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harmonies rather than address the varied ways that expert players improvised in similar situations.²⁷ Indeed, one inside joke among jazz musicians is that schooled musicians are easy to identify, for in improvising they instinctively employ the melodic minor scale a half step up from the root of a dominant chord whenever one appears on a lead sheet. Saxophonist Sam Newsome said that Terence Blanchard would always yell, “Get out of there!” when he heard his bandmates falling back on such clichés in performance (Newsome 1995).

      Many musicians told me that educators work more effectively when they inculcate in students the idea that learning the conventions and rules of jazz performance constitutes a base for further exploration rather than a rigid formula to be applied. Jazz improvisation requires not only having the theoretical materials at hand: it also requires knowing how to use them. As vibraphonist Gary Burton has observed, jazz education such as that offered at Berklee “allows [the young musician] to go further faster” (Helland 1995, 24). Burton explains, “A typical classical musician studies how music works, how harmony works, what the grammar of this music is in order to play better. You study your instrument with a master player. You study these same things as a jazz musician, but instead of using as an example a piece by Beethoven, you use a piece by Monk or Ellington. You’re still learning musical information, which helps you to be a more knowledgeable, proficient player” (quoted in Helland 1995, 23). Through courses in harmony, improvisation, composition, and arranging and participation in ensembles, students are presented with the opportunity to assimilate the advances of the past in a systematic manner.

      When it comes to negotiating the professional world, there are a number of ways in which formal and informal settings are again complementary. Professional musicians need, in addition to performance knowledge, an understanding of copyrights, music publishing, recording processes, booking, promotion and marketing, and survival on the road. In the past, the only way for musicians to learn such things was by gleaning them from conversation, trial and error, and experience. Jazz education in no way obviates the need for musicians to actually have such experiences, reflect upon them, and develop their own strategies for coping with them. What it does do, however, is to give them more reasonable expectations and the opportunity to benefit systematically from others who have already made and worked through mistakes. Perhaps the most significant, and perhaps unintended, consequence of jazz education is its contribution to the formation of musical networks that I discuss in chapter 4.

      Despite differences in age, geographical background, cultural identity, and musical training, each of the musicians I interviewed stressed the importance of various African American musics and cultural practices in their education and experience as jazz artists. Pianist James Williams, for example, was born in Memphis, Tennessee. His early musical education included lessons focused on Western piano repertoire. His training included his work as a pianist and organist in church. In my interviews and subsequent conversations with him, he stressed the profound influence 1960s free-format radio stations in Memphis had on him. In addition to programming a variety of rhythm and blues, doo-wop, blues, and Motown-produced music, those stations played rock and roll that drew largely upon African American musical practices. Williams studied music at Memphis State University, dividing his time between jazz performance, classical performance, and music education. Upon graduation in the early 1970s, he took a teaching position at the Berklee College of Music. He left there toward the end of the decade to join Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the version of the group that included an eighteen-year-old Wynton Marsalis. Williams left Blakey’s group in the early 1980s and, over the next several years, established himself as a reputable composer, side-man, and producer of recordings for other jazz musicians. Through his production company, Finas Sound Productions, he hosted concerts in the mid- and late 1990s that paid tribute to (then) living jazz legends like Milt Jackson and John Lewis. From the late 1990s until his death in 2004, he was director of the jazz studies program at William Paterson University.

      Pianist Bruce Barth was born in Pasadena, California, in the late 1950s. His family moved to New York state when he was seven. Like that of Williams, his early musical training included classical piano lessons, which he continued through the end of high school. He also spent time playing guitar and learning rock and jazz songs by ear in his preteen and teen years. His serious engagement with jazz started with a Mose Allison record, Back Country Suite, that he received as a gift when he was fourteen.²⁸ Through Allison’s music, and later through engagement with the work of pianists like Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, and Red Garland, Barth learned to play jazz.²⁹ He earned a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in music from the New England Conservatory. Since the late 1980s, he has performed with Stanley Turrentine, Terence Blanchard, and Danilo Pérez among others; made recordings under his own name; and produced recordings for other jazz musicians, particularly singers.

      Saxophonist Steve Wilson was born in Hampton, Virginia, in the early 1960s. His father sang in a group that traveled and performed spirituals in the area around Hampton and exposed his son to a wider world of African American music. The younger Wilson developed an interest in jazz through listening to his father’s copy of Ahmad Jamal’s But Not for Me: Live at the Pershing and through seeing saxophonists Eddie Harris and Rahsaan Roland Kirk at the Hampton Jazz Festival in the early 1970s. He took lessons on the alto saxophone and the oboe through high school and developed as a performer through playing in his school’s concert band, in funk and rhythm and blues bands in Hampton, and in the horn section of singer Stephanie Mills’s band. He attended Virginia Commonwealth University, where he studied with Doug Richards, who introduced him to the music of Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and Fletcher Henderson. After graduating in the mid-1980s and moving to New York City, he played with the collective Out of the Blue and, in addition to leading his own ensembles, has been in demand as a saxophonist since then, performing with Lionel Hampton, Buster Williams, Chick Corea, Claudia Acuña, Bruce Barth, Maria Schneider, Mulgrew Miller, and Leon Parker.

      Parker, who is a drummer, was born in White Plains, New York, in the mid-1960s. His parents had a record collection that not only spanned jazz history—from Lionel Hampton and Count Basie to Art Blakey, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane—but also included important Latin jazz recordings by artists such as Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaria. His musical training was less formal than Williams’s or Barth’s but no less extensive. He involved himself in the musical life of Westchester in the 1970s, playing in his high school’s jazz ensemble as well as in gospel groups and blues and rock bands. During this time he started performing in jazz clubs in Westchester and turned down a scholarship to Fordham University to start playing full-time in New York City. He began studying classical percussion around that time. In the late 1980s he became associated with some of the young musicians who were part of the New School for Social Research’s jazz program and started to develop his reputation on the jazz scene. Since then, he has recorded and performed with Kenny Barron, Jesse Davis, David Sánchez, Jacky Terrasson, Bruce Barth, and Steve Wilson. He has also released four CDs under his own name and collaborated with choreographers on various “body percussion” works.

      Lastly, guitarist Peter Bernstein was born in New York City in the late 1960s. Because of the demands of his father’s work as a journalist, his family moved frequently—to Chicago shortly after he was born, back to New York for a few years, then to Israel for four years before finally returning to New York. Public interest in Scott Joplin’s work in the early 1970s—inspired by the film The Sting—inspired a six-year-old Bernstein to learn to play piano. While his family was in Israel, he started exploring his parents’ record collection, which included recordings by Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor as well as the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band and Charles Mingus. Bernstein started taking guitar lessons there, mostly learning to play Bob Dylan tunes and songs like “Proud Mary.”³⁰ His world changed, however, when he heard Jimi Hendrix and began to explore the blues-based conceptions of guitarists such as B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert King, and Eric Clapton. Hearing them eventually led him to Pat Metheny, George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, and Grant Green and cemented his interest in jazz. He attended Rutgers University, where he studied with Ted Dunbar and Kevin Eubanks. Like Leon Parker, he became associated with the jazz program at the New School in the late 1980s and started performing publicly in the city. Since

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