Book Review

Concerns about the state and definition of jazz have been circulating in scholarly and popular discourse for many decades.In Learning Jazz: Jazz Education, History, and Public Pedagogy, Ken Prouty examines how jazz stays relevant by analyzing a network of formal and informal spaces where people learn about the music.In addition to studying the history of institutionalized jazz education, Prouty uncovers other important educational discourses in early pedagogical publications of the 1920s, in less canonical-and sometimes altogether lostvoices in jazz's history, and in more mainstream contemporary media such as film and X accounts."Jazz learning," as he calls it, shapes and continually reworks different yet equally valuable understandings of the music's essential character.Thoroughly researched and often highly original, Learning Jazz comprises five chapters organized chronologically from the music's "nascent pedagogical discourse" to the twenty-first century's more public forms of musicological mass media (12).Drawing on his experience as a trombonist, Prouty first analyzes early jazz trombone method books in chapter one, "To Jazz, or Not to Jazz"in particular, the role of the glissando and other novelty effects in defining jazz as a stylistic approach instead of a genre.He addresses this body of work in great detail, scrutinizing publications by Henry Fillmore, Mayhew Lake, and Fortunato Sordillo in 1919 and those published by well-known jazz trombonists Miff Mole, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey, who capitalized on their popular recordings with instructional manuals in the mid-to-late 1920s.Prouty's extensive primary source analysis demonstrates how the standardization of musical language, terminology, and even book covers communicate varied conceptions of the genre at a time when there was not yet a general consensus on how to define jazz.In chapter two, "We Don't Know What We Don't Know," Prouty turns to jazz history's so-called "lost voices."Drawing on Sherrie Tucker's feminist challenge to the exclusion of women musicians from history, Prouty demonstrates how historiographical choices can reflect an unspoken bias