Tag: jazz in academia

Jazz in Education

Russian Jazz Book 1926

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, Semion Ginzburg’s collection Jazz Band and the Modern Music, published in the Soviet Union in 1926, was the first book ever published on jazz.

During its first 60 years, jazz was eschewed by American academic institutions, but jazz studies and research vis-à-vis mentorship and independent scholarship are nearly as old as the genre itself. A survey was conducted on one jazz-research message board recently regarding books on jazz history. It was determined that the first book about jazz, Jazz Band and the Modern Music, was published in Leningrad, Russia by the Academia press in 1926. It was a collection of essays written by Louis Gruenberg, Percy Aldridge Grainger, Cesar Searchinger, Darius Milhaud, and the book’s editor Semion Ginzburg. According to the board’s researcher, it was published at the same time that Benny Payton’s Jazz Kings (which included clarinetist/soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet) arrived in Russia for the first tour of that country by an American jazz band. Three years later, the first book to deal with the music’s history, Jazz – Future Sounds – Future Rhythms, by E. C. Hansen, was published in Copenhagen, Denmark. The researcher’s conclusion:

From this overview, no pre-1926 book on “jazz” came out, which incidentally gives Ginzburg’s Leningrad item a surprising cutting-edge position. From 1925 is the monographic number of Musikblätter des Angruchs—those who have seen it may confirm it’s a special issue entirely devoted to jazz, with articles from various dates, mostly in translation, which is what I take from its content list. Also, this seems to be Ginzburg’s main source. Nothing from earlier dates. In the USA, I guess only how-to-play-jazz stuff can be older, but I may be proven wrong.

Two years after the publication of Ginzburg’s book, the first academic jazz program was founded at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany under the direction of the Hungarian-born composer Mátyás György Seiber (also spelled “Seyber”). The Third Reich shut down the program in 1933 and Seiber relocated to London where he composed jazz and pop music as G. S., or George Mathis (or Matthis). (He wrote “serious” music and taught under his real name.) The program lay dormant until trombonist Albert Manglesdorf resuscitated it in 1976. In America, pianist/composer Percy Aldrich Grainger, as part of his “General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music” lecture series given during his tenure at New York University, brought Duke Ellington and his orchestra to that institution on October 25, 1932, but it wasn’t until 1941 that the New School of Social Research offered actual courses in jazz history. And while Lawrence Berk had founded the Schillinger House of Music in Boston in 1945 (which would become the Berklee School of Music nine years later), the first jazz-related degree given by a university was “Dance Band” at the University of North Texas in 1947. More academic institutions followed suit, and by the 1950s there were a little more than 30 institutions of higher education offering jazz courses; but, by 1972, only 15 offered degree-earning jazz programs with the number increasing nearly fivefold within a decade.

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Now jazz education programs are nearly ubiquitous in the United States and becoming widespread in the global academic community. It has become an accepted field of study for those pursuing academic credentials and careers, with more and more schools offering jazz-related courses to undergraduate and graduate students. While Rutgers University has been possibly over-represented in this column (due in large part to my earning my master’s degree there), it is just one of many accredited academic institutions offering degrees in jazz. Big Ivy League schools and community colleges are teaching it and there are some schools that only teach jazz and jazz-related musical genres while excluding European art music studies altogether. But why did it take so long for the art form widely considered uniquely American to be taught in American schools? It might have to do with the degree by which academic research is divorced from independent scholarship and mainstream pedagogy.

This separation of educational mind and body was clearly responsible for the mythology of American history presented to generations of elementary school students. It began with Christopher Columbus discovering a continent inhabited by primitive and savage people who didn’t know how to domesticate livestock, worshipped strange gods, couldn’t read, and naively existed in disparate tribes or clans that battled each other out of xenophobic paranoia. It took years for its timeline to include that Leif Erickson might have arrived before Columbus, the existence and demise of the Aztec and Incan civilizations, and that some indigenous populations were decimated by diseases like chicken pox and the measles that the Europeans brought with them, but were themselves immune to. The colonization of the United States and the particulars of its cessation from England were introduced as the students neared their teens and slavery and the Civil War were usually addressed as they entered high school.
This plodding schedule and sugar-coated content was still in use during a time that a civil rights crisis rocked the nation to the point of enacting sweeping legislation. (Actually, rioting over race-related issues had been going on since before Reconstruction and are apparently on-going.) It was at this time that students in higher education began to protest for curricula that went beyond the Eurocentrically-leaning model and was inclusive of America’s subaltern experience and culture. This included African American studies and, therefore, jazz.

Sadly, many American people are slow on the uptake. There are many who refuse to accept the idea that people with more melanin in their skin are capable of doing the same things as those with less melanin. Fortunately, Barak Obama has set a new precedent to the contrary, but from the time that slavery was abolished in 1865 to 1968, when the Equal Housing Act was enacted, discrimination by skin color in America was acceptable by the government and in society. It was common to hear the “N-word” among the student body of the all-white pre-busing legislation schools I attended. The term is still used today, as an expression of brotherhood among non-whites as well as a derogatory adjective. This is just one sign of how racism is still popular in America and explains why American people of color, especially black Americans, find it difficult to be included in the American academic community. But this state of affairs, the marginalization of non-white Americans in academic liberal arts programs (like jazz studies) created a cultural disconnection within it. Jazz studies is still taught mostly by male white professors, mainly because white males have most of the teaching jobs. But this is a paradigm that is being humbly questioned from within its ranks. This can be attributed to the establishment of culturally diverse curricula that necessitated the inclusion of non-white professors to teach them.

When I decided to drop out of high school in 1972 and get a job playing music, I was fortunate to work for saxophonist John Handy, who was teaching at San Francisco State College. He was generous enough to tutor his young sidemen, who weren’t enrolled at “State” (myself, drummer Brent Rampone, and guitarist Mike Hoffman) about jazz in the less formal setting of his living room. The lessons were usually in a question-and-answer format, although he sometimes took a tune, like “Donna Lee,” as a starting point of a brief lecture. He mainly spoke of jazz history and its own political intrigue. Where the “Rahsaan” of Rahsaan Roland Kirk came from or Miles Davis’s interesting career and his relationships with the bebop masters (Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker). Sometimes he spoke about instrument technique: Charlie Mingus’s “nerve roll” (a rapid fire right-hand pizzicato performed with one finger) or playing notes above the standard range of the saxophone and trumpet.
There are three ways of learning any subject: (1) mentorship, (2) independent scholarship, and (3) the academic setting. For the reasons of racial disparity described above, jazz was primarily learned throughout the 20th century by independent scholarship, coupled with mentorship; the latter being largely part-and-parcel of on-the-job training. But basic musicianship was usually learned in public schools, where musical instruments could be made available to the interested student. This paradigm put the student (the mentee) in contact with a non-peer reviewed source of information that was primarily disseminated as oral tradition. It should be emphasized that this is no do-it-yourself approach to learning. Non-academy based jazz education is highly social and less isolating than its academic counterpart. Students in common locale compare their experiences and arrive at a consensus that acts as a larger body of knowledge, eventually influencing the entire genre. One such network is an alliance of jazz artists who study the methods and music of pianist Lennie Tristano. While some poke fun at this group, their dedication to carrying the torch for the arguably under-recognized genius is important in that they use a methodology that includes aural transmission instead of printed music to assemble a tightly knit personal and collective rubric and vernacular focused on the chord progressions taken from a few popular American tunes and the blues. Memorizing recorded solos is a vital part of the jazz tradition; but, ever since jazz became a part of America’s musical landscape (1916 or thereabouts), most of its practitioners read music. This is a fact that flies in the face of one of the commonly held myths about jazz: that most of its players can’t read music. As previously mentioned, most jazz musicians studied music while attending public school and knew how to read and write music. Transcription is part of the traditional jazz methodology that is easily included in the academic method. But the problem of the research to classroom “decapitation” still persists.

When I studied jazz history, I was mentored by one of the most important figures in jazz studies, Dr. Lewis Porter. Besides teaching, he is also a pianist and composer who has written a concerto for saxophonist Dave Liebman. As an author, he has written two biographies, Lester Young (and its companion, A Lester Young Reader) and John Coltrane: His Life and Music, that are essential material for studying these two iconic musicians. He created the Jazz History and Research master’s degree program at Rutgers and has been seminal in the careers of many jazz scholars and authors. However, research can make what was once accepted as fact obsolete. One of the lasting myths about jazz is that it is a kind of hybridization of African and European musical elements. While many of jazz’s original and greatest artists have been African American, to describe the music as simply consisting of African and European practices is overly simplistic. For example, Native Americans, Indians, are a part of the American saga, even if they have been omitted from the narrative of American history. Being from Indianapolis, Indiana and having worked closely with the Native American saxophonist-composer Jim Pepper, I was special note of the following excerpt on page 86 from Dr. Porter’s book Jazz: A Century of Change—Readings and New Essays:

England’s plan had been to send small numbers of its people to America (itself named after a Portuguese explorer, Amerigo Vespucci) to oversee the farming of its land with the actual work to be done by slaves. The English immigrants who ran the plantations at first thought of America as a remote, godforsaken place that nobody would really choose as a permanent residence. Of course, many English did eventually settle here permanently, and the growing African slave population was to become a major moral issue (not to mention the fate of the native peoples already living here, but that’s a whole other story).

I italicized but that’s a whole other story to emphasize that the fate of the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere are not a “whole other story” when it comes to jazz. Dr. Ron Welburn of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has been assembling a catalog of jazz musicians of mixed Native American ancestry. I believe the loping Charleston rhythm, the clave of Latin music, and the partido alto of Brazilian music are examples of Native American influences. So are the use of maracas and flutes. The ring shout, which is considered by many academics to be the source of all African American music was also common practice among Native Americans, as was (and still is) the practice of improvised call and response. Dr. Porter writes further on (p. 198) in Jazz:

In jazz, ever-present problems of tribalism are incredibly complicated. Jazz is, after all, the creation of African descendants in America, drawing upon the African American culture that developed during contact with European peoples and, to some extent, Native Americans. Then, out of this tribal mix, from the very beginning of jazz European Americans got involved. (White Americans are barely aware of it, but Native American culture had a major impact on them as well, as evidenced, for example, in the many Native American names that dot our national map.) Some, like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) and Paul Whiteman, used self-serving publicity that credited themselves for it all, and naturally black artists resented their success.

This statement is the product of a Eurocentric academic era in need of scrutiny and adjustment. For one thing, the ODJB was a group of mostly Italian American musicians and in 1917, when they made their first recording (which was the first official recording of a jazz band), Italian Americans weren’t considered white. For another, Paul Whiteman didn’t credit himself for the existence of jazz—although he did accept the product brand, “King of Jazz”—and stating that “naturally black artists resented [his] success” is far too simplistic. Certainly some did. Others could have cared less. Some were enlightened enough to acknowledge the larger issue of racism in American society as the target of their resentment. Some, like bandleader Fletcher Henderson, embraced Whiteman’s success and wrote arrangements for him, something mentioned only in reference to clarinetist Benny Goodman. Furthermore, “tribalism” is suggested as indicative of African and Native American culture. But the concept of “tribe” runs far into other cultures that sway heavy in academia and the jazz community. Porter continues:

Benny Goodman, a Jewish American, was not only respected among blacks but, with the support of his producer John Hammond, insisted on touring with such black colleagues as Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and later Charlie Christian. In his 1939 autobiography, The Kingdom of Swing (written with Irving Kolodin, published by Frederick Ungar, New York), Goodman devotes pages 156-157 and 161-162 to black arranger and composer Fletcher Henderson, crediting the success of the band to Henderson’s music.

The problem here is that subsequent scholarship has shown that it was actually the highbrow WASP John Hammond, a fervent socialist, integrationist, and possibly the black sheep of the Vanderbilt family, who convinced Goodman to play with a racially mixed combo (his big band was all white for a long time) and introduced him to Henderson. So, despite the great work of academics like Porter, there is some rewriting to do.

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Some are of the opinion that America is still, when all is said and done, an extension of European culture and industry, a last vestige of a pan-continental agenda of global dominance that gets much of its inspiration from Ancient Greece and, therefore, has trouble accepting anything non-European as culturally vital or even significant. Others believe that there is a part of American society that believes the United States should become the cultural wasteland that so many have jokingly called it for a long time. Whichever, or whatever combination of the two, it is, American academia is decidedly Eurocentric. Amiri Baraka, under the name LeRoi Jones, wisely identified in his landmark book, Blues People, the distinction between “illiterate” and “literate” cultures, one being able to roll with the times and change its point of view when necessary and the other having to defend whatever opinion it expresses until a new edition clears the errata sheet. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze described these phenomena as examples of reversible and irreversible time applied sociologically. He also thought that a sociological phenomenon like jazz is reliant on the reflexivity of the oppressed with their oppressors. But to suggest that anyone who is oppressed would be lost if no longer oppressed would be an example of delusion.
I think that Deleuze would be pleased to know that his theory can be called “Deleuzean” in English. Jazz was a music born out of the will to bring about real equality for a subaltern group, that group being non-white American musicians. It is important that jazz education revisit and revise what that meant then and what it means now that jazz is the official premier indigenous art form of America. Then we might have hope of contradicting Amiri Baraka’s concept of the “changing same.” In the meantime, the words of Bill Evans sum up jazz education very well:


This is the first of four parts, here are the links for Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.

Thinking in Jazz

I now offer my apologies for the title of this week’s post to Dr. Paul Berliner, author of a book of the same name (although he adds the subtitle “The Infinite Art of Improvisation”). I decided to use the title after receiving an invitation to participate in a survey about “Embodied Cognition; Distributed Cognition and Improvisation” that was forwarded to me by Dr. Lewis Porter, head of the Jazz History and Research master’s degree program at Rutgers University. The questionnaire gave me reason to re-examine some of the issues I’ve been discussing in recent posts about how jazz is perceived as an academic discipline vs. how certain core elements of jazz are embedded in rap music.

Berliner’s book, which earned the Alan Merriam Prize for Outstanding Book in Musicology from the Society of Ethnomusicology, is an academic inquiry into the who, what, why, where, when, and how of the culture of jazz in New York during the 1980s. Berliner interviewed more than 50 jazz musicians of all stripes and asked them to discuss how they learned to improvise. He approached the task in the same manner as when he did his field research for his Deems Taylor Award-winning The Soul of Mbira: music and traditions of the Shona pople of Zimbabwe, moving to New York City and interacting with his anthropological “informants.” Most of the established jazz musicians at the time had not learned jazz in an institutional education setting, so Berliner heard a lot about musicians getting together in community-based study groups, going to jam sessions, and being involved in mentorship with their more experienced elders. Of course, there were younger musicians on the scene who did study jazz in college, but they had generally been exposed to it before then; musicians who had never played jazz until they went to college were few.

My own college studies didn’t begin until 2001, almost thirty years after my career began, and it was during my graduate studies in 2006 that I first heard of Berliner’s book. Part of me was fascinated to read how the artists who were interviewed learned to play jazz pretty much the same way I did, by listening, practicing, performing, and listening to whatever feedback was given. I transcribed solos and tunes with a friend and, later, on my own, just like the people in the book did. I didn’t miss that much by not going to college, except for the fact that a college education then was more manageable in terms of costs. The book, however, was conducted as field research, as if Berliner was researching a primitive community in a place far away from America, and I began to notice that the idea of “place” in the jazz studies courses I attended had more nuance to it than just physical location. I began to think of place as having temporal and experiential components as well as geographical ones. Berliner’s research, no matter how valuable in terms of its musicological insights, treated the community of jazz musicians as existing outside of the academic world, although many, even if not most, of the musicians being interviewed went or taught (and still teach) in academic settings.

Things are different now and there are plenty of aspiring and accomplished jazz musicians attending colleges and universities. They study with professors and adjunct instructors who work from syllabi and within the guidelines proscribed by their institution’s vision statements. One thing that isn’t different, though, is that improvisation is still a mystery to many non-jazz trained musicians and intellectuals who want to quantify, and possibly codify, the elements and techniques that go into it. What leads me to this conclusion is the questionnaire I mentioned earlier, put together by Dr. Martin E. Rosenberg, an independent scholar and guitarist residing in Pittsburgh. His questionnaire asks some basic questions about the strategies a jazz musician might employ as they go about improvising: How does one practice it? How does one facilitate a more fluid perception-synthesis-performance state of being? What does one do when interacting with other improvising musicians during rehearsal? How does one describe their emotional responses to what they hear other improvisers play?

What strikes me about Rosenberg’s questionnaire (which I’ve paraphrased; there are actually 12 broadly worded questions arranged into four categories) is that there is very little inquiry about passive listening as an integral part of learning to play jazz. Maybe the subject is left out for a reason (i.e., to see if those responding to the questionnaire include it without being prompted), but this is an issue among many of the “old-school” jazz educators working in institutions of higher learning. Not infrequently, they have found themselves before a roomful of students who don’t listen to jazz very much, if at all. This seems to be considered an irrelevant issue among higher education administrators who insist that being obsessed with, or even interested in, playing music need not be a prerequisite for studying it. It seems that all of the jazz musicians I know have made a conscious decision, as well as a prolonged and concerted effort, to live a life dedicated to making music. Dr. Rosenberg is a dedicated jazz guitarist (as well as a self-employed information technology consultant/architect) who describes his work as “studying jazz improvisation as an ‘emergent’ phenomenon … an extension [of] earlier publications on the cultural work of the scientific concept of ‘emergence’ or ‘self-organization in the other arts and philosophy.” I’m now reading his articles “Dynamic and Thermodynamic Tropes of the Subject in Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari” and “Jazz and Emergence (Part One) From Calculus to Cage, and from Charlie Parker to Ornette Coleman: Complexity and the Aesthetics and Politics of Emergent Form in Jazz,” and find myself numbed. Not at anything Rosenberg has done—I plan to answer the questionnaire to the best of my ability—but rather with the language and attitude that comprises what I can only describe as institutional chauvinism towards the arts in general, music in particular, and jazz especially.

Rosenberg approaches his work through the lens of philosophy and accesses two 20th-century French philosophers who I had never heard of until I read his work: Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari. They wrote several books together that, as far as I can tell, explain the perception of self as a relentless string of comparisons of differences between oneself and others (e.g., I am me because I am not you). I’m sure that there is value to the approach, and I eagerly look forward to finishing the second of Rosenberg’s articles. Then I can find good translations of those French philosophers’ works and start reading them. I have been laboring under the assumption, one that I learned from my mentors and colleagues, that jazz improvisation is about tapping into a state of awareness where the self is connected to others—not different, but the same—and when that state is reached, the music happens. This is understood not as an illusory or metaphoric concept, but as a dynamic and essential element of music production. It is about a total involvement in making music that transcends awareness as an individuation of self. Possibly this concept is taken out of context by some who look at music as “apolitical.” Fortunately, though, Deleuze and Guattari understand this and use what I, at least for now, think is a horrible term, “minortarian” to describe how musicians perceive and present themselves among what is described as a “dominant culture.” Unfortunately, they seem to believe that these two factions are “complicit” with each other’s agenda, or at least the minortarian one is complicit with its dominant culture. The implication would be that without a dominant culture, the minortarian one ceases to exist.

Food for thought!

Clique Escape

We all know that American music is comprised of a multitude of genres, subgenres, cliques, factions and styles. The swath of American music is so wide that many of its most broad-minded proponents from one camp unabashedly and sincerely argue that some of the other widely listened to varieties of American music aren’t really music at all. This was the case for jazz in the first two decades of the 20th century, when many respected members of “proper” society considered the nascent genre as so much caterwauling of licentious verbiage over primitive drumbeats and rudimentary chord progressions. Now it is the official musical art of America, a “national treasure.” As we near the 100th anniversary of the first recording of “jass” music, we should pay at least some cursory attention to what jazz is.

Jazz is a music that emerged from the ghettos of New Orleans. While it may have originated and possibly have been simultaneously performed elsewhere, jazz was first identified as a music played by New Orleans musicians. The musicians who played it by the time it was first recorded were Americans: African American, Native American, Italian American, German American, Jewish American, and Mexican American. All were involved, but by far the best jazz players were Creole Americans from New Orleans. By the third decade of the 20th century jazz was firmly entrenched in almost every city in America. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Kansas City were centers where the music was being played. While jazz began as a highly competitive field of music, it also acted as a unifying force among African Americans and working-class youth and was associated with the Socialist Party of America during the 1930s and 40s, largely through the efforts of John Hammond. Since then jazz has been used to promote America’s military and capitalist ventures during both World Wars and the messages of the Civil Rights, Black Nationalist, Native American, and anti-war movements as well.

Since 1917, the recorded music industry has identified, promoted, and sold the work of select “stars” that have set standards for performance and overall style. Despite the competitive aspects of jazz, there has always been a jazz community which attempts to bridge socio-economic differences that are part of America’s culture. It can be argued that jazz is little more than that; an attempt to bridge socio-economic divisions. Probably the most obvious example of this is the jam session; loosely organized events where jazz musicians listen to and play with each other. Musical development is explained and explored, new artists are presented to established artists by sponsoring mentors, and discussions (sometimes rather heated ones) about the state of the art abound. For young musicians, the jam session is traditionally where lasting relationships and career directions are first made.

The way jazz was originally taught was through mentoring and independent group study. There were no institutions that taught jazz as a curricular topic until the 1950s, although certain pedagogues, such as Lennie Tristano, would teach large enough numbers of private students to qualify as alumni of an informal “school.” Because improvisation is a salient feature of jazz, a wide range of highly personal approaches have always been at work. Even when imitating the “look-and-feel” of a popular record “star” (i.e. Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis), an artist can usually be identified by a well-versed listener. Since the 1950s a jazz academy has emerged. Its various institutions compete among each other for affluent or grant-savvy individuals to earn bachelors, masters, and even doctoral degrees in jazz performance, composition, theory, and history. Because of jazz’s legacy of connectedness to socio-economic trends, the fields of jazz studies can overlap into other fields (American studies, Afro-American studies, sociology, film studies, dance, ethnomusicology, etc.). Now the jazz academy competes with the jazz community as the arbiter of what and who will be identified as the best examples of what jazz, America’s original musical art form, is. In many ways, this appropriation of the jazz legacy by its academic proponents has had an unsettling effect among the larger jazz community. Many traditionally-schooled artists find themselves left out as more and more teaching jobs require academic credentials that weren’t needed 25 years ago. Some identify a new style of “academic” jazz they consider lacking in emotional content and feel the necessity to delve deeper into a personal expression that disregards much of the overall texture of the greater community, which is the sonic base for the academy.

Through it all, the recorded music industry is feeling a pinch. Artists identified with jazz have largely lost their pop star potential (even though bassist/vocalist Esperanza Spalding—amid some controversy—took the Grammy for best new artist of the year and artists like Sting and Harry Connick, Jr. began their careers playing jazz). When Maria Schneider took the Best Large Ensemble Album award in 2005, a potential death-knell for the industry was rung as the album, Concert in the Garden was only available for purchase on the internet and through the collective, ArtistShare, that she helped to spearhead. Now we see the “official” categories that the recorded music industry considers to be jazz whittled down to four (Best Improvised Jazz Solo, Best Jazz Vocal Album, Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album). That this year’s Best Jazz Vocal Album went to Terri Lyne Carrington , a drummer who included several vocalists on her album, The Mosaic Project, is a new point of concern for the jazz community as well. Many jazz artists feel like the only road to hoe is the one that leads to recording projects and venues that cater to more pop-oriented music and audiences that don’t know from jazz or music in general.

Many of the venues that are dedicated to presenting jazz have to charge admission fees that are out of the range of most jazz musicians’ budgets. This has led to a socio-economic rift in the jazz community that mirrors the one of American society in general and forces many artists to rethink their relationship with jazz. This isn’t particularly new to the jazz community (or the music world as a whole, for that matter); the history of jazz is rife with artists who prefer to not be called jazz musicians (Duke Ellington, Max Roach and Charles Mingus, for example), claiming that the label is too limiting. A current example of how this plays out is Nicholas Payton’s recent announcement that he no longer plays jazz, but instead Black American Music, while Wynton Marsalis has no problem with being associated with jazz. (Another facet of Marsalis’s relationship to jazz is denunciation of hip-hop music and culture.) While either or both of these excellent trumpeters may have forgotten the inclusivity of jazz’s historical legacy, it is clear that competition is still a driving force among many of jazz’s greatest artists.

(To be continued.)