On 06/04/2013, Tom Fine wrote:

> Related to this original thread, here is the National Endowment for
> the Arts (ie the taxpayers' dime) curriculum for jazz in the schools:
> http://www.neajazzintheschools.org/lesson1/index.php?uv=s This would
> be The Canon as far as public education is concerned.
> 
> Look at Lessons 3-5. Where is ANYTHING about soul-jazz or acid-jazz?
> There sure is a lot about free-jazz, yet no mention of how few copies
> most of those recordings sold because they were unfriendly and
> inaccessible to the casual listener. There's a brief mention of
> Latin-jazz (which was HUGE as far as cultural impact and record
> sales), mentioning only Stan Getz. There's not much of anything about
> fusion (probably a safe bet that Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra
> and Herbie Hancock sold thousands or millions more records than all
> the free-jazz albums combined) and nothing about the success of
> smooth-jazz.
> 
> So the taxpayers' dime seems to have been spent to adopt the Ken Burns
> view of jazz. Great stuff!
> 
This might be a good thing.

Music you discover for yourself is going to be much more rewarding than
music you were taught about as a lesson.

Imagine being dragged through some free form jazz by an uninspired
teacher and having to answer a multi-choice test on it.

Isn't the way to teach music to children teaching them to play an
instrument, or at least to sing, and then letting them find out about
existing music for themselves ? We had no instruments but a great deal
of singing - Bach's Mass, Handel, Brahms' Requiem, etc. And I remember
no lessons at all on who these composers were. 

Regards
-- 
Don Cox
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