A Protracted Beginning

Ken Prouty, an assistant professor of Musicology and Jazz Studies at Michigan State University and author of Knowing Jazz: Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) has written at length about the early history of jazz education in the US. In his writings, he has pointed to the period from the advent of U.S. jazz and into the 1940s, as one where written records regarding formal jazz training was negligible.

Prouty accentuates that "Even into the 1960s, as jazz was becoming more accepted in society at large, many in the academy would employ this same kind of rhetoric in justifying the exclusion of jazz from the curriculum. As [music educator] Harry Allen Feldman writes... 'who can deny the close relationship between jazz and delinquency... how can one justify the serious discussion on the college level, of a subject which...makes an art out of vulgarity?'" Feldman, like others in the larger music world at that time, was a classical elitist with a somewhat hysterical view of jazz.

More than most academic disciplines, the concept of being self-taught was seen as beneficial and/or essential among the jazz musician population, while being either scorned or ignored in the academic world. Whatever the case, for most jazz musicians, economic, geographic or other accessibility issues, made an academic path a less likely option in the first decades of jazz in the U.S. Near the end of the 1940s jazz curriculums had been instituted in what was later to become the University of North Texas and Boston's Schillinger House, later renamed as Berklee. These were exceptions and it wasn't until the 1960s and 1970s, that the U.S. saw sizable development in college and university jazz programs.

There were, of course, alternatives to a purely jazz-oriented education. In the early days of modern jazz, school band programs, correspondence courses and technical high schools filled a void in jazz education. In 1911