The College Jazz Program as Tradition Making: Establishing a New Lineage in Jazz

Abstract

The College Jazz Program as Tradition MakingEstablishing a New Lineage in Jazz Tracy McMullen The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark As part of a special issue devoted to the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice’s 2021 symposium, Return to the Center: Black Women, Jazz, and Jazz Education, a reader may understandably surmise that this article’s title refers to the institute and its potential to reroute jazz lineages to better include women and nonbinary musicians in the present and future. I have taken up this very argument in other publications and have described the institute’s work as a Black feminist project that addresses gender inequity as well as white supremacy in jazz education.1 But here, surrounded by work representing the positivity, hope, and concrete solutions offered by the symposium, I want to explore the historical roots of the problem that the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice (JGJ) is now taking the lead to address. As jazz became more popular during the 1920s and 1930s, many young white men wanted to learn and perform this music. Whether it was called jazz, swing, or dance band, the music that was labeled “hot” and employed extensive improvisation was associated with African American bands and was often taught and learned in spaces where Black artists were the authorities. In the segregated United States, many white musicians would feel uncomfortable in a space where their race was no longer invisible and difficult realities of race and racism could not be ignored.2 Wanting to learn jazz, but in a way that was comfortable [End Page 32] for them, white male musicians established a new lineage in de facto or de jure segregated colleges and universities where they could have a safe (for them) segregated space to translate the music into their terms without having to face discussions of race and racism. This new lineage instantiated jazz education based on white male desires that placed Black students and female students on the outside.3 This article investigates the program that is regularly cited as the progenitor of college jazz degree programs: North Texas State Teachers College (now University of North Texas [UNT]) and its degree in “dance band” established in 1946 in Denton, Texas. While North Texas could not single-handedly initiate nor propel the problem of the jazz lineage as I will describe it, the program established a template that later jazz programs followed. Close investigation of its origins and inclinations helps illuminate the beginnings of this lineage. I focus on what is usually elided in discussions of this formative program: its status as a legally segregated college for its first ten years. A recent article in DownBeat magazine about the seventy-fifth anniversary of North Texas’s jazz program offers a useful anecdote for the ways race is avoided in discussions of jazz education, and I use the article as a scaffold for my argument. In the February 2022 issue of DownBeat, the venerated jazz magazine’s chief editor and publisher, Frank Alkyer, wrote about the seventy-fifth anniversary of the oldest jazz education program in the country, founded in 1946 at UNT. Describing the region as a current “jazz mecca” and UNT as its “epicenter,” Alkyer asks, “How did a jazz program get started deep in the heart of Texas?” He goes on to detail the influence of an ambitious dean (Wilfred Bain) and the G.I. Bill, the efforts of graduate student Gene Hall, as well as hints of resistance (the program was initially described as dance band rather than jazz so as not to “be run out of town”). Alkyer ends the article by stating, “What happened in Denton, Texas, spurred a movement of jazz education around the world.”4 Jazz historians agree that UNT’s impact has been enormous, and that post-secondary education has significantly influenced how jazz music has developed [End Page 33] over the decades.5 What jazz scholars have not examined, and what Alkyer does not mention, is UNT’s status as a segregated college for the first ten years of the program...