I spent some time today helping Lauren Hendrix prepare for her Graduate Oral exam. This is basically where you go into a room with three professors and they ask you to tell them all about jazz. They will also expect you to have a fairly extensive knowledge of your concentration. As a bass player, Lauren has been cramming her brain full of jazz bass information.
She and I talked about how strange the gaps in our knowledge can be. For instance, at this very moment in time, I could tell you more about the first Miles Davis Quintet than the second. I know (hopefully) a lot about the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, but couldn’t tell you very much about the Mingus Big Band.
My trumpet teacher from my high school years, Brad Shermock, told me not to let people try and insult me for not having heard a record or not knowing the names of all the players. It is good to know these things, but everyone’s experience is different. Last fall in Dr. Murphy’s graduate jazz history course, we talked about the difficulty in establishing a true jazz canon. There are so many levels of “importance” that one can ascribe to any given figure. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are two artists that everyone, even people with even a cursory knowledge of jazz will deem important. Of course, if you were a stupid person that wants to argue just to argue, I suppose you could even dispute those two, but you’d be wrong. After them and a few others, it’s pretty much impossible to judge importance and relevance objectively.
I have been and will continue to slowly fill in these gaps, so that my knowledge of jazz will become more comprehensive. Specifically, I need to listen to more of the second Miles Davis Quintet and the offshoots from that group: Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. All of these guys are too important for me to continuing not knowing that much about them.
Hey John, I just noticed your blog!
Whenever we hang, you seem very knowledgeable about Jazz History and pop culture. I think you have a really brilliant mind for remembering information and translating it into cool stuff like musical arrangements and spur of the moment jokes. Good on ya!
[...] Once I got to UNT, I was suddenly surrounded with people who had been listening to this music all their lives, with influences and suggestions from well-listened teachers. There were kids my age who had truly intricate knowledge of many important jazz albums. A lot of the most famous players in jazz were little more than names to me. Some particularly poor scores on Jay Saunders’s Intro to Jazz Records tests made it abundantly clear that I needed to do a HELL OF A LOT MORE LISTENING to jazz if I really wanted to understand and play it well. Since then, my knowledge and understanding has grown a lot, but still, as I said earlier, scatterbrained. In the same way that a puzzle is not completed from the top left to the bottom right, the gaps in my knowledge get filled in a seeminly random fashion. I’ve written about this before. [...]