Hi there I'm thinking about doing a masters program here in Sweden but I'm doubtful about the theme of the thesis?. I don't know what to do really. Most of the people compose and records, others offer a recital for their exam. I find that quite boring...maybe a bass method och a musical analysis of a great bassist? Please give me ideas!
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Double Bass Masters in jazz performance - pros and cons
- Thread starter Chris Fitzgerald
- Start date
Ask yourself what inspires you to play jazz on the double bass. The main topic should be something that really interests you and that you feel passionate about, if it doesn't you'll get bored pretty quickly and it will turn into a nightmare! IMHO you should perform a recital, if I had a choice I would play a recital, record it and you will get a nice demo out of it.
This link was posted in the humor forum, but I think it is pertinent to this discussion.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=33754&pg=1
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=33754&pg=1
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- Nov 13, 2009
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Hilarious read - and spot on! ANYONE, even slightly considering any career in jazz, must read this!!!
----------------
Excerpt:
Jazz Educators
Jazz music, like philosophy, ancient literature, and other insular fields with limited real-world application, has created its own cozy home in the educational system. In secondary schools, it gives young musicians a relatively harmless introduction to a music they'll later discard as outdated and irrelevant. But at the college level, jazz majors are irretrievably immersed in the music's history, theory andabove allperformance. Once the real world shatters their performing aspirations, many flee right back to the university or conservatory where, safely ensconced in a tenured position, they perpetuate the vicious cycle.
Tenured university teaching posts are probably the most coveted positions in the jazz field (other than the exclusive province of the Chosen Ones). Ironically, the personality traits that make for success in the academic world have nothing in common with jazz artistry. Jazz professorships require advanced degrees, and those who pursue them are by nature practical, career-minded andwith their orientation to future security rather than present artistic expressionfar from spontaneous.
Perhaps that's why the university professors have pioneered their own form of jazz. As they'll explain to their Jazz History classes, jazz music has evolved since its inception to reflect the lives and times of its practitioners. From bebop through free jazz, the music has been the artists' vehicle for reacting to their social, political and cultural environment. No surprise then, that jazz enables these same professors to express their own unique academic milieu: their music is the sound of personal ambition and scholarly thought. Performance and composition alike are theory-driven, and the ability to navigate complex written chord changes is paramount. Rather than relying on their ears, faculty performers are glued to their scores, negotiating obtuse chords by calculating scale choices with mathematical efficiency. Unfortunately, the music's intellectual underpinnings render it inaccessible to all but fellow professors and advanced students. Undereducated audiences are left behind, even those who recognize that appreciation of such intricate music is a mark of personal sophistication.
Although jazz professors rarely overlap in style with the Chosen Ones, most still aspire to join their ranks. Toward that end, they book Chosen Ones for concerts, often finding ways to share the stage with them, sometimes composing a special tune for the occasion (and typically naming the tune after the Chosen One, thereby marking their relationship for eternity). They wine and dine them, take joint photos, and if possible book them on the side for personal recording projects. Interestingly, although Chosen Ones are the subject of great envy among jazz professors, many aging Chosen Ones who neglected to plan for retirement eventually seek and easily land University posts. There they are allowed to bypass normal hiring procedures in exchange for lending their credibility and doing virtually nothing.
Like other tenured faculty, jazz professors are required to publish, and as the number of jazz PhDs increases, so does the obscurity of their topics. Jazz Educators' conferences are full of presentations scheduled early in the morning and sparsely attendedon subjects ranging from "The Scalar Implications of Minor Seventh Flat Nine Chords in Mid-period Bill Evans Voicings" to "A Study of Coltrane's Reed and Mouthpiece Choices in Relationship to His Late Career Dental Work" to "Post-Chromatic Stress Disorder in the Neo Lydian Landscape."
If you, Reader, were to try to look like a jazz artist, you would wind up looking like the jazz professor, who tries far harder to look like a jazz artist than an actual jazz artist does. Goatees, berets, tinted glasses, African scull caps, ponytails, and earrings are standard fare. By contrast the committed jazz artist, especially the Epiphyte, doesn't much care what he looks like and doesn't have the money to try anyway.
Identifying Signs:
Jazz Educators are better dressed, better fed, and better mannered than most of their peers.
Survival Techniques:
They have no survival techniques, as their fate is fully in the hands of another. The university professor is fully bilingual, equally at home with the pinched, grammatically correct language of the academic, and the jargon-laced, "street" banter of the jazz artist. By necessity, he has multiple personalities to complement his linguistics: entering a music department meeting, he can readily swap out his loose jazz cool for the requisite constipated classical clench.
-----
While this discussion of "Jazz Educators" focuses on university professors, jazz is also taught in the secondary schools and through private instruction. These lower-level teachers have one commonality with university faculty: They'd really rather be gigging. Beyond that, though, they have their own unique profiles:
Secondary school teachers: Although these teachers rank beneath university teachers in the jazz pecking order and in societal standing, theirs is the more noble calling. While university professors are largely responsible for the flooding of the market with aspiring professionalshighly trained and largely generic secondary school teachers are more interested in building the future jazz audience. Their focus is on instilling an understanding of and appreciation for jazz among their students; unfortunately, this appreciation quickly fades with the students' maturity.
Private instructors: Whether teaching in the back rooms of music stores or out of their own homes, these are individuals who tried and failed to make it as Gig Whores. Although most other musicians consider private instruction the final stop before suicide, society is kinder to these unfortunates, allowing them to hide their indignity behind "the importance of arts education," "passing knowledge from generation to generation," and "keeping youth off the streets."
I think pursuing any kind of musical career is an exercise in risk management. My brother studied archeology at a top university, got a PhD, got published, supervised digs, but never got a professorship. There is simply way too much competition for every qualified person to get a decent job in archeology or music--even teaching.
All musicians need a fallback. I think it is worth the extra time and effort to do a double major with something that will pay. Or at least develop a paying skill. In fact, a lot of major conservatories are partnering with other universities to offer double major programs. I think the New England Conservatory partners with Harvard. If you bag that double major, you are in pretty good shape.
All musicians need a fallback. I think it is worth the extra time and effort to do a double major with something that will pay. Or at least develop a paying skill. In fact, a lot of major conservatories are partnering with other universities to offer double major programs. I think the New England Conservatory partners with Harvard. If you bag that double major, you are in pretty good shape.
It's Tufts, actually. And the job market is pretty lousy these days no matter what degree one holds or profession one chooses....
I have a steady Tuesday night gig in Northampton MA going on 4 years now. That and a few casual gigs keep me going.
I am in the UMass Amherst Masters of Jazz Arr. & Comp. right now with the same question every one has. Where can I get a teaching gig?
I am 62 and played with a lot a great NY player and did a 5 year stint with Houston Person and Etta Jones in the late 1990s. A real job in jazz.
I think today's young players going thru a university or music school will have good preparation to become a jazz player but there is nothing like living the life of a jazz player to be an authentic jazz player and to be authentically qualified to teach jazz. I don't know that this matters much to future university/conservatory employers as it seems the administrators are much more interested in covering their asses with "accredited" (read diploma-ed) teachers and professors than those who can really dig down below the surface and get to the essence of the music. Not to say there aren't some but on whole. . .
Jazz at the university is fundamentally a poor fit unless your school is in THE major jazz markets - New York City, and possibly Boston. In schools outside of NYC there are very limited performance options with great players. In NY you can be sitting in at Smalls, Cleopatra's Needle and others with great players.
The music did not grow up in a school setting. It grew up in bars and whorehouses and lofts and basements and small apartments. It is an oral tradition and an apprenticeship system. It continues that way for genuine development. Unless you travel and learn and watch from your bosses what works and what doesn't you probably won't accumulate the experience to pass on the elements that develop depth in a player.
Case in point: I played a concert with some Phd's in jazz. We were playing Monk's Epistrophy and the horn player said he didn't know how to approach the changes. So much for a PhD.
The super talented players will probably find their own way, with or without a university.
That said, jazz is a very mature art form. IMHO Jaco was the last significant innovator and most of what he brought to the show wound up the Fusion department. It made rock stars out of bass guitarists.
Long ago I came to the realization that most of us are entertainers in "the style" of jazz. When we perform the audience goes away having experienced a jazz bassist, pianist, sax player, drummer etc. Whether we knock down any walls or pioneer a new direction in jazz is really unlikely.
That article, while dark is sadly close to the truth. There is a little bit of some of that in all of us.
So if you are looking for a job as a university teacher down the line jump through the academic hoops, write your research papers and look academic and try to become a good jazz player in spite of it.
Good luck with the bass. It is what I live for.
I am in the UMass Amherst Masters of Jazz Arr. & Comp. right now with the same question every one has. Where can I get a teaching gig?
I am 62 and played with a lot a great NY player and did a 5 year stint with Houston Person and Etta Jones in the late 1990s. A real job in jazz.
I think today's young players going thru a university or music school will have good preparation to become a jazz player but there is nothing like living the life of a jazz player to be an authentic jazz player and to be authentically qualified to teach jazz. I don't know that this matters much to future university/conservatory employers as it seems the administrators are much more interested in covering their asses with "accredited" (read diploma-ed) teachers and professors than those who can really dig down below the surface and get to the essence of the music. Not to say there aren't some but on whole. . .
Jazz at the university is fundamentally a poor fit unless your school is in THE major jazz markets - New York City, and possibly Boston. In schools outside of NYC there are very limited performance options with great players. In NY you can be sitting in at Smalls, Cleopatra's Needle and others with great players.
The music did not grow up in a school setting. It grew up in bars and whorehouses and lofts and basements and small apartments. It is an oral tradition and an apprenticeship system. It continues that way for genuine development. Unless you travel and learn and watch from your bosses what works and what doesn't you probably won't accumulate the experience to pass on the elements that develop depth in a player.
Case in point: I played a concert with some Phd's in jazz. We were playing Monk's Epistrophy and the horn player said he didn't know how to approach the changes. So much for a PhD.
The super talented players will probably find their own way, with or without a university.
That said, jazz is a very mature art form. IMHO Jaco was the last significant innovator and most of what he brought to the show wound up the Fusion department. It made rock stars out of bass guitarists.
Long ago I came to the realization that most of us are entertainers in "the style" of jazz. When we perform the audience goes away having experienced a jazz bassist, pianist, sax player, drummer etc. Whether we knock down any walls or pioneer a new direction in jazz is really unlikely.
That article, while dark is sadly close to the truth. There is a little bit of some of that in all of us.
So if you are looking for a job as a university teacher down the line jump through the academic hoops, write your research papers and look academic and try to become a good jazz player in spite of it.
Good luck with the bass. It is what I live for.
+1 for George.
As Michael Longo has put it in one of his DVD that I found very instructive on different levels:
"What is the natural environment that produces jazz musicians?
- the bandstand."
I really like to think that there is something going on while becoming a (jazz) musician that is to be processed in the unconsciousness. I do not want to overmystify things, but I think it is this what has been meant here on TB in all these threads saying "get a teacher".
It is more like "find somebody you like and find out how he's doing what you like". I always found it very helpful to understand, to get behind, to feel it in the body, to connect and then trying to reproduce the very same thing.
Mr. Longo talks about his relations with Dizzy Gillespie, who's pianist he was and explains how learning took place. And it were always concrete musical situations, on stage, or rehearsing, that had to be solved by by making steps ahead e.g. learning.
I sometimes find the academic system that installed itself in the 1970s(?) with the promise to teach jazz, produces mostly teachers to reproduce itself.
It also has a tendency to overcomplicate things, as a defense for its own existence. A lot of real musicians are denying the need for all these mountains of abstract theory.
The jazz education system has a similarity to what in economics they call a snowball system; and those have a tendency to crash sooner or later.
ups, that was longer than I meant it to be.
As Michael Longo has put it in one of his DVD that I found very instructive on different levels:
"What is the natural environment that produces jazz musicians?
- the bandstand."
I really like to think that there is something going on while becoming a (jazz) musician that is to be processed in the unconsciousness. I do not want to overmystify things, but I think it is this what has been meant here on TB in all these threads saying "get a teacher".
It is more like "find somebody you like and find out how he's doing what you like". I always found it very helpful to understand, to get behind, to feel it in the body, to connect and then trying to reproduce the very same thing.
Mr. Longo talks about his relations with Dizzy Gillespie, who's pianist he was and explains how learning took place. And it were always concrete musical situations, on stage, or rehearsing, that had to be solved by by making steps ahead e.g. learning.
I sometimes find the academic system that installed itself in the 1970s(?) with the promise to teach jazz, produces mostly teachers to reproduce itself.
It also has a tendency to overcomplicate things, as a defense for its own existence. A lot of real musicians are denying the need for all these mountains of abstract theory.
The jazz education system has a similarity to what in economics they call a snowball system; and those have a tendency to crash sooner or later.
ups, that was longer than I meant it to be.
