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The New York Times writes, “The flute is one of the more overlooked instruments in jazz, but it’s been making an impact on improvised music for more than 50 years. Let 10 experts take you on a guided tour.'“
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All it might take is a second and a half of hearing her sing to make your spine tingle or your heart drop. Opera singers, jazz vocalists, writers and Vaughan’s biographer share their favorites.
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Navigate the trumpeter’s snaky, endless grooves with picks from Flying Lotus, Cindy Blackman Santana and Terence Blanchard, among other musicians, writers and critics.
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The New York Times’ Giovanni Russonello reports that, when jazz and rock fused in the 1970s, he was at the forefront of the movement. But he never abandoned his love of the acoustic piano.
Chick Corea, an architect of the jazz-rock fusion boom of the 1970s who spent more than a half century as one of the foremost pianists in jazz, died on Tuesday at his home in Tampa, Fla. He was 79.
The cause was cancer, said Dan Muse, a spokesman for Mr. Corea’s family.
Mr. Corea’s best-known band was Return to Forever, a collective with a rotating membership that nudged the genre of fusion into greater contact with Brazilian, Spanish and other global influences. It also provided Mr. Corea with a palette on which to experiment with a growing arsenal of new technologies.
But throughout his career he never abandoned his first love, the acoustic piano, on which his punctilious touch and crisp sense of harmony made his playing immediately distinctive.
A number of his compositions, including “Spain,” “500 Miles High” and “Tones for Joan’s Bones,” have become jazz standards, marked by his dreamy but brightly illuminated harmonies and ear-grabbing melodies.
By the late 1960s, Mr. Corea, still in his 20s, had already established himself as a force to be reckoned with. He gigged and recorded with some of the leading names in straight-ahead and Latin jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Mongo Santamaria and Sarah Vaughan. His first two albums as a leader, “Tones for Joan’s Bones” (1966) and “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” (1968), earned rave reviews. Both are now thought of as classics.
But it was playing in Miles Davis’s ensembles that set Mr. Corea on the path that would most define his role in jazz. He played the electric piano on Davis’s “In a Silent Way” (1969) and “Bitches Brew” (1970), the albums that sounded the opening bell for the fusion era.
Soon after leaving Davis’s group, he helped found Return to Forever, and he spent much of the 1970s touring and recording with the band, which became one of the most popular instrumental ensembles of its era.
Reviewing a performance at the Blue Note in New York in 2006, the critic Nate Chinen, writing in The New York Times, recalled the innovative sound that Mr. Corea had honed with Return to Forever three decades before: “His Fender Rhodes piano chimed and chirruped over Latin American rhythms; female vocals commingled with the soothing flutter of a flute. Then the ensemble muscled up and morphed into a hyperactive fusion band, establishing pop-chart presence and a fan base to match. To the extent that there is a Return to Forever legacy, it encompasses both these dynamic extremes, each a facet of Mr. Corea’s personality.”
By the time of that Blue Note show, Mr. Corea’s career was entering a chapter of happy reminiscence, full of reunion concerts and retrospective projects. But he continued to build out from the groundwork he had laid.
In 2013, for instance, he released two albums introducing new bands: “The Vigil,” featuring an electrified quintet of younger musicians, and “Trilogy,” an acoustic-trio album on which he was joined by the bassist Christian McBride and the drummer Brian Blade.
He kept up a busy touring schedule well into his late 70s, and his performances at the Blue Note in particular often combined reunions with longtime associates and collaborations with younger accompanists, mixing nostalgia with a will to forge ahead. Those performances often found their way onto albums, including “The Musician” (2017), a three-disc collection drawn from his nearly two-month-long residency at the club in 2011, when he was celebrating his 70th birthday in the company of such fellow luminaries as the pianist Herbie Hancock, the bassist and Return to Forever co-founder Stanley Clarke and the vocalist Bobby McFerrin.
By the end of his career Mr. Corea had recorded close to 90 albums as a bandleader or co-leader and raked in 23 Grammys, more than almost any other musician. He also won three Latin Grammys.
In 2006 he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the highest honor available to an American jazz musician.
Though he had become symbolic of the fusion movement, Mr. Corea never put much stock in musical categories. “It’s the media that are so interested in categorizing music,” he told The Times in 1983, “the media and the businessmen, who, after all, have a vested interest in keeping marketing clear cut and separate. If critics would ask musicians their views about what is happening, you would find that there is always a fusion of sorts taking place. All this means is a continual development — a continual merging of different streams.”
Mr. Corea’s first marriage ended in divorce. He met Gayle Moran, who became his second wife, in the 1970s, when he was in Return to Forever and she was a singer and keyboardist with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, another top-flight fusion band.
She survives him, as do a son, Thaddeus Corea; a daughter, Liana Corea; and two grandchildren.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Corea converted to Scientology, and the religion’s teachings informed much of his music from then on, including his work with Return to Forever.
Armando Anthony Corea was born on June 12, 1941, in Chelsea, Mass., near Boston. His father, also named Armando Corea, was a trumpeter and bandleader in Boston, and his mother, Anna (Zaccone) Corea, was a homemaker. He began studying piano when he was 4.
He picked up his nickname from an aunt, who often pinched his big cheeks and called him “cheeky.” The name eventually morphed into the pithier “Chick.”
He moved to New York City to study at Columbia University and Juilliard, but that lasted only a few months. As Miles Davis had a generation before, when he arrived at Juilliard from East St. Louis, Ill., Mr. Corea quickly found himself lured out of the classroom and into the clubs. Some of his earliest gigs came in the bands of the famed Latin jazz percussionists Mongo Santamaría and Willie Bobo, as well as with the swing-era vocalist and bandleader Cab Calloway.
In 1968 he assumed the piano chair in Davis’s influential quintet, replacing Mr. Hancock. The band quickly went into the studio to record the final tracks that would round out “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” Davis’s first album to feature an electric piano. It signaled the trumpeter’s growing embrace of rock and funk music, a move encouraged by his second wife, the vocalist Betty Davis. (One of the two tracks featuring Mr. Corea is a tribute to her, the 16 ½-minute “Mademoiselle Mabry.”)
The group gradually expanded in size as Davis wandered deeper into the murky, wriggling sound world of his early fusion albums. He brought a version of the “Bitches Brew” band to the Isle of Wight festival in 1970, the largest gig of his career, before an audience of 600,000.
Soon after playing that concert, Mr. Corea and the bassist Dave Holland left Davis’s ensemble and joined with the drummer Barry Altschul and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton to found Circle, a short-lived but influential group that embraced an avant-garde approach.
Mr. Corea founded Return to Forever in 1971 with Mr. Clarke, the saxophonist and flutist Joe Farrell, the percussionist Airto Moreira and the vocalist Flora Purim. The following year, the band released its Brazilian-tinged debut album, titled simply “Return to Forever,” on the ECM label.
Also in 1972, Mr. Corea teamed up for the first time with the vibraphonist Gary Burton to record another album for the same label, “Crystal Silence.” The two became longtime friends and collaborators. Taken together, the two ECM albums represented something close to the full breadth of Mr. Corea’s identity as a musician — ranging from the serene and meditative to the zesty and driving.
“We made that record in three hours; every song but one was a first take,” Mr. Burton said in an interview, recalling the “Crystal Silence” sessions. They would go on to record seven duet albums, and they continued performing together until Mr. Burton’s recent retirement.
“I kept thinking, ‘Surely it’s going to run out of steam here at some point,’” Mr. Burton said. “And it never did. Even at the end, we would still come offstage excited and thrilled by what we were doing.”
Return to Forever changed personnel frequently, but its most enduring lineup featured Mr. Corea, Mr. Clarke, the guitarist Al Di Meola and the drummer Lenny White. That quartet iteration released a string of popular albums — “Where Have I Known You Before” (1974), “No Mystery” (1975) and “Romantic Warrior” (1976) — that leaned into a blazing, hard-rock-influenced style, and each reached the Top 40 on the Billboard albums chart.
Mr. Corea released a number of other influential fusion albums on his own, including “My Spanish Heart” (1976) and a string of recordings with his Elektric Band and his Akoustic Band. Later in his career he also delved deeply into the Western classical tradition, recording works by canonical composers like Mozart and Chopin, and composing an entire concerto for classical orchestra.
“His versatility is second to none when it comes to the jazz world,” Mr. Burton said. “He played in so many styles and settings and collaborations.”
In 1997, delivering a commencement address at Berklee College of Music, Mr. Corea told the members of the graduating class to insist on blazing their own path. “It’s all right to be yourself,” he said. “In fact, the more yourself you are, the more money you make.”
The New York Times’ Giovanni Russonello writes, “An album of previously unheard recordings from the “Time Out” sessions in 1959 reveals the making of a masterpiece.”
Listening to the alternate takes and behind-the-scenes recordings of any classic album will unravel some of its timelessness. But there’s something especially startling about hearing what went into the making of “Time Out,” the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s masterpiece, and maybe the ultimate example of a live art form being carved down and mapped out into an impeccably finished product.
Chances are this record lives somewhere in your memory, whether you can name it or not. “Take Five,” the single that sent the LP to No. 2 on the Billboard chart in the early 1960s, is among the most iconic records in jazz.
But from the sound of “Time Outtakes” — a collection of previously unheard recordings from the “Time Out” studio sessions, released last week in commemoration of Brubeck’s 100th birthday on the family’s new label — making the album was a sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating process, with the quartet feeling its way into a set of music that had not yet come to feel patented and perfected.
“Time Out” would be the achievement that effectively quieted Brubeck’s critics. They had called the pianist’s music uptight, unswinging and mannered (it often was), and some listeners rightly bridled at the injustice of how swiftly he — a white musician whose path ran through the conservatory and the college touring circuit, not the jazz clubs of New York — had vaulted over other bandleaders and into a Columbia recording contract. Brubeck often told the story of how ashamed he had felt when, in 1954, he became the only jazz musician other than Louis Armstrong to appear on the cover of Time magazine. He was on tour at the time with Duke Ellington, who was clearly deserving of such an honor himself, and it was Ellington who first showed Brubeck the Time cover when it came out.
As he built out his niche in jazz, Brubeck found purpose in a kind of globalism. Fascinated throughout his life by rhythmic complexity, his ears were piqued during a State Department good will tour in 1958, when he heard odd-numbered folkloric rhythms in various parts of Asia. He committed himself to integrating them into his compositions, while also making sure to nest hummable melodies inside each tune. On “Time Out,” he and the quartet manage to do all this while maintaining an effortless feeling that could easily be adopted by the listener; this was all the more impressive given that Brubeck was not always a graceful, mellifluous pianist.
The last track of “Time Outtakes” collects studio banter from throughout the recording session, and we hear Brubeck getting a little frustrated as he strives to capture a perfect take of the autumnal ballad “Strange Meadowlark.” It’s striking and disarming to hear him throwing around snippets of that song’s impeccable chord structure, sussing things out, playing one section here and a snatch of another there, while bantering with the producer Teo Macero.
Elsewhere in that track, we hear Macero encouraging the quartet to loosen up, reminding them to think of the session as nothing but a rehearsal. “You’re goddamn right it is,” one band member jokes, playful but sharp. “And I’m not getting paid for it!”
“Time Out” was recorded over three days spread across the summer of 1959. The eight tracks on “Time Outtakes” were all recorded on the first day, June 25, as the band was just breaking in the tunes. The album includes five alternate versions of pieces that made it onto “Time Out” and two tracks that did not (the show tune “I’m in a Dancing Mood” and the ad hoc “Watusi Jam”).
Paul Desmond had written “Take Five” partly as a gesture to the quartet’s drummer, Joe Morello, who wanted to show off his newfound confidence playing in 5/4 time. Listening to “Time Out,” with Morello’s broad rolling beat propelling the band and his concise, dramatic solo serving as the track’s centerpiece, he is in the driver’s seat.
But on June 25, the band tried nearly two-dozen times to get the song right, and still couldn’t. It was scrapped until a session the following week, when Morello apparently nailed it in just two takes. The “Time Outtakes” version is from June, and Morello’s part is far less developed; he taps out a sparse but somewhat obtrusive pattern on the ride cymbal, trying to perch on the end of beat one and the start of beat four. By July, he would figure out how do far more while sounding more efficient.
Still, there is an unfolding quality on the “Outtakes” version, a sense of reaching for what’s ahead, that doesn’t pertain to the final recording, maybe because it doesn’t have to. Morello’s solo on the early “Take Five” unfolds in a growing series of drum rolls, flicks of the wrist that slyly alternate their frequency and then seem to pull Morello’s arms across the whole kit. It is a far more cinematic and open display than what we get on the iconic “Time Out,” though not as built for posterity.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
“Time Outtakes”
(Brubeck Editions)
New York Times’ writers Ben Sisario and Giovanni Russonello report that, “The entire concert industry is struggling as the Covid-19 shutdown continues. But a genre rooted in live performance and in-the-moment dynamics is in particular peril.”
Ken Sturm, one of the owners of the Iridium, said there’s a “50-50 chance” that the club, long a home for Les Paul, will not reopen.Credit...September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times
When Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah led his septet at the Blue Note in mid-March, the headlines about coronavirus were growing more urgent by the day. But Mr. Adjuah, a New Orleans-born trumpeter with a cutting-edge style, had no idea that those performances would be his last shows — or the Blue Note’s — for the foreseeable future.
“You know, wash your damn hands,” he told the crowd, as can be heard on “Axiom,” a new live album culled from that weeklong residency. “But we’re not running.”
The concert world as a whole is in crisis, but perhaps no genre is as vulnerable as jazz, which depends on a fragile ecosystem of performance venues. In pre-pandemic New York, the genre’s creative and commercial center, young players still converged to hone their craft and veterans held court in prestigious rooms like the Village Vanguard and the Blue Note. It’s an economic and creative network that has sustained the genre for decades.
But after suffering nearly six months of lost business, New York jazz venues have begun sounding the alarm that without significant government relief, they might not last much longer. Even with support, some proprietors said, the virus may have rendered their business model extinct.
One such room is the Iridium, a subterranean 170-seater near Times Square that was the longtime home of the guitar legend Les Paul. “There’s a better than 50-50 chance that the Iridium doesn’t reopen,” said Ken Sturm, one of its owners. “Small clubs like us are not going to exist anymore,” he added.
Ken Sturm, one of the owners of the Iridium, said there’s a “50-50 chance” that the club, long a home for Les Paul, will not reopen.Credit...September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times
Most clubs have begun hosting livestreamed performances without in-person audiences, providing some opportunity for musicians to return to work. But without the ability to practice their art in a tightly packed room — breathing the same musty air as their audiences and feeling their response in real time — musicians say they have lost access to the jazz world’s most fertile terrain.
“It’s always been my laboratory,” the renowned saxophonist Charles Lloyd said in an interview. “We need these venues, and it breaks my heart.”
Mr. Lloyd, 82, played with giants like Chico Hamilton and Cannonball Adderley while living in New York in the early 1960s, on his way to becoming a million-selling crossover star in his own right. “You can bounce stuff off the audience,” he said. “That experience is invaluable. You can’t put a number or anything like that on it.”
In interviews, jazz musicians young and old expressed worry for the health of the genre, and their own careers, if the venue network in New York winds up decimated.
Donny McCaslin, a saxophonist and bandleader, came to the city 30 years ago and worked the club trenches for years, learning on his feet and making a living gig by gig. That dexterity was part of what led him to be hired for “Blackstar,” the final album by David Bowie, who saw Mr. McCaslin perform at the tiny 55 Bar in the West Village one night in 2014.
The saxophonist Donny McCaslin said losing the city’s network of clubs, a proving ground for young musicians, would be “devastating.”Credit...September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times
“Part of the beauty of the local music scene here was that you would be stepping into these different environments night after night, and having to negotiate the different music,” Mr. McCaslin, 54, said in an interview. Early in his career, he said, a typical week might mean a big band show at one club followed by blues at another.
For younger musicians, Mr. McCaslin added, losing that system would be “devastating — it’s a breakdown of one of the most vital parts of how they develop.”
Jazz clubs are among the more than 2,000 constituents of the newly formed National Independent Venue Association, which has been lobbying Congress to be included in its next coronavirus relief bill. Progress has been slow, as the venues jockey for Washington’s attention alongside restaurants, movie theaters and the thousands of other businesses that have suffered.
Among the organization’s members is the Village Vanguard, which opened in 1935 and draws tourists from around the world to its narrow, wedged basement on Seventh Avenue South. Its vast legacy includes landmark live albums by John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Sonny Rollins. But that may not be enough to weather a year or more without business, said its owner, Deborah Gordon.
“History gives you a nice mantle,” Ms. Gordon said. “But history doesn’t protect you.”
Deborah Gordon, the owner of the Village Vanguard, said, “We wouldn’t be doing streaming if we didn’t have any hope.” Credit...Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times
The venue association gained an important ally last month in Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, who agreed to be a co-sponsor of the Save Our Stages Act, a $10 billion bill that would authorize grants to independent venues, promoters and other parties in the live music business. At a news conference outside Baby’s All Right, a rock and dance club in Brooklyn, Mr. Schumer said that allocating relief for venues “shouldn’t be that hard.”
In the meantime, jazz’s nationwide network has already begun to crumble. In Washington, a number of clubs have closed since the start of the pandemic, including Twins Jazz, which had been the last full-on jazz club on the city’s historic U Street corridor.
Venues operating under a nonprofit model have found alternative means of support during the pandemic, and in some ways they have had more room to be creative. “There are a lot of grants available to nonprofits for Covid that were not available to for-profit venues,” said Rio Sakairi, the artistic director of the Jazz Gallery, a nonprofit in the Flatiron district.
Rio Sakairi, the artistic director of the Jazz Gallery, outside her home in New Jersey.Credit...September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times
Livestreaming, which became ubiquitous in pop soon after the pandemic hit, has been gradually embraced in jazz — with nonprofits taking the lead. Shortly after lockdown began, the Jazz Gallery began using Zoom for what it called Happy Hour Hangs and Lockdown Sessions, where audiences could talk to musicians and listen to recordings from the safety of their own homes.
Smalls, known for its late-night jam sessions, and recently incorporated as a nonprofit, was the first New York jazz club to livestream from its stage amid quarantine. That was on June 1, and soon numerous other clubs — among them the Vanguard, Birdland and the Jazz Gallery — followed suit; the Blue Note will join the bandwagon this month.
At best, venue proprietors said, the streams may pay for themselves and give some work to musicians eager to play — but they are less a long-term plan than a gesture of perseverance.
“We wouldn’t be doing streaming if we didn’t have any hope,” Ms. Gordon said of the Vanguard.
The jazz scene “is on life support,” said the vibraphonist Joel Ross.Credit...September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times
For musicians, the evaporation of live performance has been both a financial hazard and a creative frustration. Melissa Aldana, a 31-year-old saxophonist, said in an interview that in July she left her rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper East Side — “the nicest place ever, the greatest deal” — for Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn, to be closer to friends and fellow musicians during quarantine. Now she hosts socially distanced jam sessions at her home once a week, and plays with a group in Prospect Park.
“What I’m missing is just, like, having the experience to play with musicians and connect,” Ms. Aldana said. Before she moved to Brooklyn, in the dark days of spring, Ms. Aldana leaned heavily on the Jazz Gallery’s Happy Hours: “That really kept me going a couple months, just having that human contact when I wasn’t able to see anybody.”
Looking ahead, the vibraphonist Joel Ross expressed a mix of anxiety and hope for the future. Mr. Ross, 25, established himself in the New York jazz world over the last few years through constant gigging. Like most, he saw his busy performance calendar dry up once the pandemic hit, and he began collecting unemployment. The larger jazz scene, he said, “is on life support.”
But Mr. Ross also noted the optimism that has come with livestreams, outdoor performances and other adaptations that have kept musicians busy. Some events, he said, have paid as much or more than a regular gig.
“People are always going to want to see the music,” Mr. Ross said. “Whether the venues survive themselves, the music is going to press on.”
Melissa Aldana, right, playing with friends in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.Credit...September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times
The New York Times’ Giovanni Russonello writes, “Over the past 50 years, the music has become entrenched in academic institutions. As a result, it’s often inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it: young Black Americans.”
If the Black Lives Matter movement has an anthem, it’s probably Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright.” Five years after its release, it’s still chanted en masse by demonstrators and blasted from car stereos at protests, fluttering in the air like a liberation flag.
Like many revolutionary anthems past, this one is the work of young jazz-trained musicians. Terrace Martin’s shivering alto saxophone and Thundercat’s gauzy vocals are as powerful as the track’s spitfire refrain: “Can you hear me, can you feel me?/We gon’ be all right.”
Mr. Martin, Thundercat and the famed saxophonist Kamasi Washington came up together in Los Angeles’s Leimert Park scene, where Black music, poetry, theater and dance have blended for decades. Romantically, it’s the kind of place you’d imagine as the backbone of the jazz world, like Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy of the 1980s or Dizzy Gillespie’s Harlem in the ’40s. But today, local scenes like this one are barely surviving. It’s the Ivory Tower, not the city, that has become the tradition’s main thoroughfare.
The music known as jazz grew up in New Orleans, in the decades after Emancipation, as Black and Creole people founded social clubs with their own marching bands. As it evolved, jazz remained a resistance music precisely because it was the sound of Black Americans building something together, in the face of repression. But at the end of the 1960s, just as calls for Black Power were motivating musicians to create their own publishing houses, venues and record labels, a new force emerged: Schools and universities across the country began welcoming jazz as America’s so-called “classical music,” canonizing its older styles and effectively freezing it in place.
This year, the pandemic and the protest movement against racial injustice have created a moment of enormous potential. Conversations about radical change and new beginnings have crept into seemingly every aspect of American life. But as jazz musicians reckon with the events of 2020, they have found themselves torn between the music’s roots in Black organizing and its present-day life in the academy.
The very institutional acceptance that many musicians sought in the mid-to-late-20th century has hitched jazz to a broken and still-segregated education system. Partly as a result, the music has become inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it: young Black Americans, poorer people and others at the societal margins.
Of the more than 500 students who graduate from American universities with jazz degrees each year, less than 10 percent are Black, according to Department of Education statistics compiled by DataUSA. In 2017, the last year with data available, precisely 1 percent of jazz-degree grads were Black women.
“The education is the anchor,” the saxophonist J.D. Allen, 47, said in a recent interview. “We should be questioning our education system. Is it working? Is there a pipeline into the university for indigenous Black Americans to play their music, and learn their music? I don’t think that exists.”
Over the past five or 10 years, a number of musicians have helped pull jazz back into the cultural conversation, usually with message-driven music. It’s no coincidence that, like Mr. Lamar’s colleagues in Leimert Park, virtually all of them come from strong city scenes and learned much of what they know outside of school.
That’s noticeable in the calypso futurism of the London saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, and in the surrealist suites of the Chicago-based flutist Nicole Mitchell and her Black Earth Ensemble. The markings of outsiderism are all over Georgia Anne Muldrow’s new album with her Jyoti project, “Mama You Can Bet,” full of dusty, sample-based jazz collages, recorded alone in her Los Angeles studio.
Raised by musicians in Leimert Park, Ms. Muldrow remembers feeling immediately affronted when she enrolled in the New School’s jazz program. “I was like, ‘What are you trying to teach people?’ I was the worst student of all time,” Ms. Muldrow said in an interview, laughing as she remembered that she hadn’t lasted a full year. “At the center of the teaching would always be the idea that jazz is not about race. And it absolutely is. It was absolutely about where people weren’t allowed to go, which made them travel in their music.”
Inspired in part by the Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) theater artists who this summer published a 29-page list of demands for their industry, and by the female and nonbinary musicians who formed the We Have Voice collective, Mr. Allen and a number of other musicians recently began holding Zoom meetings. The group, which includes artists on three continents, has titled itself the We Insist! Collective in a reference to the rebel music of Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln and Oscar Brown Jr.; late last month it released a manifesto and charter listing 10 demands for the schools and other institutions that compose jazz’s mainstream economy.
Educational institutions must commit to revamping their curriculums around an anti-racist understanding, the collective wrote. A Black Public Arts Fund must be created to help increase the representation of African-American students in jazz programs. And educational institutions should work in partnership with “grass-roots local community organizations,” recognizing where the music has historically grown.
“The story of jazz is that of the pursuit of Black liberation, and that liberation can only happen through the dismantling of racism and patriarchy,” the manifesto reads.
Black musicians have built institutions since before the word “jazz” was even used. In 1910, James Reese Europe organized the Clef Club, effectively a union and booking agency for Black musicians in New York with its own large ensemble. But as white audiences fell in love with the music too, white entrepreneurs stepped in to handle the record labels, the publishing companies and the best-paying clubs.
The civil rights movement progressed and white liberal audiences recognized jazz musicians to be some of the country’s great artistic leaders, but they rarely treated those musicians as the scholars and thought-leaders that they were. White journalists, historians and broadcasters reserved that job for themselves.
At the midway point of the 1960s, after releasing his masterpiece, “A Love Supreme,” John Coltrane started a large ensemble with deeply spiritual intentions; he was abdicating the throne as jazz’s mainstream hero, and moving beyond many critics’ comprehension. That same year, a collective of musicians in Chicago formed the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, supporting each other in creating new music and educating young people on the South Side. Months earlier, in a series of concerts known as the October Revolution in Jazz, musicians in New York had seized the gears of concert presentation, breaking with the clubs.
“I think the music is rising, in my estimation. It’s rising into something else. And so we’ll have to find this kind of place to be played in,” Coltrane said at the time, calling for musicians to lead the way through “self-help.”
Somehow, it was in this moment that jazz programs began to spring up in academia, declaring the music’s history basically complete and assembling rigid curriculums based on bebop theory.
When the saxophonist and former Coltrane collaborator Archie Shepp was offered a job at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1969, he hoped to teach the music as he was playing it: in conversation with African diasporic culture, in collaboration with theater artists and dancers, in spaces designed around the ethics of the music itself.
“I quickly learned that that was not too feasible, and mine was a point of view that was not welcomed,” Mr. Shepp, 83, said in an interview. He proposed setting up a program in African-American music within the music department, but was shut down; he landed in African-American studies instead. “The idea of Black music input or some nonwhite element being integrated into the academic experience was immediately rejected,” he said.
Mr. Shepp was one of the various cutting-edge musicians who were invited to teach at the university level around this time, but never fully embraced by music departments. “They were not willing to tolerate an Archie Shepp or a Max Roach, a Sun Ra or a Cecil Taylor,” the historian Robin D.G. Kelley said in an interview. “They kicked them out and said, let’s open the doors to ‘professionals’” — primarily white instructors who weren’t top-tier public performers.
Combined with the resegregation of public education and the defunding of arts programs in many cities, the effects of academicization have been profound, and ironic. Jazz got a crucial nudge into the academy from Wynton Marsalis and his fellow young neo-traditionalists, who were guarding against what they saw as the corruptions of fusion and free jazz. But even the music made by the ace students in academic programs nowadays rarely upholds the qualities Mr. Marsalis meant to protect: the swing rhythm at the music’s core; a clear commitment to the blues; focus on lyricism.
When the esteemed drummer Billy Hart, now 79, took his first university teaching job in the 1990s, he got the sense that the academy was finally ready to hire real practitioners. “It became some kind of fad,” he said dryly in an interview. “They decided that the students would be better suited if they had somebody that had experience.”
Naledi Masilo, a jazz undergrad at the New England Conservatory and the president of its Black Student Union, said that with the events of this summer, she and other Black students felt called to speak up.
“Until the recent uprising and Black consciousness on all of these school campuses, there weren’t many conversations had on campus on a deep level about what role Blackness plays in this music,” Ms. Masilo said. “It was especially shocking to me in this jazz program, where there’s only three Black students and three Black faculty. There was a disconnect — how are you teaching this music without giving any real influence to the people and the culture?” (After publication, the chair of the school’s Jazz Studies department said there are currently five students and six faculty members who identify as Black.)
The students made three immediate demands, calling for action within the month. A group of N.E.C. alumni followed with a forceful letter of its own, co-signing the students’ ultimatums and adding more — including that the jazz department be renamed the department of Black American music.
Jason Moran, the MacArthur-winning pianist and multidisciplinary artist, is a professor at N.E.C., where he advises the Black Student Union. He tells his students to bear in mind that they should always be in tension with the institutions they seek to change. “An underground movement has to be underground,” he said in an interview.
In his own classroom, he rejects the notion of having a written curriculum. “What I talk about in my classes between my students and I, the kinds of conversations we have to break down about repertoire — who wrote what and why — is not on a syllabus,” he said. “You would never detect it if you searched it, because I don’t teach that way.”
Some schools are starting to approach the integration of humanities, history and artistic instruction that Mr. Shepp and others had in mind 50 years ago. One is Harvard University’s Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry doctoral program, recently founded by the pianist Vijay Iyer and driven by a mostly female faculty from a variety of global traditions. Another is the Berklee Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice, founded by the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, who conceived of the program with activists including Angela Davis.
Ms. Mitchell, the Chicago-based flutist, took over the jazz studies program at the University of Pittsburgh last year, stepping in after the death of its prior director, Geri Allen. Founded by the saxophonist Nathan Davis in 1970 as a concession to Black student activists, Pitt’s jazz program was attractive to Ms. Mitchell because of its focus on scholarship and musicology, as well as learning the notes.
Upon arriving, she proposed that the jazz program partner with the school’s Center for African-American Poetry to open a small venue in the community engagement center that Pitt was building in a historically Black neighborhood. The administration immediately said yes.
“This will be place for local musicians to perform, for students to connect with local musicians,” Ms. Mitchell said.
“The music is about community,” she added. “So if a student graduates and doesn’t have any connection to community, that’s a real rip-off for that student in terms of what they’re supposed to be gaining. And it’s also a rip-off for the future of the music.”
