Timeline of jazz education

A timeline of jazz education in all countries

Non-academic

• ca. 1890: Jenkins Orphanage Bands. The Rev. Daniel Joseph Jenkins established an orphanage in Charleston, South Carolina.
• 1890s: Alpha Cottage School An orphanage in Kingston, Jamaica offering a music programme.
• No date: Colored Waifs Home for Boys (see Louis Armstrong).
• No date: Jane Addams's Hull House, Chicago (see Benny Goodman).
• 1916: Major N. Clark Smith taught at Lincoln High School, Kansas City. From 1922 he taught at Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago.
• 1917: Industrial High School in Birmingham, Alabama. Fess (John T.) Watley offered extracurricular marching and concert bands, and the Jazz Demons in 1922.
• 1927: Jimmie Lunceford organised a jazz band at Manassa High School, Memphis, known as the Chickasaw Syncopators.
• 1930s: The Bama State Collegians, a student jazz orchestra was founded in the 1930s at Alabama State University and was organized by Len Bowden and Fess Whatley. They were directed by Tommy Stewart and Erskine Hawkins.
• 1931: Capt. Walter Dyett produced many well-known jazz musicians at Wendell Phillips High School and from 1935 at DuSable High School.
• ca. 1935: Samuel R. Browne taught music at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles.
• ca. 1940: Prairie View Co-eds was a poplular all-female band.
• 1964: Jazzmobile, Inc. is founded in 1964 by Daphne Arnstein, an arts patron and founder of the Harlem Cultural Council and Dr. William "Billy" Taylor.

Academic

• 1928: The first academic courses in Jazz anywhere: Jazz studies started by Bernhard Sekles at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Way ahead of his time, Sekles started the jazz program although under heavy criticism throughout Germany. The jazz courses were headed by Mátyás Seiber. A recording of the jazz band from 1931 can be heard on German Radio archives. [1] Both Sekles and Seiber were Jewish and the Nazis stopped the program in 1933. The program was restarted in 1976 with Albert Mangelsdorff as head of the department.
• 1932: Percy Grainger, a student at the Hoch Conservatory (1895-1900), became Dean of Music at New York University, and underscored his reputation as an experimenter by putting jazz on the syllabus and inviting Duke Ellington as a guest lecturer.
• 1939: Glenn Earl Brown (1914 – 1965;^[1] 1936 graduate of Ithaca College School of Music) introduced stage bands to Long Beach, New York, public schools.^[2][3] Glenn Brown had been, for more than 14 years, a marimba soloist with the Xavier Cugat Orchestra.^[4] He is the father if Raymond Harry Brown (jazz trumpeter and educator) and Stephen Charles Brown (jazz guitarist and educator).
• 1941: New School of Social Research in New York was the first school in the U.S. to offer jazz history courses.
• 1945: Lawrence Berk founded the Schillinger House of Music in Boston. Berk changed the name to Berklee School of Music in 1954. The school granted its first bachelor's degrees in 1966. In 1973 Berklee's name was changed to Berklee College of Music.
• 1945: Westlake College of Music, Los Angeles
• 1947: The University of North Texas was the first university in the U.S. to offer a degree in Jazz Studies: Major in "Dance Band" or dance music degree.
• 1950s: Over 30 colleges and universities add jazz courses to their curriculum.
• 1952: The Institute of Jazz Studies was founded by Marshall Stearns. It is the largest and most comprehensive library and archive of jazz and jazz-related materials in the world.
• 1957: Lenox School of Jazz: Summer jazz school in Massachusetts founded.
• 1967: Stan Kenton participation at Tanglewood Education Symposium for the first time addresses validity and perpetuation of American jazz education programs in school band programs.
• 1965: Leeds College of Music offered one of the first jazz courses in Europe.
• 1972: Only 15 U.S. institutions of higher learning offer a degree in jazz studies; by 1982 this number had increased to 72.
• 1974: Banff School of Fine Arts: Oscar Peterson and Phil Nimmons set up the Jazz Workshop.
• 1975: University of North Texas One O' Clock Lab Band, under direction of Leon Breeden, becomes first collegiate ensemble to receive Grammy nomination status.^[5]
• 1981: McGill University (Schulich School of Music) becomes the first university in Canada to offer a BMus degree in jazz performance.
• 1982: American School of Modern Music of Paris: Jazz courses started by Stephen Carbonara.
• 1984: North-Netherlands Conservatoire Prins Claus Conservatorium, Groningen, The Netherlands launched a jazz department
• 1986: The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music is founded by David Levy and Arnie Lawerence.
• 1986: Darius Brubeck establishes first jazz program in Africa at University KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa.
• 1993: Leeds College of Music started BA (Hons) in Jazz Studies.
• 2005: First Eastern European school of jazz established at Tibiscus University, Timisoara, Romania, by John Bota and US Fulbright Professor Tom Smith
• 2009: University of North Texas One O' Clock Lab Band, under direction of Steve Wiest, receives sixth Grammy nomination.
• 2011: Tom Smith establishes first university jazz program in Mainland China at Ningbo University

References

• Jazz education in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Ed. by Barry Kernfeld. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 396-7.
• Jazz Studies in American Schools and Colleges: a Brief History by Daniel Murphy—Jazz Educators Journal, Vol 26, 1994, pp 34–8
• Cahn, Peter. Das Hoch'sche Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main (1878-1978), Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 1979
• Jazz Education in Britain [2]