The following is the first in a series of interviews with Bill Dobbins. This first excerpt focuses on some of Mr. Dobbins perspective on Jazz education. We’ll finish some of his thoughts on education next month. He’ll also open and talk about other topics such as the state of the music, his performance career, his study of Ellington’s music and more.

The interviewer in this series is Bill’s son, Evan Dobbins. Evan serves as an Associate Dean at the Hochstein School in Rochester, NY. He partners the leadership of the Rick Holland-Evan Dobbins Little Big Band, Uptown Society Orchestra’s, the Uptown Swing Sextet and other groups under RuthEllen Music. He has performed with the Phil Woods Octet in NYC as well as many other Jazz luminaries. He also has received degrees from The Eastman School of music and Harvard University. He is a fine musician and a very well spoken, thoughtful individual. We’re delighted he has joined JR247 for some occasional contributions.

We hope you’ll enjoy this first part of a tremendous interview on the State of Jazz from Mr. Dobbins.

Evan Dobbins.: You advocate a proactive learning style in which a student takes all the initiatives to learn about the music and the teacher is there primarily to give feedback and guide their efforts. How rare is the student that comes into the program already having transcribed and analyzed some solos, studied basic jazz history and able to play a convincing swing solo?

Bill Dobbins: At the undergraduate level it’s extremely rare for an incoming freshman to have that kind of experience and self-motivation. The manner in which our society has utilized technology and media and the increasingly oppressive nature of popular culture have created generations of young people that are more and more passive. It’s important to realize, however, that young people today can’t possibly get the kind of practical musical knowledge from life experience that was available fifty years ago.

In the first half of the twentieth century, aspiring jazz musicians were able to work on a regular basis with local established professionals. This was just as much a proactive situation as the one we strive for at the Eastman School. Most of what the young players learned from performing with more seasoned veterans had to be picked up simply by paying attention and learning how to put things together for themselves.  Very little was explained in a simple and easily understood form in the manner most of today’s students expect.

But the immediate example of the musical role models or mentors combined with practical work experience had tremendous value. As a direct result of both overuse and misappropriation of technology and media, the demand for live music has decreased dramatically since the 1960s. In my view, the main challenge of jazz education is to fill the need for the development of young talent that used to be accomplished in the everyday journeyman situation, when live music was an essential part of everyday life and jazz was at the core of American culture, in both its popular and more sophisticated forms.

I must also say that the one aspect of jazz education that I don’t think should be so proactive is the determination of subject matter and curriculum. Just as the mentor professionals of the earlier years already embodied much of the musical vocabulary and attitude that the young lions needed to soak up, jazz educators need to maintain a definite standard to which the students know they are expected to aspire. If jazz education can’t at least be an adequate substitute for the practical experience that was available when there was a real demand for live music, then it is of little value either to jazz or to education. 

 E.D.: In regards to jazz education, what was your early development as a musician and a student like and how did these experiences shape your teaching philosophy?

When I was about twelve years old, my father came home one day with a recording of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, performed by pianist Oscar Levant and the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy. That music made such a strong impression on me that I went to a local music store the very next day, bought a copy of the version that was reduced for solo piano, and was able to play the entire piece from memory within two or three days.

 When I found out that the elements in this piece that most fascinated me came from a type of American music known as jazz, I started to take out recordings from the Akron Public Library. Since I didn’t know anything about jazz, one of the first recordings I picked out was called, “What Is Jazz?” Narrator Leonard Bernstein discussed some of the important elements and stylistic varieties of jazz, interspersed with performances by some of the most essential groups, including those of Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. Not long afterward, I had a totally life changing experience after school one day at a friends house.

His father was a jazz fan, and my friend played me some selections from recordings by the Ahmad Jamal trio, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Dave Brubeck quartet, the Australian Jazz Quintet and Erroll Garner. I heard immediately that these jazz musicians were using all the elements that I loved most in classical music, but they were using them in a personal and spontaneous manner in the same way that a group of people carries on a conversation in their native language. From that moment on, I knew that my life was going to be involved with jazz, and that I had to come as quickly as possible to an understanding of how it worked and of how I could learn to play it.

While I was in high school, I decided that I needed more thorough training in music harmony and theory. A year or two of weekly lessons with an organist who taught at Akron University, Farley Hutchins, got me to the point where I could begin to make sense out of the chord progressions and forms of some of the tunes on the jazz recordings I was listening to. I formed a quartet with a few friends from school who had also discovered jazz on their own or through their families.

 Although we played occasional gigs, our primary focus was regular rehearsals followed by listening sessions and discussions, as though we had formed a kind of jazz school just from our intense desire to get into this music by any and every possible means. I also began learning solos from recordings at this time, and made use of the available sources of published piano music that had a jazz content, from tastefully arranged versions of popular standards (Blue Moon, Stardust, Invitation, etc.) to the few books of transcribed piano material that were just becoming available in the early 1960s.

At that time there were few jazz programs in America’s major musical academies, the programs at the Berklee School of Music and North Texas State University being rare exceptions and the forerunners of the jazz education movement. Always tending to under assess my own musical abilities in relation to those of my heroes, I chose a local school, Kent State University, to pursue my musical studies. I must say that I was extraordinarily lucky to have been assigned to private teachers in both my major areas, piano (Earl Kelly) and composition (Fred Coulter), who were easily as good as the best that I’ve encountered in the most prestigious and expensive institutions since then.