Easy Diatonic Standards

[ragman1]

Sounds like boot camp.

[pamosmusic]

Sounds like boot camp.

He was an army guitarist with a masters from Indiana … soooo … yep.

[Christian Miller]

Re the scale stuff, I don’t think it’s teaching at all tbh. It’s assessment. Here’s what you need to learn, here’s the info. Now learn it and I’ll test you next Tuesday.

A good teacher will set realistic goals i suppose. I don’t mind ‘teaching’ like this - it’s clear, but it’s also kind of brainless.

Problem is, unless you have someone there to breathe down your neck you might never develop those skills. For me it was crashing and burning on the Barry harris scale outline exercises in class. I got it together because everyone else could do it.

Still has to come from the student.

The kind of teaching I think we’d all like to do is a bit more two way, creative and human. Something were the teacher and student are partners. A lot of teaching in my life is simply not that.

I wonder if there’s analogies with other art forms. In music you really have to work really hard just to get the basics together to get even a tune out of many instruments, let alone creative music. I compare that to how quickly a child learns to draw simple but appealing pictures.

[pamosmusic]

Bad teaching? I don’t think it’s teaching at all tbh. It’s assessment.

Which part are we talking about?

[Christian Miller]

Which part are we talking about?

I expanded a bit

EDIT actually I think I’m going to rephrase that.

[pamosmusic]

Oh for the record. I loved that guy. He was a really good teacher too. Also (obviously) extremely demanding.

Like I said, that kind of boot camp was what I needed at the time. Also other stuff … I did a lot of transcribing, but also he taught how to use a transcription. Etc. anyway … edited the other post to make that clear too.

[pamosmusic]

I’ve had lessons with people who want to work on how to hold the pick and I learned nothing about music. (This was a one-off lesson too, which was particularly weird.)

I’ve had lessons that want to talk about philosophy and stuff.

There’s a place for the really nitty gritty technical stuff, and for the artistic stuff. By themselves, neither is really particularly effective. Which is fine if a student knows that they need both. If they think they’re getting everything, it can get a little weird.

[Christian Miller]

In the past, I've studied with a few people who taught at jazz programs. This person wasn't one of the people I've studied with but he was friends with one. It was a while ago, but I think he studied with Mick Goodrick and William Leavitt in the 70's. What I remember is, his goal was bring the students to a level where they can play the changes using appropriate chord-scales over tunes. Get those chord tones down using the scales. After that, they were on their own. I remember also seeing on YouTube Gary Burton giving feedback to students after they performed. If he could hear the changes in a student's solo, he praised him/her. If he didn't clearly hear the changes, he told them to spend more time on their instruments to get those chords down. It wasn't about whether the students touched his soul with their killer lines. It was about whether they know how to get around their instruments. You get good at each chord, then work on connecting them. Then you make sure you have good enough chops to perform at decent tempos. Then you spend the rest of your life exploring if that's what you want. That's my take on this teaching philosophy. I like it.

Getting fluent with chord-scale mapping on your instrument is also essential to the Barry Harris approach. Of course he taught a different (perhaps a simpler) chord-scale mapping, and emphasized line building over tunes with these scales. But if you can't play the scales at tempo everywhere on your instrument, you are doomed from the beginning.

I remember one of the people who I was studying with complained to me about some students graduating without knowing tunes. So, I don't know how perfectionist they can be with all this stuff in education. There is a bit of garbage in, garbage out factor there.

An important date in the history of jazz IMO is 1970 -
the date Berklee became accredited as a College. It was a school up to that point.

So you need a syllabus and you need to prove you are delivering it. It’s reasonable. Accountability is important in education. Everyone - not least jazz college professors - celebrates the era of apprenticeship, but it strikes me that this approach could be open to massive abuses. Measuring outcomes and being accountable for them is a Good Thing imo opinion - or at least is better than the alternative.

Berklee is obviously famous for its institutional approach, streaming students etc. it’s not a super selective school as I understand it, unlike some other colleges, and therefore it’s institutional systems need to accommodate a wide ability spectrum.

Quantitive assessment is fairly objective and therefore useful as a robust indicator of success, in that it can be defended. Otoh the things a quantitative assessment focus on might be have nothing much to do with what makes a good musician; otoh the people against which a music program might need to be defended may know literally nothing about music (seriously)* - so these sorts of technocratic measurements are useful ammunition. Whatever else the head of a major jazz college may be, they are first and foremost an administrator and advocate who is answerable to various other authorities.

Set against these considerations the actual teaching of jazz is less defined. What i suspect to be the case is that people like Burton know all this better than anyone, and the tacit objective is to maintain the school as a space where experienced practitioners and a broad base of talented students can intermingle and learn outside of the formal curriculum.(everyone I’ve spoken to on the subject indicated this as the most important thing about jazz school.) In this case the various accreditation criteria and formal syllabus and so on are merely the necessary libations to the capricious gods.

Set against this, obviously Berklee (in exchange for large sums of money) might have a obligation to teach you its syllabus but it is not required and neither could it be required to equip you with the motivation, talent, habitus and social capital required to build a career. So maybe the ideal of accountability is, well, an ideal - perhaps the apprenticeship has merely put on a gown and a mortar board. But isn’t that true of all higher education?

However all this has had a real effect on the nature of contemporary jazz. This is reflected in its harmony - a lot of guys play them note scales - and also in its social conditions, where performance and education form a very tight relationship.

* I have a good friend who was in this position recently

[Christian Miller]

That said, learn your scales, you oiks

[pauln]

Some, come to the guitar from a pre-existing
music background (other instruments/voice);
others start with a guitar as their first musical
venture with no musical experience. So guitar
was thought by famous Miles Davis and Barry
Harris as a difficult instrument but maybe the
bright side is that this difficulty serves to level
the playing field, eclipsing advantage of those
with conceptual or technical pre-background?