Berklee College, Boston: a jazz education mecca

Let's be honest and lay it out on the table by acknowledging that jazz education has become a sizable and self-supporting niche industry unto itself. You allude to this in your piece by speaking of graduates whom go on to teach in the schools from which they've just graduated.

Until there is some kind of large scale change in the funding of jazz performance, presentation, and/or recording on the scale of major symphony orchestras, opera companies, or museums, etc..... I frankly don't see any sizable shift on the horizon, at least in the US. There just simply aren't enough Monterey or San Francisco or Newport festivals, not enough Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestras....to sustain actual jazz performance careers in the large numbers you're discussing here.

HM: Sustaining jazz performance careers may not be the end result of jazz education. I think we may be creating a large cadre of jazz listeners, perhaps people who think in jazz-like ways, with jazz-influenced values. I also think all musicians today benefit from knowledge of jazz practices, whatever kind of music (commercial, country, symphonic) they play. It may also be, in our new economy, that people play for pleasure without much reference to professional opportunities. That means some (many? most?) of those students won't be pro musicians, but will learn (later? elsewhere?) to contribute to society and make their livings some other way, keeping jazz something special. Kind of like English majors back in my day, or liberal arts students in general.

I've often wondered whether it would've been helpful for someone to clue me in to the incredible imbalance of supply and demand in the jazz world when I was going into a mountain of debt to finance my jazz education at the New School--where I saw you speak in 1995. (I think I remember my roommate at the time telling me that the average starting salary of a Parsons design grad was over $50,000, and thinking that the average starting salary of a New School Jazz grad would be tips and a beer.)

However, I probably wouldn't have listened if they had, since I was young and invincible and little things (like the fact that there seem to be more people making jazz than listening to it) couldn't faze me.

HM: Thanks for your note, Ian. I don't mean to dissuade anyone from studying jazz; as you write the power of jazz to attract the young and invincible is stronger than financial considerations for them. Those of us involved in the music though ought to look at our society clearly, and consider how to work with the gap between what we're called to do and how we can live. This is what jazz musicians have done since the get-go. I think such reality-checks strengthen the musician and the music. Who said it was gonna be easy?