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From “Perspectives in Jazz” to Jazz Perspectives

We are delighted to welcome you to this inaugural issue of Jazz Perspectives. That the founding editors of this journal are based in the music program of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers University-Newark is particularly fitting, since our campus is also home to both the world’s premier jazz archive, the Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS), and the first jazz history degree program, the Master of Arts degree in Jazz History and Research. Each of these developments marks an important contribution to a long history of international efforts to promote jazz scholarship in the academy. Indeed, the same aspirations that led to the founding of this journal and the jazz studies programs of Rutgers-Newark were likewise integral to the humble beginnings of academic jazz history courses. A window on the early days of jazz in the academy can be seen in the extant course notes of Marshall Stearns, the Yale-trained medieval literature scholar—and passionate jazz critic/historian—who founded the Institute of Jazz Studies out of his New York City apartment in 1952. In 1950, Stearns, John Hammond, and George Avakian jointly taught a groundbreaking class entitled ‘‘Perspectives in Jazz’’ for New York University’s Division of General Education. (See Figure 1.) The course advertised guest lectures by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and other major musicians. Stearns’s files indicate that this class was offered annually up to at least 1956, and that it attracted an enviably diverse group of students, which in one given semester simultaneously included a chemist, a United Nations worker, a Wall Street security analyst, an architect, two female librarians, two housewives, thirteen secretaries, two models, seven dance teachers, and three people in sales, among others. By the early 1950s, this course was by no means an anomaly, as a note by Stearns from this period lists twenty-five similar jazz courses being offered at a wide diversity of American colleges and universities. (Similar courses were likewise offered in European universities and music conservatories by this time.) But Stearns did have an innovative agenda, as he sought to introduce his students to diverse critical perspectives on this music ‘‘by exploring ... such varied approaches as that of anthropology, folklore, and sociology.’’ The intertwined beliefs that this tradition can be of vital interest to audiences and researchers of widely diverse social and cultural backgrounds, and that this tradition should be studied from a broad number of scholarly viewpoints, lie at the heart of our vision for Jazz Perspectives (and we will likewise have visits from Ellington, Armstrong, Parker, et al.), but it took several decades for Stearns’s view of jazz studies to gain firm roots in the academy. Jazz Perspectives Vol. 1, No. 1, May 2007, pp. 1–3