
(L-R): Walter Cano, Liz Reggs Meder, Michael Fowlkes. Photo by Daniel Sheehan.
Since its inception in 2010, Seattle JazzED has achieved what so many idealize without ever truly accomplishing. Via a robust connection to the city’s jazz community and a sliding scale tuition, the non-profit organization makes jazz education accessible to – and affordable for – as many students as possible, regardless of skill level or socioeconomic circumstances. In its near-fifteen years of operation, they’ve helped thousands of children across Seattle discover the distinct joys of creative expression, of learning a skill, and of collaborating with others toward a shared goal.
“All of us on this team care so much about students having this experience,” says Program and Partnerships Director Michael Fowlkes, speaking to Earshot alongside Equipment Manager Walter Cano and new Executive Director Liz Riggs Meder. “We’re trying to make sure that anyone who wants to be able to play jazz has the space to be able to do it.”
His words paraphrase Seattle JazzED’s mission statement, one that founders Clarence Acox and Laurie de Koch centered the organization’s goals around. The myriad benefits of a jazz education are well-known, but too often they’re limited to families that can afford instruments and lessons, and these expenses are further and further out of reach from less-affluent families – who also tend to be from marginalized communities. To that end, Seattle JazzED offers both in-house classes at their base in South Lake Union and in-school assemblies that bring that education to groups for whom travel would be less feasible.
Their sliding scale pricing structure is perhaps the organization’s most significant step towards achieving that equity, despite it also being their greatest challenge to maintain. Riggs Meder, whose time directing Seattle JazzED has only just begun, can already attest to that difficulty, especially in a post-COVID landscape where funding for arts programs are down everywhere. “We’re learning how to move into a sustaining phase that’s not reliant on any one person to carry the torch, so that it becomes like an institution,” she says. But despite the sliding scale model limiting the organization’s available resources, she says, it’s worth it to counter the most historically common issue keeping kids from learning jazz.
Of course, there are other such issues that the aspiring institution attempts to counter as well. Early programs like Girls Ellington (later renamed Femme Ellington to better reflect non-binary students) also helped balance the scales between the gender disparity in music classrooms. “Whenever [the class demographic] doesn’t match the demographic of the school that you’re in, that’s an indicator of structural inequalities,” summarizes Riggs Meder. “What they wanted was to give other people who didn’t go to Garfield the opportunity, but also to give people who were going to Garfield but didn’t have access to go to Washington Middle School, or didn’t have access to private instruction opportunities, the access.”
A Seattle JazzED education doesn’t just involve learning an instrument or a style of music; it’s also about learning where that style of music comes from – namely, from Black Americans – and about preserving its origins. For specifically that purpose, the organization hosts a forty-five minute in-school assembly in participation with Black History Month. Exclusively offered in February and available in the same flexible pricing scale as other programs, the assembly aims to inform students about jazz’s roots as an expression of the Black American experience, teach them how to communicate their own feelings in the music, and then introduce them to the instruments jazz musicians use to translate those feelings.
As important as the practice, explains Cano, is the fostering of social interaction that comes from participation. “It’s about the hang,” he summarizes. “In the golden era, the session afterwards was always very lively. Everyone stuck around. I like to think of our education as an extension of that word of mouth and community.” That mentality seeps into JazzED’s methods, from the removal of the audition process to the general mandate for teachers to meet students at their skill level and not strip them of their dignity – the sin so many jazz instructors tend to commit in pursuit of perfection. After all, long before jazz was about technicality, it was about solidarity.
There’s no better example of Seattle JazzED’s successful focus on accessibility than Cano, a man of Hispanic descent from Seattle’s North End who started his own professional musical career as one of the organization’s very first students. “As someone who didn’t grow up going to Garfield, seeing that [jazz band director Clarence Acox] was starting a band, it immediately drew me to want to be part of the program.”
Today, he’s an educator to a new generation of students, and also one of JazzED’s biggest thinkers. His passion for contributing to the jazz community is palpable; even in the span of our chat, he excitedly breaks to his peers an idea he’s been stewing on: reinstating the big band program that led him to JazzED in the first place. Though the program was eventually dropped, Cano envisions it as a new cross-generational effort, with students and parents sharing an education (and the stage).
“Obviously it could be more work, but I think it would be a cool way to bring that community aspect of the big band forward,” says Cano. “It’s not just about a bunch of kids becoming elite so they can compete. It’s really about the community aspect of it. We had a choir some years ago that was intergenerational; we had some students with their parents. It’s like family and community in one. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a way we could touch back to the past of our programming while doing something new.”
Cano is just one of the many impassioned teaching artists, facilitators, directors, and donors working together to ensure the endurance of jazz as an art, but as a part of American history: a once-secret language decoded and gifted to its descendents. Through their work, they pass that gift on.