I had a fantastic experience at the 2009 Banff International Jazz Workshop, and it appears from the recent flurry of blog posts from participants that this feeling is nearly universal. In fact, the three years I’ve been at Banff, it’s hard to think of any faculty or participants that I’ve spoken with who didn’t feel that their time in the mountains was an inspiring period of musical growth. Surely the crisp Canadian air and high-quality catering cannot fully explain this phenomenon. What makes the Banff program so successful?

Diverse, Rotating Faculty. Having a different group of faculty every week emphasizes a pluralistic approach to learning music. It affords each faculty member the opportunity to teach to their strengths, and the students the opportunity to take each teacher as one voice among many, and to dig further into the ideas of the faculty they feel most connected to.

Faculty that Works. The unifying aspect of all the diverse faculty members is their active playing careers. Active performers tend to have more fluid, dynamic attitudes towards music education as a result of them grappling with the issues of music-making on a daily basis. They have direct knowledge of the practical aspects of a performing career, something that can be underemphasized in school settings.

Emphasis on Performance. Weekly concert-hall performances with faculty, multiple Club sets nightly for a focused and enthusiastic audience, and a variety of informal performance opportunities assure that students will be performing regularly. This is critical at a time when so much thinking and learning is occurring. Too much thinking and not enough playing, and a resulting over-focusing on the few performance opportunities available, can be a crippling imbalance in some educational settings.

Emphasis on Self-Direction. Official workshop events generally represent about 6 hours of the student’s day. This is definitely a lot, but it still leaves the majority of productive hours to be spent in self-directed study – practicing, composing, listening, organizing and playing sessions, attending performances, scheduling informal lessons, experimenting with collaborations, etc. This is crucial because each student generally knows best what they need, and also because it establishes habits of self-direction that are necessary ingredients of any life in music outside of school.

Excellent Facilities. There are virtually no times when a student is unable to gain access to practice space, good pianos, drums, and amps, organize an ensemble rehearsal, have a listening session, a meal, a hike, and coffee. More facilities means less downtime, which enables greater productivity.

Engaged Administration. I work in direct connection with program director Dave Douglas, as do all faculty, and his focus on the student experience is unwavering. This further encourages faculty to engage with the participants more readily and deeply. Although I don’t work directly with the administrators above and around Dave, it is clear that the vision for the workshop, and for the Centre, is both well-conceived and well-executed.

Talented, Open-minded, Diverse Students. Diverse in background, nationality and musical direction, the students are truly what makes the program special. Part of a generation of young musicians whose musical abilities have a greater level and breadth than any before, they all come eager to learn, open to new ideas, and ready to work hard. It is primarily for this reason that they leave with a feeling of growth and accomplishment.

Jazz Educators, Students and Administrators: Which of these aspects of the Banff workshop can be applied to your school situation? Which cannot, or should not, and why? Comment below.

Excellent. A highlight of my year every time I’ve been invited.

This program is enjoyable, the students are remarkable, the setting is pristine, and of course I am honored to play with jazz Luminaries: Joshua Redman, Dave Douglas, David Gilmore, Matt Penman, Clarence Penn.

More significantly though, I think this program is a great example of what is possible in jazz education — active, engaged students and faculty; an emphasis on music-making, self-direction and inspiration; and an appropriate balance between skill set expansion and the development of a personal style.

I’ll be blogging in greater detail about my experience at the Banff International Jazz Workshop shortly. Until then I recommend the Real-Time Banffy Blog of our esteemed program director Dave Douglas.

A peculiar combination of factors led to my spending the last four days in Minneapolis and environs. Said factors included: personal work-scheduling oddities, the opportunity for discount travel, some stubborn sense from my youth that time spent traveling alone is somehow necessary for personal growth (even when I don’t particularly want to be away from my wonderful wife), a fascination with the American Midwest and the baseball-card-collecting subculture thereof, and the touring schedules of Kneebody, Brad Mehldau and the Kansas City Royals. The result was exquisite, a long weekend in Minnesota that was both busy and quiet.

The foundation of the trip was a short trip with Kneebody, including two clinics, a concert at Dazzle and a KUVO radio spot in Denver, followed by a concert at Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis. Playing and teaching in Denver was a treat as always. (Thanks to Tyler, Donald, Gerry, Pam, Karen, Bob.) Playing in Minneapolis for the first time was great, as we have been meaning to infiltrate the Twin Cities for quite some time. (Thanks to Dan, Lowell, Wesley, Carl Pohlad.)

The rest of my long weekend included visits to two iconic sites of the Super Giant Stuff school of American architecture: the Metrodome and the Mall of America. Bloomington’s Mall of America is famously the largest mall in the USA, and boasts that it attracts more visitors than Disney World, Graceland and the Grand Canyon combined, but as the most extreme example of the mall phenomenon it serves well to demonstrate its limits. A combination of all possible franchises is not novel in itself, although it is theoretically convenient. It is still quite a neutral space and the generic nature of the franchises subdues the mall’s more unique elements (water park, aquarium, amusement park). It is segmented into “neighborhoods” that attempt to group stores appropriately and this results in some interesting visual spaces (notably the pink neon and shiny silver plastic “technology neighborhood” on the third floor) and some memorable nomenclature (the Macy’s end of the second story is the “Upper West Side”, the 14-screen theater and food court on the fourth floor is the “Theater District”). Still, the best things about malls to my mind – eerie acoustics, awkward fountains, and the sad areas surrounding shuttered franchises – are not as impressive here than at your local Westfield Shoppingtown.

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Cheesy cacophony at the Mall of America.

Where the Mall fails, the Metrodome succeeds: its decaying concrete and plastics surround a vast empty space that give voice to their message of Midwestern humility and utilitarianism, the garish May sunlight turned appropriately grim by the semi-translucent dome. The almost claustrophobic walkways emphasize the vastness of the playing field, on which unfolds a slow game comprised mostly of stillness, performed at the highest level by a workaday Twins squad that still somehow embodies these Midwestern values. I was happy to see DH Jason Kubel, son of my former piano tuner in Los Angeles, excelling for the Twins, but the real standout was Royals closer Joakim Soria. Watching him warm and throw the ninth was similar to seeing Mehldau the next night – all the elements align to allow a normal person to function on a level beyond their colleagues, everyone quietly acknowledging the rarity of such ability.

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A dated style is endearing in the Metrodome’s last season hosting the Twins.

Turning to Mehldau’s trio, it was especially instructive to see him perform on the Dakota’s Yamaha piano, as I often wonder how much of his unique tone is attributable to his choice in piano (perhaps just as worthy an artistic element as touch anyhow). This piano was certainly bright, and brightened further by the PA, but Mehldau is so gentle with the bottom of the keybed, and has such precision even at the quietest dynamics, that it still had the warm concert hall resonance of his more recognizable Steinway tone. Although it wasn’t the most inspired set I’ve seen them play, Larry Grenadier was a standout, playing clearly conceived ideas with intonation as excellent and as personal as Charlie Haden’s. I met plenty of Minneapolis jazz musicians at this show and they were universally warm and positive about their local scene, which was refreshing. When we were chatting with the band and management afterwards, I thought about how Mehldau is one of the only young jazz musicians that I still see as a legend more than a colleague, and that felt so thoroughly healthy that, although I felt silly for it, I sipped my beer and chatted with the other guys rather than introduce myself to him. Though many people I work with or know are heroes of mine, it’s still nice to have a hero in the way I did before I was a working musician too.

Stillwater, Minnesota is an “International Book Town”, in fact the first North American town to be so named, following the original Book Town, Hay-On-Wye in Scotland (insert sandwich joke here). I took a day trip along the St. Croix River to visit Stillwater and some local parks and towns, reveling in the familiar late-spring humidity and friendly woodsiness of the area and its similarity to my childhood home in central New York. Getting out into small-town America in a rental car, listening to Gillian Welch’s Soul Journey, my mind was quiet and turned to family, recalling the innumerable similar weekend trips I took with my family growing up in the Northeast. I can’t codify the particular lessons I learn from my solo travels the way I did when I was younger, but the lessons are still valuable. Being alone with myself with all the daily trappings of my adult life cast aside feels grounding. And if there’s one thing in life I’ve always known I wanted to do, it’s to travel America. What better time than now?

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Stillwater, MN and sunset at MSP International Airport. I love my country.