Each style and era of jazz adopted new techniques to help educate younger musicians.
[5] In New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century, as jazz was taking form from its roots, musicians learned in a style that is best described as an apprenticeship.
An early example of this style of education is Louis Armstrong, who studied under famed trumpet player King Oliver.
[8] The use, almost exclusively, of ear training amongst pedagogues and the cultural influence of New Orleans made this style of jazz the most practical and popular.
[9] These two urban areas were particularly popular because they provided a larger audience base for performers and closer proximity to recording studios.
Clubs like Monroe’s Uptown House and Minton’s Playhouse became the public home for the phenomena that already took place in apartments and smaller venues across Manhattan and the rest of the country.
Early bebop musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk introduced a new and more virtuosic style of improvising that proved influential to future generations of jazz musicians[15] Jazz bands in secondary schools and colleges typically emerged as extracurricular auxiliary ensembles, derived from larger concert or marching bands.
The earliest college jazz bands were not offered for academic credit and were usually organized and led by students.
[17] Along with this growth at universities came a number of summer programs that served to educate young musicians about jazz.
These summer camps were some of the first academic institution of any type to invite professional musicians to help educate young students.
George Russell wrote a text entitled Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization in 1953, promoting the idea that jazz chords have corresponding scales that may be used for improvisation".
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 early Aebersold books.
In this clarification process, harmonic structures also became codified, and progressions such as the twelve-bar blues and the ii-V-I were defined as the easiest and most common, as indeed they were at the time.
"[20] Aebersold's Play-A-Long book and record combinations had particular influence, with sales of over 5 million copies since they first were introduced in 1967.
Today, many musicians continue to use Play-A-Long materials, from Aebersold or software-based providers, to learn theory while playing over backing tracks.
Bebop improvisation is based on these fairly standard patterns and usually performed at tempos that force musicians to acquire a high level of facility with their instrument.
One of the first educators to incorporate this aspect of jazz into was Gene Hall, a graduate of University of North Texas.
[1] Gene Hall, who had written a master's thesis there in which he outlined a proposed college-level jazz curriculum, became the first faculty member in the new program.
[2] The influx of student musicians brought about by formalized jazz education suddenly provided academic institutions with the numbers necessary to create their own big bands.
Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz makes virtually no mention of music schools, nor does Ken Burns’s ten-part PBS documentary.
Classes and lessons have replaced jam sessions, which served as the major form of jazz education for the first half of the twentieth century.
Books such as the Charlie Parker Omnibook, which is a particularly popular publication, are denounced for the quality of student they produce.
One of the largest of these groups was known as the International Association for Jazz Education, which scheduled regular conferences in cities across the world.