Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Jazz Stigma. With notable exceptions like the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory, the nation's great music schools are way behind the general universities. Only in the last year, for example, have conservatories like Eastman and Manhattan begun to offer jazz during regular semesters. Juilliard and Curtis still do not. Until very recently, a student could be evicted from conservatory practice rooms just for playing jazz. And that is as nothing compared to the astonishing neglect accorded jazz in black colleges. Major black schools like Fisk, Tuskegee and Wilberforce still do not condone it. Perhaps...
College campuses have led the way. In 1965, only 25 colleges gave accredited courses directly or indirectly related to jazz. By next September, some 500 will offer jazz as part of bona fide curriculums; the University of Utah has just instituted a Ph.D. in jazz composition. As recently as 1967, only one U.S. college-North Texas State-offered a major in jazz. This year ten colleges are awarding jazz degrees. Other schools offer swinging seminars by guest "professors" like Cannonball Adderley, Clark Terry and Billy Taylor who discuss such vital matters as the trumpet lip trill and, almost as important...
Staying in Tune. The fact that jazz is being marked and measured by the schools will lend it a certain stability that it never had before. The big danger, of course, is that, like so many other folkloric subjects in academia, jazz could wind up fully preserved but essentially dead on the page...
Indeed, there are some who worry whether jazz can (or should) be taught at all. "If you have to ask what jazz is," Louis Armstrong once observed, "you ain't got it." His view is both right on and slightly wrongheaded. Schooling alone can no more produce a creative jazz player than a novelist, poet or even an All-America fullback. Yet the nurturing of naturally gifted kids is a proud and longstanding challenge to the American academic scene. Any young jazz player can certainly stand some formal polishing of his delayed triplets, skimmed notes, quarter-tone vibratos...
When North Texas State became the first U.S. college or university to offer a jazz degree back in 1947, most of the faculty protested on the grounds that jazz had no place in an academic program. Worse, it would automatically bring marijuana to the campus. Today, the school has no more pot than many others. But it does have eight romping jazz bands and 200 of the finest young jazz players in the country. Times have changed, even if North Texas State still has to award an anachronistically entitled degree in "Dance Band" because of a certain residual hostility...