Playing Changes by Nate Chinen

Author:Nate Chinen
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

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When Clausen and Mulherkar both enrolled at Juilliard in 2010, its Jazz Studies department wasn’t yet a decade old. It had been designed as an elite preprofessional program, with a student body of just eighteen musicians, and a hands-on faculty of notable jazz musicians, such as the pianist Frank Kimbrough. By contrast, Miles Davis went to Juilliard in the 1940s—partly as a concession to his parents and partly to be close to the action in New York at the time. He later characterized the classical program at Juilliard as valuable in certain technical and compositional respects, but otherwise stifling: “The shit they was talking about was too white for me.”7

The school wasn’t really all that different when Marsalis dropped out of Juilliard in the late seventies, though he was more receptive to the premise of European classical instruction. Marsalis later became the director of Jazz Studies at Juilliard—in the summer of 2014, just after Clausen and Mulherkar graduated with their bachelor’s degrees.

During the first major boom in conservatory jazz programs, in the 1970s and ’80s, a common complaint among older musicians was that the schools merely turned out imitators: eager young players with basic proficiency and some solid book learning but nothing resembling an original voice. The implicit (or, at times, explicit) comparison was to a more heroic jazz generation that willed itself into being, learning the music as an indomitably creative folk art. (To wit, the indelible first line of Clark Terry’s autobiography: “I made my first trumpet with scraps from a junkyard.”)8

There was some truth in this critique, which had a lot to do with methods of instruction. It also reflected the ways in which a school can be an echo chamber, the sort of place where a consensus is unwittingly formed. At one point in the seventies, it was common to hear skeptics complaining about “Coltrane clones,” in the same way that the fifties produced a proliferation of wannabe Charlie Parkers. By the eighties, the frame of reference had largely shifted—to Michael Brecker, the ingenious, astonishingly proficient tenor and soprano saxophonist who sheathed Coltrane’s style in a layer of Teflon. Sticking with the tenor saxophone as a case study, you could have ducked into almost any jazz school in the nineties and heard an emulation of either Chris Potter, who embodies the next step after Brecker, or Mark Turner, whose innovation set different parameters: a sleeker line, a lighter sound, a more labyrinthine path, a more introspective tone.

Turner’s influence in the academy turned out to be nearly overwhelming, as some students of his style have observed—none more insightfully than the saxophonist Kevin Sun, in an article titled “Every Single Tree in the Forest: Mark Turner as Seen by His Peers, Part One.” Sun includes several amusing vignettes, including one from Boston circa the fall of 1998, involving a young man who bought an album from the Tower Records at the corner of Newbury Street and Massachusetts Avenue.

The next day, the same young man,

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