From workshop to festival gig ... - Mark Doffman

The London Jazz Festival burnt brightly this year over its 10 days passage through the concert halls and jazz bars of the capital and all venue types in between. The range of the programme was spectacular, covering about 50 venues across London and the organisers seemed to get the balance about right between showcasing less well known British jazz players and bringing in the big international hitters such as Chick Corea and John Scofield who can be relied upon to sell out the concert spaces. The opportunity to take your place within such a prestigious festival is not every day and many thousands of hours of practice will have led up to that point where a musician is ready to take advantage of that phonecall or email. But how do you prepare?

One of the interests within our project is how players develop on the scene to the point where they may be performing at an international festival like the one that has just taken place. How does shared cultural transmission across generations and between contemporaries play its part in the formation of a music scene? Part of our work over the second part of this year has been documenting some of the routes, internal to any music community, through which musicians come to take their place on the concert hall platform or club stage. As one example, Dune Records have been heavily involved in workshops and jam sessions at different venues in London and through these different sorts of sessions, young musicians slowly become inducted into the understandings and competencies that go towards jazz performance.

The stereotypical view of music learning, one that is usually associated with study within western classical repertoire, but one that also applies to jazz makes assumptions about learning taking place in a largely solitary way - musicians 'paying their dues' with respect to the traditions of the music, and developing the 'chops' to be able to play alongside others. Often quoted is the research statistic that musicians require about 10,000 of study (which represents about 3 hours per day, every day for 10 years) to become professionally competent. All this seems to undervalue the informal learning that takes place within a group environment which may be just as vital as the many hours of practising alone.

The work of Dune and Jazz Alive, to name two of a number of jazz organisations which offer opportunities for young musicians, attest to the value of working together as an ensemble in delivering high quality musical outcomes. In particular, Dune have developed a series of learning ensembles that take musicians through jazz to the point where they may be performing at an extraordinarily high level. This sort of group learning does not deny the importance of working by oneself with the guidance of a teacher but it does offer opportunities for music making in which collaboration and mutual support networks develop alongside more traditional musical skills. In a more subtle way, such learning forums offer young musicians the chance to negotiate their own sense of belonging to this musical tradition which for many people in this country remains an exoticism.