If you're looking for something innovative, challenging and
exciting to kick off your school year, you've just got to
get this book.
Lee Bash, Jazz Educators
Journal
Collier asks long overdue questions and offers provocative
answers, about the relevance of current jazz education
methods.
Mark
Levine, jazz pianist and
author
Your
music is wonderful and your book is full of important
concepts for all, students and
professionals.
Justin DiCioccio,
Manhattan School
of Music
From
the Introduction
What needs to be
addressed in jazz education is the development of
improvisation in all its forms, individual and collective,
textural and structural, in the minds of all the players in
any jazz situation. (This is especially needed in the
average college big band, where usually only a few can
improvise - or feel that they can.) The workshops in this
book are designed to help all levels of improviser. They
can help the raw beginner start the process of learning to
improvise.... The workshops can also help the technically
fluent improviser who often needs to be taught to listen
more and consider the overall picture rather than just his
or her own contribution.
Contents
Introduction: Three
kinds of improvising
Part One: Opening up the combo
Chapter One What is
Jazz? Moving towards a working definition
Chapter
Two The Bebop thing, What’s going on and what’s
going wrong
Chapter Three
Tradition & the “New” thing - Jazz
Changes
Part Two: The large
jazz ensemble - opening up the big band
Chapter Four Under
the Pier, Structural improvising on the blues
Chapter
Five Ryoanji, Textural Improvising in a Japanese
Garden
Chapter Six One by
One the Cow goes by, Possible Pictures
Some readers are going to easily relate to what Collier has
to say and use it as a point of departure while others are
likely to feel either threatened or offended. Although he
strongly challenges the status quo in jazz and especially
jazz education, his work holds the promise of liberating
the music and our classrooms like nothing I have
encountered in print. So if you're looking for something
innovative, challenging and exciting to kick off your
school year, you've just got to get this book.
Lee Bash,
Jazz Educators
Journal
I
shall not try to review the pedagogical relevance, only
point out that the fundamental visions which Collier
describes thoroughly are there for all to learn. The
problem is probably that those who could really benefit
from Collier's visions and directions - namely those
without fantasy, unqualified, scared third-rate musicians
who are harrying most educational institutions the world
over - will be the last to be open to conceptions such as
creativity, new ways of thinking and responsibility.
Erling
Kroner, Jazz
Special, Denmark
In
this thought provoking book, Graham Collier reaffirms and
reclaims originality and improvisation as the essence of
jazz music and warns of the dangers of Aebersoldism -
‘learning jazz by numbers’. He goes on to
discuss the potential of improvisation as stretching beyond
the mainstream notions of form - i.e. time and changes, in
favour of textural, structural, collective and spontaneous
improvisation.
Simon
Purcell, The
Musician
Interaction,
Opening Up the Jazz Ensemble is being discussed in classes
and it has already influenced the way I am coaching the
jazz combo and big band that I am directing as part of my
assistantship. Your thoughts about the function of jazz
compositions being ‘to inspire the soloists
concerned’ have really influenced me, especially in
coaching the combo.
From a letter
received from Tom Giampietro, a 2005 Jazz Teaching
Assistant at the University of Northern Iowa
Published
by Advance Music in 1995 as a
Book and CD package. Available from them and all good
jazz stores.