Birth of the jazz school: how my students helped me connect jazz to play
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by Tom Reardon
In December of 2020, a few days before winter break and eight months into the pandemic, I found myself in a unique situation. I was teaching computer science to K-4th grade students for an online charter school in Arizona and my principal asked me a question.
“How do you feel about teaching some music or PE sections in the spring,” she asked.
Being a team player, I asked, “Where do you need me most?”
“Well,” she said, and I remember this like it was yesterday, “I think you’d be great at teaching music.”
I had never really considered teaching music until that moment but the thought of it really excited me. We went over a few particulars and that was that. I would start my first classes in three weeks when the spring semester started on January 5, 2021.
What would I teach, I wondered. How would I teach music online?
Taking notes
Over the winter break I worked on my lesson plan. I put together some playlists on Spotify and built myself some PowerPoints going over music history. I would be working with K-3rd grade students, all of whom I knew from my computer science classes, and according to my mentor teacher, I had carte blanche to teach what I wanted.
Since you can’t sing or play instruments together over Zoom, all I could really do was music appreciation and a little bit about how songs are created. I decided to start with the earliest days of music and work my way through history. When we got to the 20th Century, I knew I had a lot of genres to cover, and the big question hit me: What would these children like?
If you asked me in late January of 2020 which genre of music my students, these 5-to-9-year-olds in my care for 55 minutes a day on Zoom, would have loved the most, I would have said pop music, hip hop, or good ol’ rock and roll. I might have even thought about adding country to the list before I would have said “jazz,” but I would have been wrong. Jazz was, by far, the most popular genre among my students.
By the end of the third quarter of the year, when I asked my students what music they wanted to learn more about in quarter four, the resounding answer was jazz. At least 70 percent of my students said “jazz” on their end-of-quarter survey. I was floored.
Why do kids love jazz? This is a great question.
As Susan Milligan and Louise Rogers wrote in their book Jazzy Fairy Tales, A Resource Guide for Introducing Jazz Music to Young Children, “Jazz is a play-centered approach to music, and we know that young children learn best by playing. Jazz is improvisational, fun, and playful. Jazz is creative and social.”
This was music to my ears when I read this the first time, and I still wholeheartedly agree with it. Jazz is playful, especially the types of artists and songs I was sharing with my students. As a teacher, I am familiar with the importance of play to a child’s development.
Jazzed to play
One of my favorite educational minds, Lev Vygotsky, talked about how when a child is at play, “he is a head taller than himself.” Researchers at the Minnesota Children’s Museum took this idea and ran with it in looking at the power of play in 2012, but Vygotsky’s thought also seems perfectly aligned with what can happen when a couple of motivated jazz musicians get together. It’s hard to imagine that Miles Davis and John Coltrane, for example, did not feel a “head taller” when they got together to jam.
When it came to the playlist, I did stick to the classics at first.
In fact, the first two artists I shared with my students were Dizzy Gillespie and the aforementioned Davis. Looking back, those first songs I shared were very playful. Gillespie’s killer take on Elmer Bernstein’s “Walk On The Wild Side” from 1963 has an infectious trumpet riff that people of any age can latch onto and enjoy while fellow trumpet ace, Davis, demonstrated that spontaneity and playfulness kids adore on “Chance It” (1952).
This playlist was curated by Tom Reardon for Medicinal Media. It’s our first playlist! We hope you enjoy it. Jean Piaget, is another educational expert. He approached his study of how children learned in a unique way because of his biology background and wrote about how children are “actively constructing their understanding of the world” as noted here in 2021. Considering that the improvisational nature of jazz is also “actively constructing” its understanding of what a song can be, it’s also understandable that children are drawn to it.
After teaching on Zoom for almost a year at the point when I began teaching music, I had grown accustomed to monitoring facial expressions to gauge the success (or failure) of a lesson. It didn’t take long though before my students were giving enthusiastic thumbs-up to their new jazz heroes.
As the semester rolled on, thanks to Spotify’s easy integration into Zoom (just share your computer sound with your audience), I shared a lot of jazz with the children and built it into every lesson. Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Vince Guaraldi, Dave Brubeck, and even Frank Sinatra’s jazzier side became favorites of these students. “Nostalgia in Times Square” by Mingus, for example, became a big hit — and it is over twelve minutes long!
Part of me started expecting to see my students wearing black berets and sunglasses when I started class. As we wound our way through the decades, I learned that the students even enjoyed some of the more out-there jazz of the ‘70s from bands like Weather Report and artists like Dexter Gordon. The more jazz I played, the more they liked it.
The cat’s out of the bag
One of the most popular songs among the kids was probably the newest of all the jazz I played them. “The Cat” from Jeff Goldblum & the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra was constantly requested and eventually became the music I started every class with as I ventured into my second year of teaching music online. The songs from Goldblum’s 2019 record I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This got my students revved up and ready to go each day.
When I would ask them what they liked about jazz, the students would often kind of shrug their shoulders and say something along the lines of, “I don’t know, I just like it.” Sometimes they mentioned the horns or the piano, but it was usually clear they couldn’t quite put their finger on what it was about the genre they fell in love with during my time as a music teacher.
Sadly, I was forced to switch jobs when online enrollment dipped to lows that couldn’t sustain a music program, but I am back in the classroom with some wonderful fourth-graders. Just a few days ago, I asked one of my students what he wanted to hear for our morning music and guess what he said?
Jazz.
