The Common Room

Creative Music Education: Neoclassicism, Jazz Pedagogy, and the Afrological Alternative

Brandon Roberts

When studying history in today’s schools, it is common to inhabit a post-historical mindset. Many textbooks make this easy: by positioning oneself at the end of the timeline, looking back on what has happened, the reader often feels a sense of finality, not to mention alienation — ‘if history has already happened, what’s in it for me?’ Jazz history is no different: books like Ted Gioia’s How to Listen to Jazz construct grand narratives of jazz music’s ‘culmination’ in years past, before admitting that the music has since regressed into a neoclassical preservation of ‘the hits.’ Gioia then implies that we live in a post-neoclassicist jazz world, one where “you can hear the whole history of jazz hiding inside this music;”1 this is a common position in 21st-century scholarship, but one which only encourages post-historicism. 

Whether we imagine ourselves at the ‘cutting edge’ of jazz or not, and despite the post-historical positionality of Gioia (and critics like him), we remain firmly rooted in a neoclassicist jazz world, especially in jazz education. As David Ake and others have argued, jazz education has become one of the centers of jazz performance, and the continued dominance of neoclassical ideology has kept the movement very much alive in American jazz culture. With that in mind, I will argue that the state of jazz education today firmly upholds the neoclassical agenda, perpetuating a cycle of codification, separation, monetization, and control of the canon. This process has been effectively retrofitted for American schools, but it is ultimately reductive to the tradition it claims to support. I will gesture to pedagogical alternatives rooted in George Lewis’s Afrological framework — which are explored in greater detail in the full version of this essay — with the hope that jazz education can develop into what I term ‘creative music education.’ Such a model is more conducive with the spirit of the tradition, the act of musical creation, and the ultimate goal of music education. 

Neoclassicism: Then and Now

Neoclassicism swept through jazz education and performance in the 1980s and 90s, carried by men (and they were mostly men) who sought a more specific definition of jazz, its boundaries, its canonical figures, and its stylistic foundations. In “Constructing the Jazz Tradition,” Scott DeVeaux makes an important clarification regarding the neoclassical impulse: “What distinguishes the neoclassicist attitude is not so much its habit of retrospection, but rather its heavy-handed attempt to regulate the music of the present through an idealized representation of the past.”2 The trouble with  the neoclassicist attitude is not that it’s backward-facing (as he points out earlier in that paragraph, the avant garde also claims direct lineage with the jazz tradition). The issue is regulation, which can only be done through codification of the tradition, separation from popular music, monetization of the narrative, and subsequent control over the boundaries of what jazz is and who gets to play it. This four step process has, to various extents in the last three decades, been largely successful, especially considering the preeminence of Jazz at Lincoln Center and its highly visible leader, Wynton Marsalis. 

It would be lazy to simply place Marsalis at the helm of this ‘neoclassicist attitude’ which has come to wield so much power in the jazz world — as Nate Chinen points out in Playing Changes, far from being the progenitor, “he was neatly positioned to catch [the neoclassical] wave just as it was cresting.”3 We should not study Marsalis as an all-seeing, all-powerful mover-and-shaker of the jazz landscape, but as an exponent of a neoclassicist impulse that was designed to support his vision. He is undoubtedly virtuosic in both jazz and European classical repertoire, but, still, he is only an individual. Indulgence in ‘Great Man history’ — whether to praise or excoriate the man in question — masks the institutions and trends which have upheld his vision for the future (and history) of jazz. 

That noted, it would also be a disservice not to discuss Marsalis; as one of the most powerful (and best paid) men in jazz today, Marsalis’s voice in the American jazz conversation carries farther than most. Much of the rhetoric that survives from Marsalis’s peak (roughly bookended by the 1990s) has to do with the boundaries placed on jazz, both explicitly and implicitly, and the implications of those definitions on the music as a whole. As early as 1988, Marsalis published an article in the New York Times titled “What Jazz Is – and Isn’t,” a piece full of the seeds of Marsalis’s intellectual ambitions for jazz: worship of the heroic individual, special focus on Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and a chronology of ‘classic jazz’ that ends with Bebop, all ideas which would germinate in the coming years of his stardom. By 1994, it was very clear how Marsalis was shaping the jazz world around him — Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) had been under his leadership for three years, and in a piece on jazz clarinetist Don Byron, Stephen Sherrill observes that “as defined by Marsalis and [Stanley] Crouch, jazz is now primarily Ellington-style bop and swing.”4 What Sherrill may not have known then was that just 18 months later, JALC would launch their Essentially Ellington program for the 1995-96 school year, a high-school competition where bands compete to replicate Duke’s work through “original transcriptions of recordings by the Duke Ellington Orchestra, not simplified arrangements,”5 a brag that is certainly in keeping with an event built around competitive copying.6 

It would not be fair to say that Essentially Ellington is bad for jazz education, nor would it be fair to say that it only exists to further Marsalis’s agenda. In addition to not being provable, it erases the fact that JALC’s work in jazz education — primarily in the New York region, but also beyond — has been positive in bringing both money and attention to jazz in schools. However, the dangers of the program are inherent in that sentence: Marsalis and Lincoln Center can focus on certain groups to the exclusion of others. To again quote Sherrill; “with the patronage, publicity and canonizing tools at their disposal, Marsalis and Crouch have the power to define others right out of the genre.”7 Indeed, at a time when many students are getting their first rigorous jazz exposure, the notion that jazz is the replication of big band giants is harmful to emerging artists. Some of those students may never play jazz after high school, but many will, and those who do will bring that image of jazz into their classrooms, ensembles, and communities. 

This may seem like an outsized amount of influence for two men to wield, but remember, they are passengers on the ‘cresting wave’ of neoclassicism, not masters of it, and they are supported by what Chinen calls “a historicist agenda,” which “actualized in the 1970s, mobilized in the 1980s, and all but tyrannized the 1990s.”8 With three decades of momentum, the ideological edifice could be solidly constructed, and it was clear as early as 1979 that a new wave of jazz pedagogy and historicity was approaching. Music critic Gary Giddins wrote of the emerging ‘jazz repertory’ movement in a column for The Village Voice, which contains many observations on the closing years of the decade that now sound like prophecy: “Swing was rediscovered as an axiom, and so was the repertoire;” “eclecticism reigns as the past is raked for guidance and validation;” “new standards had to be in­voked, and the ‘70s might be described as a period of blind runs and free falls;”9 all comments which indicate that the time was ripe for the mobilization of a neoclassical revival. 

Part of that ripeness was due to what many have referred to as a ‘jazz crisis’ in the late 1960s and 70s. Giddins is less pessimistic than others,10 describing the 70s as a particularly intense decade within a greater jazz history paradigm:

The historical relationship of jazz and pop mixes symbiosis with reproof. In the ‘20s, ‘40s, and ‘60s, jazz was resolutely piloted by its avant garde, so much so that even today the Hot Five, Charlie Parker, and Ornette Coleman are more heard of than heard. But in the ‘30s, ‘50s, and ‘70s, a taming of the extremist impulses and the compromising influence of pop effected a cooler dialectic.11

In this lens, the reactions of smooth jazz and crises of conscience were so strong due to the effervescence of the avant garde in the 60s: the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, and others constituted the “white-­on-white canvas or the nonnarrative novel” of jazz, a movement that pushed the art so far past its home territory that many wouldn’t even call it jazz.12

Thus, through augmenting Giddins’s paradigm beyond 1979, we can draw a similar relationship between the reactionaries of the 1970s and the neoclassicists of the 80s and 90s. Giddins may characterize the 70s as a reactionary period of smoother textures, but those textures were often being achieved through electronic means: the decade ushered in by Bitches Brew and Headhunters was bound to digitize, and both Davis and Hancock were pursuing a fusion with rock, funk, and other popular idioms. The shift away from a purely acoustic sound was found in both the cutting edge and the commercial: George Benson’s Breezin’ with its silky smooth textures and studio strings also participated in this revolution, while adding the wrinkle of commercial super-stardom. Thus, as neoclassicism was ‘actualizing’ it was responding to the digitization and commercialization of the music, a reaction that necessitated a return to acoustic instruments and more ‘natural’ timbres, standardization of the repertoire, and rejection of anything like  Breezin’ that could top Billboard’s Pop charts.13 

The State of Jazz Education

Fears about the future of a music that seems to be collapsing under the weight of its own excess point to the fraught nature of teaching jazz in schools. With so many disparate definitions of what’s important (and of what jazz even is), distilling into a curriculum without being reductive is a near-impossible task. In 1989, just one year after Marsalis’s article appeared in the New York Times, pianist and jazz educator Lewis Porter decried the state of jazz in the classroom: “There has been very little attempt to develop successful methods of approaching the creative aspects of improvisation,” and teachers instead settle for “those things taught most easily in the classroom — theory, technique, composing and arranging, and the transcription and reproduction of classic solos.”14 This technique-regime is so intense because, as David Ake points out, jazz in high schools and colleges has quickly become the primary way people in the US experience jazz, especially in college towns with little to no other jazz exposure.15 For students of the music, mentorship no longer occurs ‘on the scene,’ but in schools: “The apprenticeship model doesn’t exist in the way that it once did, so it’s being incubated in institutions.”16

It is not a coincidence that the actualization and mobilization of neoclassicism in professional jazz coincided with the growth of jazz in higher education (and K-12 more broadly). Classical music education relies on the European Common Practice to set boundaries around what the music is, often characterized by a clear separation from popular music(s) — the first two steps of our neoclassical cycle. In an effort to legitimize jazz as ‘America’s Classical Music,’ the steps from European Classical education were closely followed: at universities in the 1960s, “the first round of textbooks and other resources was characterized by an emphasis on strict formalization and structure, on the definition of levels, and on establishing a relatively narrow core repertoire broadly around bebop and hard bop.”17 Although this creation of a ‘jazz common practice’ has helped ossify a well defined jazz canon for American music students, it has also justified ire and ignorance from musicians and critics toward those students. “By most measures the age of the autodidact is over” — the era of Miles Davis dropping out of Juilliard to be mentored on 52nd Street in New York has given way to the Juilliard Jazz Studies program, led by none other than Wynton Marsalis. Even still, the notion that ‘true’ jazz is learned ‘on the street’ has proven durable.18

Admittedly, this is due to a disconnect inherent to jazz programs generally (high schools specifically), where big band remains the dominant format despite its lack of popularity in contemporary jazz clubs and recording studios.19 There are several potential reasons for this preference. First, as in all high school activities, larger groups are preferred to encourage participation. If high schools must choose between a quintet and a twenty-piece band, the big band wins on sheer engagement. Alternatively, that school could have four quintets to encourage small combo development in the program, but hiring the faculty for such a project is, at best, an improbability — at many schools, that jazz director is also the orchestra director, concert manager, and possibly the choir director, among other potential side roles. Second, in keeping with the steps in Classical training, learning from the written score is foundational to the institutional study of music, both as an individual and as a collective. To again return to Essentially Ellington, it is the written score that is being studied, not the development of the individual voice within a larger ensemble, the latter being something Ellington’s groups were known for.

Thus, although educational pedagogy has evolved since the ‘60s in most other fields, our obsession with a jazz canon has held firm. Books like Mark Gridley’s Jazz Styles undergo successive editions (in Gridley’s case, eleven) and continue to be taught in schools, due in part to ease of use: since Gridley’s text has very little concern for the cultural influences and implications of the music, it can be easily implemented into a ‘jazz appreciation’ course which intends to focus ‘strictly on the music.’ These courses do not exist to teach students that jazz was a powerful socio-cultural-historical force, but rather to define the ‘musical characteristics’ of each style period and discuss the great men20 of those styles.21 

The trouble with this style-appreciation approach is twofold. First, it perpetuates what DeVeaux describes as an internal narrative: “the history of jazz is characterized by continuous stylistic change because it is in the nature of an art form to grow and develop,” an evolution that follows not the currents of culture or the whims of individuals, but an “inner logic” inherent to all autonomous art.22 If jazz is to be added to the pantheon of high art — a position that, however dubiously, it seems to now occupy — it will be forced to reject cultural-historical influence in favor of this internal narrative. Once again, this internal has precedence in the process of European Classical canonization, as great innovators rely on their inherent genius and veneration of the masters to make their music, with passing mentions of contemporary European conditions. The mantle of ‘popular music,’ however supposedly pejorative, often resists these pitfalls. 

Second, it supports the notion that in order to appreciate jazz ‘properly,’ you must know the style period, artistic influences, and location within the canon of the music you’re listening to. According to Marsalis, this is the job of program notes, which his colleague Stanley Crouch writes for performances at JALC: “Although jazz can be enjoyed on many levels, from the superficial to the profound, we feel that the proper presentation of notes, song titles and even small discographies will help audiences better understand the essential elements of the music and thereby enjoy the music even more.”23 Style history and ‘jazz appreciation’ teach our music students that ‘appreciation’ means the retention of factoids about the music (not mere enjoyment), reinforcing the neoclassical motives underpinning jazz education generally and style history specifically. 

The aforementioned codification of a discrete canon, exemplified by chronology in our teaching on jazz styles, is what keeps neoclassicism firmly rooted in our schools. Just like classical music’s Common Practice, the Real Book — a multi-volume collection of sheet music that functions as a song dictionary, jazz shibboleth, and unofficial textbook for jazz combos — provides clear and present lines on what is and isn’t jazz.24 For schools desiring a canon, neoclassicists provided perfect parameters: according to David Ake, “no one has ever been as successful as Wynton Marsalis at articulating and disseminating such a neatly circumscribed vision of jazz.”25 Conferences like that of the International Association for Jazz Education have succeeded at connecting jazz educators to each other and students to resources, but according to Chinen, “with its clinics, performances, ceremonies and panels, the [IAJE] conference is where the disconnect between jazz education and the performance and business of jazz comes into starkest relief.”26 The two worlds of education and performance fail to meet in this instance not because the ‘business of jazz’ isn’t happening in schools, but because the performance world has less interest in the codification project: by the turn of the century, “the whole idea of a definition [for ‘jazz’], in fact, was beginning to feel outmoded.”27 

Conclusion: The Shape of Jazz (Education) to Come

In the full version of this paper (linked here), I consider some pedagogical alternatives to this neoclassical method, closely following the great pioneer of the AACM, George Lewis. For the sake of time, however, I will instead attempt to draw conclusions from this brief vignette of modern jazz, and allude to the solutions which I find in Lewis’s ‘Afrological’ model. To do this, we return to the quintessential neoclassical project: Essentially Ellington. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this sort of pedagogy is that, in order for the music to be good, to be worthy, it must be perfectly executed in the style of the master composer. We forego the heterophony of a collage in favor of the monophonic portrait — a portrait which depicts a man who would be disgusted by the manner in which he was portrayed. Is that the imperative to pass to students? Or should we encourage the polyglot beauty of the amateur collage, the essence of experimentation, and an ‘ethic of care’ for fellow creative musicians? I think the latter. If we limit a student’s understanding of ‘good jazz’ to what can be measured on a score-card, we’re hardly encouraging good composition, let alone creative improvisation. If the goal of music education is to create creators and inspire expression, we must return to the purpose of tradition. An obsession with ‘reverence and preservation’ certainly encourages ‘respect’ for tradition, but putting ‘America’s Classical Music’ behind bullet-proof glass hardly encourages development of the tradition’s material and values, and misrepresents a fundamental truth: Jazz is a cross-cultural phenomenon with disparate influences and constant reinventions. Jazz education must reshape the ways it represents this phenomenon if it wishes to survive as an academic discipline, let alone a relevant medium of expression. 

Endnotes

  1. Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz 150.
  2. Scott DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 551.
  3. Nate Chinen, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018), 17.
  4. This definition was offered in opposition to Byron’s music, which Marsalis was quick to dismiss as ‘not jazz.’ Stephen Sherill, “Don Byron,” The New York Times Magazine, January 16, 1994.
  5. Lincoln Center Staff, “Essentially Ellington: About the Program,” Program description, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz Academy, 2014, https://academy.jazz.org/ee/about/. 
  6. I am obligated to note here that working through these scores at the high school level can be a great tool for pushing students toward further technical mastery on their instruments. However, to say that this decenters improvisation and the unique individual voice — two high points in the Ellington orchestras — would be an understatement.
  7. Sherril.
  8. Chinen, Playing Changes, xi.
  9. Gary Giddins, “Jazz Wars in the ‘70s,” The Village Voice, December 17, 1979.
  10. Reflecting on the 1980s, Gioia is perhaps more reflective of the fatalistic norm: “The lack of common standards and a common musical vocabulary has exacerbated the collapse of the jazz world into countless schools and tendencies, each unable to communicate with those outside of its own small world.” This crippling fear of particularism will not go away. Ted Goia, The Imperfect Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 84.
  11. Ibid.
  12. Ibid
  13. Breezin’ spent two weeks in the summer of 1976 at the top of the Billboard 200. billboard.com/charts/billboard-200/1976-08-07. 
  14. Lewis Porter, “Jazz in American Education Today,” College Music Symposium 29 (1989): 138.
  15. David Ake, “Crossing the Street: Rethinking Jazz Education,” in Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, ed. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 237-63. As an example, here in Galesburg the Rootabaga Jazz Festival boasts over forty years of vibrant jazz cultural exchange, in a Western Illinois locale that may not witness such vibrancies if it weren’t for the college program that makes it happen.
  16. Berklee Professor Bill Pierce, quoted by Nate Chinen, “Jazz Is Alive and Well. In the Classroom, Anyway.,” New York Times, January 7, 2007.
  17. Charles Beale, “Jazz Education,” in The Oxford Companion to Jazz, ed. Bill Kirchner (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 759.
  18. Chinen, “Jazz in the Classroom;” Ake, “Crossing the Street,” 238, 248-50. 
  19. Chinen, “Jazz in the Classroom.”
  20. Like most supposedly comprehensive jazz histories, Gridley does mean men. See Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), for a discussion of sexism in histories of jazz, and special treatment of Gridley’s work in particular.
  21.  Subsequent books meant to guide educators can fall into the Jazz Styles trap: Jazz Pedagogy: The Jazz Educator’s Handbook and Resource Guide features a detailed chronology at the center of the book entirely absent of historical/cultural context (also, the timeline categorizes Miles Davis as strictly a Hard Bop player, which is at best a disservice). J. Richard Dunscomb and Willie L. Hill, Jazz Pedagogy: The Jazz Educator’s Handbook and Resource Guide (Miami: Warner Bros. Publications, 2002), 16-27.
  22. See Dunscomb and Hill, 14; DeVeaux, 541. 
  23. Wynton Marsalis, “What Jazz Is – and Isn’t,” New York Times, July 31, 1988.
  24. Interestingly, volume 1 of the Real Book is missing several tunes considered by many as core standards, while including Yesterday by the Beatles. It is also worth noting that other projects have added to the tradition’s dictionary — the Fake Books, Colorado Cookbook, ‘New’ Real Book, and more. Unfortunately, wading into the Real Book project is beyond the scope of the paper.
  25. David Ake, “After Wynton: Narrating Jazz in the Postneotraditional Era,” in The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies, ed. Nicholas Gebhardt, Nichole Rustin-Paschal, and Tony Whyton, Routledge Music Companions (Routledge, 2019): 78.
  26. Chinen, “Jazz in the Classroom.” Note that the IAJE was reincorporated as the Jazz Education Network following financial troubles and general organizational issues. 
  27. Chinen, Playing Changes, xi.

Bibliography

Ake, David. “Crossing the Street: Rethinking Jazz Education.” In Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, edited by David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark, 237-63. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

————. “After Wynton: Narrating Jazz in the Postneotraditional Era.” In The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies, edited by Nicholas Gebhardt, Nichole Rustin-Paschal, and Tony Whyton. Routledge Music Companions. Routledge, 2019.

Allsup, Randall Everett, and Eric Shieh. “Social Justice and Music Education: The Call for a Public Pedagogy.” Music Educators Journal 98, no. 4 (June 2012): 47-51.

Beale, Charles. “Jazz Education.” In The Oxford Companion to Jazz, edited by Bill Kirchner, 756-65. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Burns, Ken. Jazz. Limited Series, Documentary. PBS, 2001.

Chinen, Nate. “Jazz Is Alive and Well. In the Classroom, Anyway.” New York Times. January 7, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/arts/music/07chin.html.

————. Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 2018.

Creative Music Studio. About Page. Creative Music Studio, n.d. https://creativemusic.org/about/.

DeVeaux, Scott. “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography.” Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 525-60.

Dunscomb, J. Richard, and Willie L. Hill. Jazz Pedagogy: The Jazz Educator’s Handbook and Resource Guide. Miami: Warner Bros. Publications, 2002.

Giddins, Gary. “Jazz Wars in the ‘70s.” The Village Voice. December 17, 1979. https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/12/11/jazz-wars-in-the-70s/.

Gioia, Ted. How to Listen to Jazz. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

————. The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Gipson, Grace. “Creating and Imagining Black Futures through Afrofuturism.” In #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation, edited by Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman, 84-103. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019.

Gridley, Mark C. Jazz Styles. 11th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2012.

Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow, 1963.

Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

————. “Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970-1985.” Current Musicology, no. 71-73 (February 2001): 100-157. https://doi.org/10.7916/cm.v0i71-73.4822.

————. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal 22 (2002): 215-46.

Lincoln Center Staff. “Essentially Ellington: About the Program.” Program description. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz Academy, 2014. https://academy.jazz.org/ee/about/.

Marsalis, Wynton. “What Jazz Is – and Isn’t.” New York Times. July 31, 1988. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/31/arts/music-what-jazz-is-and-isn-t.html.

Morrison, Allen. “Building the Cathedral.” Downbeat, December 2017.

Music Dispatch. Omnibook Advertisement. Downbeat, March 2018.

Palmer, Robert. “Pop: Newport Newcomers.” New York Times. June 10, 1973. https://www.nytimes.com/1973/06/10/archives/newport-newcomers-pop.html.

Porter, Lewis. “Jazz in American Education Today.” College Music Symposium 29 (1989): 134-39.

Quinn, Bill. “The AACM: A Promise.” Downbeat Music ‘68, 1968, 46-50.

Sherrill, Stephen. “Don Byron.” The New York Times Magazine, January 16, 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/16/magazine/don-byron.html

Smith, Wadada Leo. “Creative Music and the AACM.” In Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, edited by Robert Walser, Second ed., 274-80. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

————. “Philosophy and Language of Music.” Artist Statement. Wadada Leo Smith, n.d. https://wadadaleosmith.com/philosophy-and-language-of-music/.

Solis, Gabriel. “Soul, Afrofuturism & the Timeliness of Contemporary Jazz Fusions.” Dædalus 148, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 23-35.

Taylor, William ‘Billy.’ “America’s Classical Music.” In Keeping Time.

Thomas, Igmar. Improvisation in “Change of the Guard.” From The Epic, Kamasi Washington. Brainfeeder, 2015.

Watrous, Peter. “Lincoln Center Elevates Status of Jazz.” New York Times. December 19, 1995. https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/19/arts/lincoln-center-elevates-status-of-jazz.html.