FOSTERING HUMAN LEADERSHIP AND CREATIVITY

All music education should free players to build relationships through music, so they learn how to lead, and how they can use their music-making to make a difference in the world.

A pro jazz musician and successful pop session keyboard player in London for many years, I directed the Royal College of Music Big Band from 1999 to 2007 (pictured above).

Band members were some of the UK's top young jazz musicians – highly talented and creative individuals, potential leaders in their musical communities (Shout out to Bruno Heinen, Rob Taggart and Rob Eckland).

Few received any credit for their jazz skills or their potential leadership skills, from the course they were on at the time. Instead, the norm was not to perform outside the college, and instead to focus on technical skills and recreating the great music of the past.

What these potential leaders and inspiring improvisers needed above all was to perform a lot, in musical spaces where they could discover how use music to connect with an audience through their music-making.

All good music has impact. So all music education should free learners to have impact through their music-making, and, in the case of the especially talented, to lead others towards making a difference in the world. Indeed conservatoire musicians, the top 0.1%, are already potentially musical leaders. We desperately need them out there, to use music to rebuild our fragmented society and help us rediscover our common humanity.

Below are two recordings from my final concert with the RCM Big Band in June 2007: the first is part of Maria Schneider's original composition Hang Gliding; and the second is an extract from Quincy Jones's classic Quintessence.

REDEFINING MUSICAL EXCELLENCE AT ABRSM

The radical idea behind the new jazz Grade exams is simple and inclusive: to provide beginner jazz musicians with the same structured curriculum and fair but meaningful qualifications that their classical counterparts had always enjoyed.

The task was to give stylistically open educators, most of them classically trained, the tools to approach jazz and other styles with confidence and authenticity.

To do this, we focused on three key skills, all of which we assessed from beginner level upwards:

• All learners can improvise – we can create as well as recreate at every level.

• Learning by ear helps you engage with what you play more creatively.

• Groove, pulse and rhythm are key to all musical styles.

The ABRSM's jazz exams have now been running for over 25 years. We gave them a new jazz boat, new jazz oars, and taught them how to row.

As a result of that change-making work, thousands of children and adults who previously had no opportunity are now playing jazz. That approach continues in ABRSM's newer syllabuses. But there is more to do.

STARTING FROM WHERE LEARNERS ARE

Musical excellence takes many forms, and with AI it will take many more in the years ahead.

Jazz education is just one example of the way that music education remains a long way from real-world music-making.

As a result, only certain people participate and engage in music education. Jazz musicians, pop musicians, musical theatre singers, and those whose lived experience is rooted in non-Western musical traditions are often forced to learn outside the education system—informally, through experience and in community.

To increase participation and engagement, we need to reintroduce that sense of community into music education. We should reconnect music education with the real world. Learners of all ages should be performing in all kinds of contexts, both in and beyond schools, colleges and universities.

Musical learning should be a balance of informal learning and genuinely open one-to-one and group teaching, led by educators whose expertise extends beyond their own stylistic backgrounds.

We need to empower and develop learners' own tastes, individuality and cultural backgrounds through their music-making. Let's start from where learners are.