Richard Jernigan -> RE: Flamenco in music conservatories? (Aug. 9 2016 19:53:27)
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For a little context, in my youth jazz was not only not taught in university or conservatory, jazz musicians were generally against it being taught there. The origins of jazz, like that of flamenco, were among the poor and dispossessed. The musicians were not necessarily illiterate. Louis Armstrong, one of the all-time great innovators of jazz, was taught his instrument at the school for orphans he attended. He was an outstanding student both as a player and in musical academics. But my friend Frank Adams, who retired as Toscanini's lead percussionist, told a story of the time when he played in Paul "Pops" Whiteman's "jazz" band in the 1920s. Whiteman was an educated white musician who hired conservatory trained musicians to play written arrangements, but he also hired a few real jazz players for solo work. One of the soloists was the trumpeter "Wingy" Manone. "Wingy" because he was missing his left hand. At the first rehearsal Whiteman started off the band on the written intro. Manone played something else. Whiteman stopped the band and said, "Mr. Manone, please play the part as written. Your solo comes later." Whiteman started up the piece again, and again Wingy improvised. After a couple more attempts, Whiteman stopped the band and said, "Mr. Manone, do you read music?" Manone replied, "Sure Pops, just whistle it to me and see if I don't read it." In the 1950s progressive jazz was certainly a strongly intellectual discipline. The Bop generation listened to Stravinsky, Milhaud and the other leading 20th century classical composers. They parsed the harmony and applied it to a densely intellectual music, partly intended to be hard for non-jazz musicians to penetrate. Miles Davis notoriously dropped out of Juilliard, the most prestigious conservatory in the USA, where I think he was on scholarship, in order to join the downtown jazz scene. He fairly quickly became one of the leading innovators. Jazz wasn't anti-intellectual. It was deeply intellectual, but it was anti-establishment. These days jazz is part of the curriculum of just about any respectable music school. I just got the brochure for the season of the Butler School of Music here at the University of Texas. I was surprised to see that there were both Mariachi and Conjunto ensembles on the schedule. I think I'll go hear them. I love the music, and I´m curious to see what effect academia has had on it. But there's no flamenco, despite a large, world class classical guitar studio, and the great popularity of flamenco shows by Paco, Tomatito, Niño de Pura and Vicente Amigo. When Grisha and Jerome Mouffe gave a master class at the University, Adam Holzman, the head of the guitar studio, asked Grisha to teach the students rasgueado. Holzman himself paid very careful attention. RNJ
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