That Jazz - Monkey Max Music and File Download

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Part II: Jazz Greats and Great Jazz: An Evolutionary Riff
� Mark Dresser
� The Jazz Passengers
� Junk Genius (a San Francisco band)
� Roscoe Mitchell
� Roy Nathanson
In recent years, the Knitting Factory opened a Los Angeles sister club and
expanded its program to include contemporary music, not just jazz.
Both the Knitting Factory and the AACM have fascinating Web sites that provide
a lot of information on the music as well as bios of many musicians.
Check out their sites online:
� AACM Web site: www.aacmchicago.org
� Knitting Factory Web site: www.knittingfactory.com
Academia finally embraces jazz
One of the signs that jazz was earning acceptance
as important American music came when
universities began to offer courses and degrees
in jazz history and performance.
� The University of North Texas became the
first American university to offer a degree
in jazz in 1947.
� Prompted by John Lewis, a faculty member
(with Max Roach, Kenny Dorham, Bill Evans,
and other jazz greats), Ornette Coleman and
Don Cherry enrolled at the Lenox School of
Jazz in Massachusetts in 1959.
� Also in 1959, big band legend Stan Kenton
began offering the first of his summer jazz
camps in Bloomington, Indiana.
� Indiana University (IU) popularized jazz
bands in the ’50s and ’60s and offered a
bachelor’s degree in jazz studies for the first
time in 1968. In 1979, IU added a master’s
degree program in jazz. As a result of new
awareness of black culture in the 1960s,
many other universities soon added a variety
of African-American studies including
jazz.
The National Association of Jazz Educators
(now known the International Association of
Jazz Educators) was founded in 1968 to promote
jazz as an important part of curriculum at all
levels of education and has grown to more than
8,000 members in 42 countries.
Today universities offer many types of jazz programs,
from history and theory, to performance,
and in all styles from ragtime to free jazz. Most
professional jazz players today have college
degrees in music, some of them from prestigious
schools like Juilliard and Berklee. College educations
would have been a radical notion during
jazz’s early years, when aspiring performers
earned their “degrees” on the road.