General Overview

The lesson is about how to improvise on the blues in a jazz band. The point the teacher wants
to get across is that a good solo, most importantly, has good rhythmic ideas. The teacher
involved the students in the learning process by using a call and response method of teaching.
This involves the teacher playing an idea, and the students playing it back. He started by singing
the ideas and having the students sing back, and then moved to playing the ideas on an
instrument and having the students play the ideas back. As the lesson went on, the teacher
started playing/singing harder ideas, and when the students didn’t play/sing the idea well he
would repeat. After this, he called on students to lead the call and response. There was a
moment where the students got lost and he redirected them to the correct place, but other
than that he really let the students do their own thing. He would always celebrate the person
who volunteered to lead. The students interacted with each other and the teacher in a casual,
friendly way. However, the teacher never seemed to lose authority of the classroom.

Personal Connection
My unofficial major is Music Education Jazz Subtrack. The reason I want to be a music educator
is to teach high school band, in particular jazz. This lesson was incredibly meaningful to me
because it is a direct lesson in how to teach jazz, the subject I want to teach.

Learning how to improvise is like learning a language. You first learn basic vocabulary, then you
start to develop sentences, then more advanced vocabulary, and then you can “write” a very
good solo. Thinking as an educator, I struggled to come up with a way to teach students a basic
vocabulary so they can start to create their first solos. Using the call and response method
shown in the video is a phenomenal way to teach students a basic vocabulary. It is like using
flash cards with kids learning English. I wonder why the instructor chose to play the ideas he
chose to play. He started going into triplet ideas that I don’t hear a lot of in jazz. That’s the only
question I would ask the teacher, I was able to follow his thinking for the rest of the lesson.

Textbook Connection
One of my ensemble directors said that as a band director, the music that you choose to play in
your ensembles is the curriculum. To put this idea into textbook terms, the formal curriculum
for a band director comes from inside the pieces that they choose to play. The formal
curriculum is what a teacher intends to teach, as dictated by standards or a lesson plan (Sadker
et al., 2022, p.313). As a director, I would pick the piece in the video for my band to play
because it contains syncopated rhythms in the introduction, which would help teach the
students how to play in a jazz style. I would pick this piece because it is a blues, and as a jazz
musician you will never go a day without playing the blues. I would pick this piece because the
melody right after the introduction exemplifies the soloing concepts that the teacher was
talking about in the beginning: It doesn’t have a lot of notes, but the rhythms are strong, and
the ideas are melodic. The textbook does not go into depth about how music can be used to
teach a formal curriculum, I imagine because most of the people they are selling this book to do
not need to know that. In summary, the piece the director chose is the formal curriculum in this
classroom because it teaches students many different musical concepts.