The Transformation of Jazz: From Street Music to Academic Art Form

From Exclusion to Acceptance: The First Century of Jazz

When I look at the history of jazz, what struck me most is how this genre managed to survive for nearly half a century with almost no institutional support. In the first half of the twentieth century, being a jazz musician meant being entirely self-employed, scraping by with mostly short-term bandleaders and fluctuating public support. In that era, the closest thing to a "steady job" for a jazz musician was a place in a successful touring band — and even that could end at any moment. Musicians could find themselves stranded far from home, sometimes literally thrown off the tour bus along the way.

Can you imagine? Beyond the question of inviting them to perform on campus, professorships were out of the question. Applying for the fellowships and artists' residencies that are common today was almost unheard of. Stride piano pioneer James P. Johnson applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in the 1930s and (as you might expect) was rejected — but what is striking, given the attitudes of the time, is that he even thought to apply. To show just how dire the situation was: in 1949, Downbeat magazine launched a competition to choose a new name for jazz. Many people believed that the old name was stained by negative associations and that the music needed a more respectable label. The winning entry — taking the thousand-dollar prize — was "Crewcut." Fortunately, the competition was soon forgotten and we went on with the word "jazz."

Jazz Enters Academia: A Turning Point

In the 1950s, a major turning point came for jazz. The first jazz textbooks appeared, and about thirty colleges began offering courses in the subject. That may seem small compared with the present situation — when nearly every college has embraced jazz in some form, and more than a hundred have formal degree programs — but at the time it marked a great change. Jazz performances on campus, which had previously been confined to informal settings such as fraternity parties and student-organized dances, now began to receive official approval from administrators.

It took a full generation for the impact of that transformation to be felt on the jazz scene. The jazz atmosphere of the 1980s and 1990s reflected this change: a growing number of rising performers with expanded historical awareness who could move easily from style to style. For this generation, academic training and college degrees were the norm, not the exception. Of course, the transition was not without conflict. Those aligned with the styles and attitudes of earlier eras grumbled that the new players suffered from too much education. For them, jazz with an academic pedigree was a cold imitation of the real thing. Real jazz had been tested in the wild world of touring bands and tough jam sessions — not by sitting in a classroom and reading a textbook.

The Rise of Jazz Education Institutions

Jazz's entry into academia happened under the leadership of specific institutions. When Berklee College of Music was founded in Boston in 1945, it was one of the few schools taking jazz seriously as an academic discipline. The school's founder, Lawrence Berk, believed that jazz musicians, like classical musicians, needed systematic training. Today Berklee is one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, hosting thousands of students each year, with countless Grammy-winning artists among its alumni.

The University of North Texas (then North Texas State University) became, in 1947, one of the first major universities to formally launch a jazz studies program. The school's One O'Clock Lab Band grew into a world-renowned ensemble, and many professional musicians came up playing in this band. New England Conservatory, under the leadership of Gunther Schuller in the 1960s and 1970s, expanded the boundaries of jazz education and carried the Third Stream concept into the academy. Institutions such as the Manhattan School of Music, the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, and Indiana University also built strong jazz programs from the 1970s onward, solidifying the academic infrastructure in this field.

A similar development took place in Europe. The Conservatorium van Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium (Rhythmic Music Conservatory) in Denmark became pioneers of European jazz education. While teaching the American jazz tradition, these schools also laid the ground for the emergence of Europe's own jazz identity.

Jazz Education in Turkey

The institutionalization of jazz education in Turkey began relatively late but moved quickly. Bilkent University, founded in 1986, took a pioneering step by including jazz studies in its music faculty. The music department at Istanbul Bilgi University, with educators such as Tuna Ötenel and İmer Demirer teaching from the 2000s onward, became an important center for Turkish jazz education. Haliç University, Bahçeşehir University, and Istanbul Technical University's State Conservatory of Turkish Music also joined the ranks of institutions offering jazz education. These developments significantly increased both the number and the quality of young jazz musicians trained in Turkey.

Jazz Festivals: The Music's Global Showcase

The history of jazz festivals is directly tied to the music's legitimation. The Newport Jazz Festival, founded in 1954, went down in history as the world's first major jazz festival. Brought to life by George Wein's vision, the festival carried jazz outdoors and to large audiences, fundamentally changing how the music was perceived. The 1958 documentary "Jazz on a Summer's Day" took the magic of Newport to the world.

Major festivals such as the Montreux Jazz Festival (1967), the North Sea Jazz Festival (1976), and the Montreal International Jazz Festival (1980) played a critical role in jazz's recognition as a global art form. The Montreal International Jazz Festival entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest jazz festival, drawing more than two million visitors each year.

In Turkey, the Istanbul Jazz Festival has been organized since 1994 by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) and has become one of the most respected jazz festivals in the world. Events such as Akbank Jazz Festival, Nardis Jazz Club's programs, and the Ankara Jazz Festival also reflect the richness of festival life in Turkey. These festivals both bring international names to Turkish audiences and provide Turkish jazz musicians with an international showcase.

The Grammys and Jazz: Recognition by the Music Industry

The Grammy Awards played a major part in jazz's acceptance as "serious art music." When the first Grammy ceremony was held in 1959, jazz already had its own categories. Over the years, those categories were expanded and refined. Today, the Grammys include many jazz categories, including Best Jazz Vocal Album, Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, Best Latin Jazz Album, and Best Improvised Jazz Solo.

Wynton Marsalis's 1997 Pulitzer Prize for his oratorio "Blood on the Fields" became one of the most concrete signs of jazz's academic and cultural acceptance as "serious music." Until then, the Pulitzer Prize for Music had been awarded only to classical composers. The prize declared that jazz was no longer mere entertainment music but one of America's highest forms of artistic expression. In 2007, Ornette Coleman won the Pulitzer for his album "Sound Grammar" — jazz's second great victory in this arena.

The Rise of Modern Jazz Masters

These changes inevitably affected the sound of the music. If you had any doubt that jazz was no longer empty entertainment but a serious art form, all you had to do was observe the solemn bearing in concert halls of the rising stars of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The artist who perhaps reflected this seriousness most clearly was pianist Brad Mehldau. He seemed to feel a deep aversion to smiling on his album covers, and he quoted German philosophers in his liner notes. At one point, an academic paper examining the reflections of Nietzsche's philosophy in his music was even available for download on the pianist's website. But the singular seriousness of Mehldau's art came through most strongly on stage, where he masterfully reshaped popular songs and his own sharp compositions.

Matthew Shipp took a different approach. He has had to defend his independence against those who wanted to label him a follower of Cecil Taylor. But Shipp was too complex a musician for such simple family trees. He could unleash titanic atonal attacks at the keyboard — something he had been demonstrating since his apprenticeship in saxophonist David S. Ware's group — but he could also work his magic inside traditional chord changes or with simple pentatonic-based figures.

Geri Allen was one of the most important pianists of this era. She was among the first students to receive a degree from Howard University's jazz program and went on to complete a master's program in ethnomusicology at the University of Pittsburgh. But apparently no one told Allen that academics are supposed to stay in their ivory towers. She tore down every kind of boundary — cultural, stylistic, or geographic. She could revive the music of Kansas City jazz pioneer Mary Lou Williams with meticulous authenticity and at the same time collaborate with avant-garde leader Ornette Coleman.

Among the saxophonists who came to the fore, Joe Lovano carried out, with great skill, his commitment to drawing on the past without staying stuck in it. On his outstanding two-disc live recording at the Village Vanguard in 1995, he paid impressive tribute to Ornette Coleman with the composition "Fort Worth." On his earlier album Rush Hour, the saxophonist collaborated with Third Stream founder Gunther Schuller.

Joshua Redman, born in Berkeley in 1969, followed a different path. Raised on the West Coast and successful in academia — he graduated as valedictorian of his high school and went to Harvard — Redman entertained the idea of becoming a doctor or lawyer before choosing the saxophone. But like Lovano, he emerged as a unifying figure who drew on many camps without fully committing to any.

Chris Potter is a perfect example of the contemporary, well-educated saxophonist. Born in Chicago, Potter moved to New York at eighteen and received formal training at The New School and the Manhattan School of Music — but before long he was making his name in local nightclubs. In addition to leading his own ensembles, Potter has appeared on roughly two hundred different recordings. With good reason: he can do almost anything on almost any saxophone (and, when required, on bass clarinet, flute, and other instruments).

Jazz Goes Global: America's Classical Music Opens to the World

Around 2015, the most talked-about jazz story in the media was about an eleven-year-old boy: Joey Alexander. He was everywhere at once. His music went viral on the web, he got top-tier coverage in The New York Times, he appeared on CBS's 60 Minutes news program, and he booked a headlining set at the Newport Jazz Festival. When he took the stage at the Grammy Awards, this precocious child received a standing ovation from the leaders of the music industry. But those familiar with how the music business works should have been struck even more by Joey Alexander's origins in Bali, Indonesia. That is especially surprising once you consider that Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country and home to one of the world's richest musical traditions.

For years, with a strange kind of complacency, jazz fans in the United States have proclaimed jazz to be "America's classical music." There is something pleasing in the phrase, but a closer look at the jazz world tells a different story: many of the art form's most exciting developments are happening outside the music's homeland — and that is increasingly the case with every passing decade.

In today's London this is particularly striking. The jazz scene there has been growing for decades, but it had usually taken its stylistic cues from the United States. Today the roles have nearly reversed. Many American musicians and fans are not only paying close attention to new sounds coming out of the United Kingdom but are increasingly envious of a British jazz ecosystem that supports a wide variety of new styles and perspectives, draws an eager young audience, and wins admiration in mainstream media outlets. Names like Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia, Ezra Collective, and Moses Boyd have taken their place on the world stage as bright representatives of London's new jazz wave. Ezra Collective's 2023 Mercury Prize win was concrete proof of the new wave's strength.

The Rise of Jazz in Europe and Asia

The late-1990s rise to fame of Swedish pianist Esbjörn Svensson and his trio e.s.t. — with bassist Dan Berglund and drummer Magnus Öström — was an important event in this context. With a pile of Europe-wide awards and a proven, loyal following, e.s.t. had found a way to build a global impact and a worldwide audience before they ever came to America. The group's music was as unconventional as its performance style, full of unexpected shifts and turns. The trio could build rich, complex, maximalist structures in terms of harmonic motion; yet with little warning e.s.t. could drop into a loose, open jam or strike up a laconic dialogue between instruments.

On the European jazz scene, the collective or organization often looms larger than the individual. This is visible both in AACM-type organizations such as F-ire Collective and Loop Collective in the UK, and in the more collaborative structure of most leading groups. This stands in sharp contrast to the American jazz orchestras that have always borne the bandleader's name, but the difference is a useful reminder of the collectivist ideas that pervade much of the European jazz ecosystem.

Germany's ECM Records label has perhaps played the largest role in bringing European jazz to worldwide recognition. Founded in 1969 by Manfred Eicher, ECM has released albums by artists such as Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Tomasz Stańko, and Anouar Brahem, introducing Europe's distinctive jazz aesthetic — more contemplative, more meditative, sometimes nearly classical — to the world.

The jazz scenes of Latin America and the Asia-Pacific are not as self-sustaining, due to a comparative scarcity of institutional funding and support. That does not mean these regions do not produce major jazz talent; rather, they struggle to nurture, retain, and sustain it. Japan has played a unique role by supporting jazz in its cities. Japanese audiences have championed the music with an enthusiasm and distinctiveness rarely matched elsewhere, and the number of venues presenting jazz — live in nightclubs and concert halls, or through recordings in the country's many jazz cafes — puts much of the rest of the world to shame. Japanese jazz musicians such as Hiromi Uehara, Makoto Ozone, and Terumasa Hino enjoy great respect on the international stage.

Jazz Studies Programs: A Global View

Today, jazz studies programs are found at hundreds of universities around the world. In the United States, institutions such as Berklee, Juilliard, The New School, the University of North Texas, and the Manhattan School of Music continue to lead, while in Europe schools such as the Amsterdam Conservatory, London's Guildhall School of Music, the CNSMDP in Paris, and the Norwegian Academy of Music in Trondheim offer strong jazz programs.

There is no question that these programs have played a role in elevating jazz to the status of "serious art music." Today a jazz musician can begin a career along an academic path as structured as that of a classical musician. Doctoral programs in jazz performance and jazz composition are among the most tangible signs of the music's academic legitimacy. But this academicization has also brought a tension with it: doesn't jazz risk losing its spontaneity and its street spirit?

The truth is that the best jazz education institutions manage to strike this balance. At Berklee, a student attends harmony and counterpoint classes in the morning while joining jam sessions at Boston's jazz clubs in the evening. Theoretical knowledge and practical experience go hand in hand. Moreover, the affordances of the digital age — YouTube lessons, online masterclasses, easy access to transcriptions — have democratized jazz education and made it accessible to young musicians in every corner of the world.

Conclusion: The Future of Jazz

When jazz first emerged as a commercial phenomenon, perhaps it stood out as a specific local style — a particular way of playing instruments and blending sonic textures, with New Orleans as its epicenter. With the passing years, however, jazz turned from a static set of practices into an attitude, from slavish loyalty to the proven into an openness to possibility — and no single city, country, or region can contain its all-encompassing appetite.

If we look at the history of jazz's first century, perhaps its most defining feature is this unwillingness to stay put, this imperative to absorb other sounds and influences, this destiny as a music of flow and fusion. Every address is therefore its home, but none, likely, will be its final stop. Education and globalization may have remade the jazz world, but the energy, excitement, spontaneity, and above all the ability to move people emotionally that lie at its core — these fundamental values still live in the heart of jazz.

Today the future of jazz looks brighter, perhaps, than it ever has. Robert Glasper's meeting of hip-hop and jazz, Kamasi Washington's carrying of jazz albums to stadium concerts, Snarky Puppy's Grammy wins for their collective music-making — all are proof that jazz's boundaries continue to expand. From the Grammys to the Pulitzers, from university curricula to world festivals, jazz's journey of transformation has long since gone beyond the story of street music reaching the status of a serious art form. Jazz is now an inseparable part of humanity's shared cultural heritage. That is why the academic world can be adapted by jazz, but it seems unlikely that jazz will be adapted in any meaningful way to the academic world. Jazz, as always, will go on adapting, transforming, and surprising its listeners.