Jazz Cats Unmasked

New Zealand jazz education has come of age in the last 30 years. The presence of a jazz curriculum in schools and universities has reflected students’ desire to study this vernacular music and an adherence to international shifts in music education. Yet, the Jazz genre commands the least market share in terms of record sales and concert attendance worldwide. Now often described as America’s true ‘classical music’, the cogent questions would seem to be ‘why jazz’, ‘why now’ and ‘why here’? This book explores these questions through the narratives of two New Zealand-born jazz educators who have made considerable contributions in post-secondary settings. It takes a critical look at their musical lives, and the influence that experience, context and self-perception has on their teaching philosophies. Stripping back the layers created by predominant binaries of musician/educator, glocal/global, history/genealogy, formal/informal, and generalist/specialist, this book makes liberal use of a range of arts-informed methodologies to unmask the main actors in jazz education adding to the ongoing broader international discussions of future directions of the art.