International Society for Jazz Research

Too few branches of science have so far been active in jazz research. Sociology, psychology and education, to name but three, have been inactive. The following questions therefore require an answer:

These open questions show that jazz research must be anthropocentrically orientated. At once the school enters as an important factor.

The relation of the school to society is sometimes adaptive, sometimes corrective, particularly in art teaching. On the whole, matters are better in art than in music teaching. Form and shape are more easily handled than sound. Music teaching hardly ever succeeds in provoking the creative forces of our day. Considerations are lacking as to how young people can be stimulated to musical consumption or production. For these purposes, jazz and beat are eminently suitable, but experiments in this direction have hardly gone beyond first steps. Music teaching can therefore, at best, claim an adaptive function today, certainly not the function of correcting society.

The best possibilities of using jazz pedagogically in schools offered themselves during the 'fifties. But due to the schools' focus on past concepts, this chance was missed. Meanwhile young peoples' interest in jazz has steadily diminished. Only 6 of 64 institutions of higher learning in West Germany employ jazz as a teaching subject.

The future depends on making jazz intelligible from the inside by presenting it not only on the concert platform but also in a workshop atmosphere. This requires:

1. that we recognize in our occupation with jazz a possibility of acquainting pupils with the meaning of playing;
2. that we persuade them to develop the sense of playing in view of the tasks facing us in a leisure society;
3. that we create a psychosomatic balance;
4. that we cause schools to devote themselves to the playing techniques of jazz and to practice them.