In Prouty’s The History of Jazz Education: A Critical Reassessment there is a lengthy discussion about the two phases of Jazz education.  By and large academic Jazz programs are accused of not paying enough homage to Jazz as an art form.  Great musicians and mentors were replaced by “great” schools and their professors.  The main pioneer for Jazz education was Len Bowden who wrote one of the first textbooks on the subject.  Prouty also mentions that from 1964 to 1974 the number of college Jazz bands increased from 30 to 450, and the number of institutions that offered Jazz instruction went from 41 to 228.

Robert Witmer and James Robbins walk us through a brief history of formal Jazz education in their article, A Historical and Critical Survey of Recent Pedagogical Materials for the Teaching and Learning of Jazz.  The first textbook was written by Bower in the fifties.  Witmer and Robbins commented that the textbook well represented how artists of that time learned. Mehegan, who wrote a lot of textbooks in the future, was the next to write a textbook, and it honed in on rhythm compositions.  Witmer and Robbins found that in the sixties were heavily focused on mastering patterns.  A man by the last name of Baker wrote many textbooks to complement this focus.  Laporta, whose interview we pulled from, wrote a guide to learning the phases of improvisational work, which Witmer and Robbins deemed “Unpretentious.”