Berklee College, Boston: a jazz education mecca

Berklee is a lively place that has involved notable musicians as faculty and produced an impressive number of famed alumni. Being in the thick of it, though, you’re bound to wonder: What’s the point of this jazz education?

During my long day at Berklee last week I addressed smart students and faculty in five separate meetings on topics of reviewing, interviewing, biography, travel writing and “effective communication.” The attentions of those I faced as well as the palpable creative energies in the streets and classrooms of the burgeoning urban campus did happily encourage your humble culture vulture. And yet I also worry: What do these bright kids think they’ll do with their costly educations? Can the world employ several thousand grads every year whose skills focus on the instigation of sound? The greatest of jazz’s greats — Morton, Armstrong, Bechet, Dodds, Beiderbecke, Hines, Ellington, Basie, Hawkins, Young, Benny Carter, Holiday, Goodman, Parker, Gillespie, Monk and the rest — didn’t go to school but worked at jazz from an early age. Do programs like Berklee’s prolong adolescence, indulge self-absorbtion, or train youth to become productive citizens and professionals? 

I was visiting as a guest of the Liberal Arts department, hosted by Fred Bouchard, the school’s  principal teacher of writing and a published connoisseur of wine, food, birding and technology as well as music, so I enjoyed the royal treatment. But aside from the upbeat buzz and evident well-designed comfort of the many newly renovated practice rooms, what impressed me most was the sense of hands-on work being done everywhere — by musicians playing music, yes, but also by musicians turning their minds to literary matters: 

• One class, learning to review cds and post to blogs, confronted journalistic basics such as the necessity of writing briefly and descriptively, and learning to identify “throwaway” phrases — those asides that don’t convey info or forward the plot — followed by actually throwing them away.
• Another group, having read Keroauc’s On The Road, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie and Mark Twain’s essays on Bermuda, considered “voyages” that scramble narrative conventions by shuffling chronologies and heightening consciousness — with reference to Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, the film Memento, Henry James and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
• In the “Effective Communications” class taught by Rebecca Perricone questions involved how to ask questions (be an interviewer) and how to answer them (be interviewed). As Berklee has an Oral History project in expansive redevelopment, several teachers and administrators were interested in related fundamentals: how to pace sessions, how to direct discussions, how to probe, when to lay back, problems arising from interviewing several people simultaneously. 

I gave my spiels and expanded as requested — the very model of a cooperative interviewee.  Was I giving away professional secrets? No more than sharing what I’ve learned while practicing as a professional, which is what I believe teaching’s all about. 

True, I stumbled on my tricks of the trade without any such formal instruction, and there’s value in having arrived at certain ways of doing things by being forced to improvise in the heat of the moment. That’s traditionally been the jazz method. But these Berklee students aren’t to be criticized for trying to prepare themselves through professional training. There were no courses in arts journalism while I was at Syracuse University, so of course I learned on the job. Now there are degree programs but no jobs. . . 

 

From her bio: