The college school of jazz

Old-school jazz on the cutting edge

Queens College program reflects the boro’s music history and today’s world

by Michael Shain Chronicle Contributor

The great saxophonist Jimmy Owens recalls a time when his school — the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan — considered jazz a serious offense.

“If I was caught playing jazz in any of the practice rooms, I was sent to the dean’s office,” he said.

“If you were at Music & Art, you weren’t there to learn about jazz. You were there to learn European classical music. Period.”

That was in the late 1950s.

Within a decade, jazz had gone off happily to college. All legit.

Today, 120 colleges in the U.S. offer jazz studies programs, according to jazzinamerica. org.

Jazz became a traditional academic subject — with a structured curriculum, advanced degrees and a rhythm section of professors — in the late 1980s at Queens College.

Remarkably, the prestigious Aaron Copland School of Music reached outside the academic world for the jazz school’s first director, Jimmy Heath.

Heath, a diminutive saxophone player with an enviable network of friends and fellow players built over 40 years, had graduated from a segregated high school that stopped at 11th grade.

An arranger and composer as well as the leader of his own band with more than a dozen albums — including one nominated for a Grammy for best big-band record of the year — Heath lived in the Dorie Miller Housing Co-ops in Corona, a few miles from campus. Then in his 60s, he was also a born teacher.

Heath ended up running the jazz program at Queens College for 20 years.

By the time he left in 1997, jazz had long taken its place in music classrooms next to Bach and Bernstein.

Still, Heath — who’d learned to play from older musicians in nightclubs and living room jam sessions — was the last to hold the job without a fancy degree.

Queens has been a hotbed of jazz musicians since at least the 1930s, when performers like Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane and Duke Ellington moved into houses in Southeast — neighborhoods where they could live comfortably, commute easily to Manhattan and avoid being accused of busting the city’s segregated housing protocol.

Queens was the place where jazz slept.

Modern-day jazz resources in Queens are few and far between now. An active, grantsupported concert series at Flushing Town Hall, some scattered brunch places and a handful of summer concerts in the parks are about it.

The Queens College jazz masters-degree program has gone a long way to revitalizing the music here.

The program is not for the elite and was never designed to be.

The best and brightest can attend schools like the Juilliard, the New England Conservatory of Music or the Manhattan School of Music.

Others choose Queens College — a part of the heavily subsidized City University of New York — because it may offer the least expensive music masters in the country.

Tuition for a graduate degree at Juilliard costs about $50,000. At Queens College, it is $7,500 — $15,000 for out-of-state and international students.

The program was designed from the start to serve professional musicians who did not have the time to go to school full-time and New York City schools music teachers in need of a master’s degree to keep their jobs.

“Some of our students are farther back on the learning curve; some of them are Grammy nominees,” said Michael Mossman, who followed Heath as director, doubling the number of students in the program before stepping down in 2007 to become a professor again.

“We have a huge range of ages, ethnicities, musical skills. It’s so Queens — and we love it.”

Antonio Hart — one of those Grammynominee students — is now the program’s third director.

Hart was recruited for the trumpet legend Roy Hargrove’s band right out of college and. like many other jazz program students, he worked and toured all during the time he studied for his master’s degree under Heath.

In one sense, if the new generation of jazz musicians now learn their craft in college practice rooms instead of on smokey bandstands, it is still the same exercise. Senior members of the jazz fraternity are still showing the pledges how to do it.

“I’m a coach,” as Hart put it. “I don’t believe I’m a teacher.”

He is frank about what he sees as the shortcomings of college-educated jazz.

“Student musicians are more technically advanced” than he and his contemporaries were at this stage in their careers.

But students are always playing with other inexperienced students.

“They play with the same level players all the time,” he said.

“They don’t have Frank Wess who would tell me me I played too long tonight or too short,” Hart said of one of his veteran bandmates during the years he came up.

“Those are the things you don’t learn in school. They don’t have bands where they can learn.’’

Fully one-third of the credits required for a degree are spent in personal, one-on-one lessons with working professionals. It is the heart of the program, said Hart.

The rest of the time is spent in classrooms learning theory, history and, singularly, the business of jazz.

“A lot of them don’t understand the business they are in,” said Mossman.

“That’s why teach business classes about all the possibilities that are open to them — film scoring, technical production, jazz composing and arrangement,” he said.

“Being an excellent player is big piece of the puzzle, but the world is filled with great players. We want to give them a broader view of the industry.”

While Hart and Mussman are trying to teach students the business side of making a living as a jazz musician, they have been forced by recent events to become students of the business side of education.

Since Covid, enrollment has plummeted from 80 or so students to just 35 this year, said Hart. He is still unsure how many students who auditioned — some via Zoom — this spring will decide to come next fall.

Like Queens itself, the QC jazz program has relied heavily on its international connections — aspiring players from jazz-crazed countries like Japan, China, Singapore, the Netherlands and Israel.

When the government stopped issuing student visas, “we got hit really hard,” said Hart.

Programs like this have been a source of adjunct professorships for established professionals and senior figures who no longer can or want to travel. The shrunken student rolls have meant there is harding any work for them, said Hart.

“I had the job of getting the program from from 20 students to 80,” said Mossman, “But it’s not anything like what Antonio had to deal with since Covid.” Unlike, say, a history department where administrators admit the top 50 applicants and call it a day, jazz is a team sport. “The biggest challenge is making sure we have all the basic instruments to run ensembles,” said Mossman. “Do we have the right number of piano players or drummers? We basically have to rebuild every two years.”

To even things out in years when it has too many bass players and not enough horns, the school offers financial aid as a recruitment tool.

In early May, the school announced the establishment of a scholarship fund in memory of Heath, who died in January 2020 at age 93.

To raise money, Heath’s friends and students staged a benefit — the first jazz concert at Queens College since the pandemic made gatherings like that impossible.

“We had a robust community attendance before all this,” said Mossman.

“Once we get back to normal — whatever normal is — we can get it back.”

Jimmy Heath, first director of the jazz program at Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music, conducts the Queens Jazz Orchestra. Below, Antonio Hart, the program’s newest director, solos as Heath conducts. PHOTOS BY MICHAEL SHAIN

Jazz Education