Opinion Piece: Jazz Curriculum in South Africa: Content and Relevance

Abstract

While the jazz libraries of our educational institutions expand with hundreds of personalised method books, the old learning systems that brought about the development of jazz music are fading into the shadows:

Teachers are wrong all over the world, I don’t understand it. What I don’t understand mostly is who did they ask how to teach in these colleges. See that’s what’s wrong. They surely didn’t ask Hank Jones, you know. They didn’t ask John Lewis … they didn’t ask any of those cats, and they’re the ones we learn from, Bud Powell you know… So most of the schools are wrong. (Harris 2014, 0:45)