part of it. They don’t have the necessary knowledge or smarts to actively participate. So that’s the first thing we have to address. Again, in my own teaching, I try to emphasize the whole understanding of it being fun. Which it really is. It is so much fun. This summer at the Mancini  Institute we implemented an entirely different program and brought in Latin jazz and we had eight string players participate. The whole emphasis for me was for those students to have fun, to do something they had never done before on stage and just have a ball. If we can start there, it gets others interested. They talked to their colleagues and explained what the experience was like and how valuable it was for them and how much fun they had. That’s why we play music, isn’t it? Also, necessity is the mother of invention, those of us teaching this and talking about it have to write and arrange things for string players that will help to make the music again more accessible. It’s really important that we also develop in that way.

Julie Lyonn Lieberman: Another successful tip is to bring in a famous artist, not a string player, because they won’t know who they are, but a school will bring in an artist such as Bobby McFerrin (which is what we did at Juilliard). Then you get the kids to play something behind that person on stage and you’ve got it made. Publicity galore!

Q. Curriculum. Do you think that the curriculum of all schools should change to incorporate some knowledge of jazz and improvisation?

DA. Yes. A knowledge of American fiddle styles and other vernacular fiddle styles should be included in that. Fiddle is often a way to get students into jazz. You learn a lot about rhythmic concepts, going back to the dance, and without the harmonic difficulty that crops up immediately in jazz. If you can get a kid thinking about rhythm, and playing sophisticated rhythms through fiddling, often you can get them going into the jazz idiom more easily.

RB. Matt Glaser addressed that as well and he talked at length about Bartok. He discussed how,  “Bartok believed that folk music was a deep and important source for all music. And our American music, including fiddle music, jazz, classical , and folk music, all have validity and influence each other. So therefore music education should incorporate all sorts of music.

LT. That reminds me of a really interesting experience I had when I started to develop as a jazz musician. Max Roach was at his home one afternoon and he encouraged me to take a book down from the shelf, which was a book on jazz and jazz history, and in it I found a wonderful story about how Anton Dvorak came to know about Negro Spirituals, another American musical art form. It seems that H. T. Burleigh, who was a very important person to that music and went on to document a lot of the spirituals, was in a class at the New York Conservatory that Anton Dvorak was teaching. Dvorak was always taken with this particular student because he would come in singing these melodies and they were so beautiful and so soulful and so deeply felt. Dvorak approached him and asked him what they were,  and Burleigh said, “well these are spirituals, these are the songs that I sing in my home. I grew up on this music.” Dvorak began to incorporate this music in his own compositions, in the “American” String Quartet, and the “New World” Symphony. Dvorak said, “this is important music. It is America’s music, and everybody should hear and know this music.” When I read this I just literally fell off the chair I was sitting on. I had never, in my formal education, been told about this or heard about this. Dvorak was an important person. Here was someone saying, “ this is great stuff, we should all know it and hear it and study it.” The same is true of this music, jazz. Not just horn players and piano players and those folks should be privileged to have it. String players should have it too. It should be a part of the regular curriculum. It should be mandatory to study this. It just broadens your whole experience, it opens you up to so much more.

MN. I completely agree, I think it should be part of any string players experience. But, again, I think we need to make a distinction. Music schools are divided in two sections. One is music education and one is performance. Though I would love for every classical performer on a stringed instrument to know some jazz, I think it’s more important to focus on the music education majors. The National Standards for Grades K through 12  have been out since 1992 and they have improvising at every level in it. And still, a lot of people on this panel, and folks like Randy Sabien, go around to schools and teach methods such as Randy’s Jazz Philharmonic and the teachers don’t know how to teach it, though they are so excited about it. That should be our main focus, to simply make sure that every music education program properly prepares the people they send out into the real world. The real world of music teaching has to have improvising in it, that’s been mandated by our government standards.

Q. If the String Student is a Jazz Major, do You believe that the Curriculum should be the same as for any other jazz instrument?

BL. Sure. It’s got to be. There is a jazz vocabulary. If you teach a language class you teach everybody the same way. Part of the nature of the jazz vocabulary is that we piano players are trying to emulate horn players who are trying to emulate Billy Holiday or someone else. There is all this cross pollination of trying to emulate different voices, and instruments and string players as well as everybody else have to learn these things. So I guess the question is integration or segregation of the strings, right? And I can come down on either side of that. If we advocate segregating the strings and treating them separately, in a separate but equal way, sometimes that doesn’t work. You run into the problem of trying to convince a band director or a director of jazz studies somewhere that he’s got to develop this whole other program. Getting new classes, and staffing, getting people. You’ve got to find ways to fit the student into what’s already there. Because you’re going to scare people off that might otherwise include strings. At the same time, every section of your music department at some point has to be segregated and you have to deal with them. For instance, I have to take my guitar players aside and work with them on specific issues. Obviously certain things have to be taken care of with the string players. I end up separating them as well. The way I’ve solved the curriculum issue is that I just put the string ensemble under jazz combos which is already an approved class. There is no separation there.

RB. When I asked Matt Glaser this question he said; “ It should be the same in some ways, however string jazz majors in private lessons should still study classical techniques. String players should not have to give up string techniques such as accompaniment patterns, bass lines, etc. For instance, this year at Berklee, Joe Lovano asked to have three string players in his jazz band class and I understand that they used all of their string techniques there. They were not just playing horn lines or copying horns. This is an important thing for me, string players should be able to use all of their string identity. For instance, Darol Anger and I still incorporate our fiddle technique into our jazz playing.

PZ. I’d like to address the segregation issue again. It’s really important for string student studying jazz, as Bert said, to be able to be part of the existing jazz program and learn all of the things in harmony, theory, and language as any other jazz player. At the same time there are certain things that are not going to be found in a regular jazz program as it exists in a lot of schools now. One of those is jazz string history. One of the great things about Berklee when  I attended there, was taking a jazz string class. Then you really understand the tradition of jazz strings in America and in Europe and in every jazz style. That was one of the most important things that I got by going there. As Matt said, the techniques for jazz strings are unique and, as Bert pointed out, there are things that you can work on in a separate or string specific class.

MN. One of the classes at Belmont that I feel strongly about is a seminar class where all the lead players are together. The class has trumpet, saxophones and strings. I don’t teach the class, it’s taught by the head of the jazz program, Jeff Kirk, who is a great saxophone player. They simply go through the Real Book. I remember being in the room when they played “Joyspring”. The horns opened it up and it sounded great, then Jeff started laughing because the second section of the tune goes up a half step and ends up in Gb. He turned to the strings and I just about crawled under the piano. I think when it comes to jazz repertoire it is very important that the strings are integrated with the horns. When it comes to ensembles, that’s where I like Matt’s term, the string identity certainly needs to be expressed, in jazz string quartets and so forth.

LT. It’s important to remember that if we’re string players coming into jazz, it’s assumed that we have classical training because that is what has been the most available to us. There is no way that we can ever get rid of that. I can never separate myself  from my classical training or throw it away or get rid of it. You are adding to your experience. You are creating other experiences to have in your life. That won’t help with this whole notion of trying to undue yourself, which you really can’t do anyway. Yes, strings should be integrated, and yes, we should be doing all of the things that other instrumentalists are doing., and singers as well. They learn also from us. It goes both ways. It is not only one way. They learn something valuable about discipline, practice and study from string players which we’ve been doing all along.

Q. How can We Help Jazz Education Become Part of a Standard Education at the College Level? This is a huge question, and I don’t think any of us can answer it in any final way, but I wondered if we could all come up with an idea, just off the cuff at this point.

DA. We are at an International Association for Jazz Education talking about this and we have a wonderful organization here whose resources we are learning to draw on. Hopefully we can do more of that. We have our String Caucus organization which everybody here probably is a member of. There’s a lot of resources here, knowledgeable people that can be drawn upon to figure out ways to do this. A lot of it is by example, people going out and playing music on strings. Making this music available to people so that they can hear it and know what it feels like and what is sounds like, what it could be. Again, clinics, clinicians - we just need more people that are willing to go out in the trenches and play music in schools, and do clinics everywhere they can. To make it possible for people to hear, to know that it does exist, and that it’s fun to do.

LT. I totally agree Darol. Also, aside from string jazz just existing, it has existed, it has been a tradition for a long time. We need to really get that word out. Again I’ll use myself as an example, in my own education I had no idea that there were people like Stuff Smith and Eddie South  and Stephane Grappelli and all these great violinists that were playing jazz and doing it well for a long time. That knowledge is invaluable. Utilizing what you have right in your own backyard is vitally important. Here in Los Angeles, at Cal State LA where I am now involved, the demographics are such that there is a large Hispanic populace. Within that are a lot of Mariachi bands that have a lot of violin players who are open to learning jazz and learning jazz styles. I’ve just begun to tap into this and find ways to bring them into that experience as well as other classical players. I tell them about what we are doing there, invite them and encourage them to come and join, and some have. And we are slowly building what has really been a long established tradition of Charanga music with strings involved heavily in that music. We are pulling all of those forces together (of course I’m not doing all of this by myself. There are people that are involved and some are sitting in this very room and have kept this going as well) and being able to see what you have around you and utilize those resources, bringing it together in an effective way, and keeping it going.

MN. I like to dream that in order to have a music school you have to teach jazz for music, especially in music education. Well, who checks the music schools? I learned this story from Laura Reed a couple of days ago, the National Association of Schools of Music is a college level accreditation body that goes around to the schools and checks that every teacher is qualified. They check the curriculum. What if in their guidelines there was something saying that you have to teach jazz to music education majors? I know that ASTA has gone through a four or five year process of having some of that language changed in their guidelines. I think that would be a long term goal, maybe ten years, fifteen years down the road. That would be one of the most powerful ways that we could get jazz in every single music education program.

BL. There are some schools that are already encouraging more music education majors to take jazz classes. We have created a class that is required for music ed majors at USC so that they will know something about jazz. I’m excited about that for a number of reasons, one of them that I don’t have to teach it. With curriculum, any jazz student has to learn something about jazz theory, something about jazz history, and something about jazz improvisation. There’s ways to work any instrument into those classes. I have a great jazz musician in my school now who plays steel drums. He does all the work , transcribes all the solos, he’s got the vocabulary. We’ve got a lot of non-traditional people trying to do these kinds of things. Where we’ve  got to focus our effort somehow, we educators, we have to create some kind of an ensemble place for these people. We can teach them the classes, but they’ve got to have some place where they can do the ensemble. That’s where we’re at this brick wall here.

Most of the jazz programs anywhere are based on the dance band instrumentation of the thirties. Except that there were violins in the dance bands, they’ve kind of eliminated them. They’ve eliminated clarinets too, you can’t be a jazz major if you’re a clarinet player in a lot of major universities because it’s not a “jazz instrument”. Much less violin or flute or other instruments. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s true. But part of it is they’ve got to have some place to put those bodies and give them some ensemble experience. There’s an amazingly large literature for Big Band. Trumpet, Trombone, Sax is the typical kind of instrumentation. The only way you can incorporate strings or other instruments into that is if the band director or somebody is willing to figure out a part and copy out a trumpet part for the violins or have the cellists read trombone parts or bari-sax parts, something like that. There’s not a studio orchestra nor is there likely to be one introduced at the high school level or even in many colleges for a while.

There’s got to be a demand created by the educators out there for ensemble music so that writers like myself can get this stuff published and get it back to you. It’s got to work both ways. There are writers out there writing, but they’re not going to spend a lot of time writing stuff without groups to play it. We’ve got to work some way to create that demand for the ensembles so they have that experience. As far as the separation issue, we’ve got to get strings involved with the other jazz musicians, because that’s also part of that whole jazz community, how they learn, how they share vocabulary. They learn a lot more from each other than they do the teachers.

Q. What different methods can we use for our students? What methods of teaching jazz to string players are your favorite methods?

MN. I like my own method, Jazz Fiddle Wizard. I used my own method for the first year with pretty much all of my students. It goes through very basic chord knowledge, be-bop scales and so on. Ideally, the student by sophomore year should be through with that, at which point I ask them to transcribe solos. They’ve been transcribing solos the first year, but only from violinists. The second year they start transcribing solos from non-string players, at which point I try to make a personal curriculum for each student by seeing which solos they bring in. Some of them may bring in more swing solos, I do more swing with them. Some of them may bring in a Coltrane solo. A cellist of mine just transcribed Naima from Coltrane. Then I try to make it as personal as I can so that when they come out of school they sound different. I don’t want all of my students to sound the same. In the third year I encourage them to play as many different styles as they can. A lot of the students that I have in Nashville are so familiar with the fiddle styles that I specifically am forced to teach jazz styles mainly. One of my students, a freshman, is already playing at the Grand Ole Opry. I don’t think there is anything I can teach her in fiddle. In the fourth year I continue to encourage as many different styles as I can.

LT. I like my method too. I don’t do anything different than anyone else here on this panel, really. Except maybe I would include call and response which is very effective for me with students. Especially if they’re really afraid and scared. They don’t know where to start, what to do. They’re completely overwhelmed at the beginning. That works really well. I will do that one on one in one way and also if I’m in a larger group I utilize the group. One section will have to come up with backgrounds and supportive material while someone is soloing. They’re having to create something and they get together and discuss what to do. It gives them a sense of teamwork and coming together as an ensemble to create something. I find that to be good as an ice breaker. They begin to develop in that way and then I continue on in the same way that Martin has discussed.

RB. Matt Glaser has a compendium of improvisational methods that he uses, though he uses just bits from each one. He likes to use Bert Ligon’s “Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony”, Bob Mintzer’s new book, “15 Blues and Funk Etudes”, the Ramon Ricker Improvisation series, Jerry Bergonzi’s “Inside Improvisation” series, Walt Weiskopf’s “Intervallic Improvisation, the Modern Sound”, and Shelly Berg’s Jazz improvisation, the Goal Note Method”. Of course Berklee has their own set of rules and regulations about the things that are required for every jazz performance major which you can read on their web site.

DA. My methods seem somewhat similar to Lesa’s. As a clinician I’ll often go into a situation where I won’t see the kids again. A lot of times I’ll be doing introductory type work. Ear work is really important and call and response is a huge component of that. I’ll usually try to get people aware of the blues form. It’s amazing how many string players, and other good musicians too, are not really aware of the blues as a formal form. “Oh the blues, yes it’s blues, it’s pure emotion, it’s a feeling, it’s this it’s that”. If we can get beyond the initial call and response and ear work, I try to get people thinking about the blues as a twelve bar form. There’s a couple of different ways to do that. You can go the simplest route, three phrases. If they catch onto that you can go into the chordal form. That’s pretty good. Then, as things go on, I actually like Martin’s method very much, I’ve been using that quite a bit. There’s a lot of good stuff.

PZ. I wanted to add that I also usually start students with blues. Partly because if they’ve grown up in America or even Western Europe, they have the form internalized. You say, “raise your hand when you hear the IV chord” and even if they don’t know what the IV chord is right away, they’ve heard it so often that they have it in their ears and it’s all ready for them to access the information. It’s also a good way to start out talking about form, where the form ends and begins. Doing it by ear, using different scales depending on which fit you can then improvise immediately and you can improvise with other people immediately. Which I think is even more important. I do try to get people doing the F blues and Bb blues as soon as possible so that they can play with horn players. Often I use recordings and a lot of the other methods that we’ve talked about here. I also like the “Jazz Fiddle Wizard” a lot because it does get people away from using just the blues scale and into chromatic and be-bop scales. Tying what we do to our tradition is really important and  I use a lot of early blues recordings so that students get an idea that they are part of a very long tradition. I also use recordings of contemporary blues players. One of my favorites right now is Regina Carter’s “Skeeter Blues” which is an F blues. I have people just learn the solo by ear. It’s a very clear solo that uses a lot of different techniques and it’s a lot of fun to play too.

BL. In addition to what everyone else is doing here, I do the call and response with the beginning kids because that’s great. In fact I just use an open string and one other note at the start as a way of teaching them those rhythmic phrases, thinking rhythmically and not trying to overwhelm them with a bunch of notes. But as they progress, of course we go through all of the other things, identifying chord tones and learning lines to connect these chord tones. Of course I use my books too here. That’s why I wrote them, for the kids. In addition to what we’ve all said up here, they’re all studying great music. They’re all playing classical music. I have them bring in the music that they’re studying in their private lessons or in their classical studies and we’ll find something that applies. If they’re playing Mozart, who else do they need to go to to learn how to play great melodies? They’re already playing great melodies and his stuff  still applies. C major is still C major and we can steal something and we can find some way of developing it. I have them recognize the elements in the pieces that they’re already playing, that they’re already working on technically in the practice rooms, and write etudes that fit the tunes that we’re doing.

Laura Reed Q. Bert, you mentioned trying to integrate string jazz into something that already exists, working with what you already have. In your school do you have a separate jazz teacher as well as a classical teacher? For instance, at Belmont or Berklee they have a separate jazz string teacher. Could you describe the structure of your program?

BL. With any of  the instruments, piano, strings, trumpet, saxophone, they all have their  classical teachers and then they come to my improv class and they’ve been taught how to play the instrument and I can teach them how to improvise. They’re taught how to play their instruments. The strings are mixed in with the winds in my improv classes. Although I advocate including them right there with all of the “traditional” jazz instruments, but I’ll also separate them too. I’m kind of doing double duty there.

Laura Reed Q. Will the faculty there work with the kids in their private lessons on some of this stuff?

BL. No. Not even in the slightest.

Laura Reed; it seems to me that needs to be one angle of attack too, the classical faculty should know the importance of this.

RB. Didn’t we start there?

Q. How can we get more music for “studio jazz orchestra”?

LT. The Mancini Institute has a large library.

Laura Reed: Kathleen Horvath (who I think is now at the Cleveland Institute of Music) is Chair of a print music task force through ASTA. They were originated to try to get some out of print music back into print. They are initiating dialogs, and maybe you need to contact Kathleen because that might be a really good way to get to the major publishers as well. They’ve started a dialog, they’ve had conventions and sessions together and things like that.

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