From the Club to the Classroom: A History of Inequity in

Seattle Jazz Education

By Brendan McGovern
March 11, 2016
Honors History Thesis
Introduction

On a sunny afternoon on April 21, 1976, 250 student demonstrators at the University of

Washington (UW) gathered outside the school music building to protest the faculty’s denial of

tenure to Joe Brazil, the school’s first black assistant professor of jazz music. The group stood at

each entrance to the building, requesting that all music students boycott their classes and demand

a “full and open hearing” for Brazil.1 Fearing that the protesters would enter the building, UW

police closed the music school down, making the front page of the school newspaper, The Daily.

Brazil was a popular, though controversial, teacher who “worked outside the mainstream of

where most of the faculty were coming from, a classical European background,” according to the

president of the University Black Action Committee.2 His career and unsuccessful quest for

tenure at the UW embodies the inherently political and racialized struggle to solidify jazz as a

serious academic subject in public schools and universities.

In the 1960s and 1970s, jazz was only just beginning to earn respect as a field of music

education. According to music education historian Michael Mark, “[t]he confrontational and

sometimes violent protest tactics” of this time period caused music teachers to increasingly

accept the younger generation’s taste in music, and thus, “colleges began to develop degree
1
I would like to acknowledge the many musicians, educators, historians, students, scholars, faculty, and friends
who have assisted me with this project. In particular, many thanks go to my mentor, John Vallier, who is the head
of Media Relations at Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington. Vallier gave me helpful comments on my
drafts and offered a unique perspective as a drummer who played in the Cornish jazz department. Secondly, thank
you to Steve Griggs, Norm Wallen, and Danny Ward, who are all jazz historians and performers themselves. Griggs
has been an amazing help to me in procuring sources, particularly on Joe Brazil and the Black Academy of Music.
Wallen and Ward studied at Central Washington University and Olympic College, respectively. Without them, I
would not have learned about the rich background of Pacific Northwest college jazz programs. In addition, I wish to
thank the many interviewees who were so gracious in offering their time and thoughtful responses to my research
questions. Finally, thank you to Professor Lynn Thomas, and my peers in my Honors History cohort. Throughout
these past two quarters, you have continued to inspire and amaze me with your deep knowledge and considerate
comments on each other’s research drafts. I wish the best for you all in your future scholarly efforts.

Steve Miletich, “UW police close Music Building during Brazil tenure denial protest,” The Daily, Apr. 22, 1976, 1.

2
Ibid, 2.
 McGovern 2

programs in jazz.”3 This music appealed to many young aspiring music students due to its social

and political relevancy in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. University

of Washington School of Music Director William Bergsma described jazz, in a proposed

instructional plan for city-wide jazz education in 1971, as the “predominant area in which Blacks

and Whites have worked creatively together over an extended period of time…. jazz- perhaps

because it has always had to fight against scorn from the musical Establishment- has shown a

continuity unique in American art.”4 While Bergsma’s statement explains the necessity for the

serious study of jazz, it also obscures the racial tensions and economic factors that shaped the

development of jazz education, particularly within Bergsma’s own school and the city of Seattle.

I will argue that the complicated racial politics and history of Seattle’s high school and

college level jazz programs through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s restricted the accessibility of formal

jazz education in Seattle to wealthy and predominantly white students. While many educators

and musicians from this time period viewed jazz as free of racial tensions, citing integrated

ensembles as evidence, this idealized perspective ignores the larger political and economic

factors that have always affected equal access and opportunity to quality jazz education. By

examining this complex history of jazz education in Seattle, we can gain a greater understanding

of why we must strive to make music programs accessible for all students.

Contextualizing Seattle Jazz Education

3
Michael L. Mark, “Music Education since Midcentury,” in A History of American Music Education (Reston, VA:
Schirmer Books, 1999), 364.

4
University of Washington Special Collections, Seattle (UWSC), Presidents’ papers, Charles E. Odegaard, “Proposed
Instructional Program in Afro-American Jazz” (1971), 1.
 McGovern 3

Seattle has a unique, rich jazz education history. Before the establishment of formal

instructional programs in the city, musicians honed their craft through informal jam sessions and

steady night gigs in bars and clubs along Jackson Street, the commercial and cultural hub of

Seattle’s Central District. Seattle has thus been referred to as a musician’s “breeding ground,”

nurturing and developing the early talents of such influential jazz figures as Ray Charles,

Ernestine Anderson, Quincy Jones, and Floyd Standifer.5 Seattle Times journalist Paul de Barros

writes in his book, Jackson Street After Hours, about how race and class privilege allowed many

whites in Seattle to take little notice of the cultural importance of this scene, viewing the black

ghetto “dives” as merely a “colorful diversion from their routines, not the unfolding drama of an

American music culture in the making.”6 When the state allowed “licensed businesses” (which,

in practice, meant white businesses) to sell hard liquor in 1949, these after-hours “bottle clubs”

were rendered obsolete. Furthermore, the police and state liquor boards began to crack down on

the Jackson Street businesses, forcing the jazz scene out of the Central District and into more

upscale downtown establishments.7 De Barros argues that since the demise of the Jackson Street

clubs, “musical values tend to be passed down in the schools, not the street,” and it is schools

that have continued to bolster Seattle’s “breeding ground” reputation in jazz education circles

today.8

Starting in the early 1960s, Seattle achieved national recognition for its high quality

secondary school jazz ensembles and pioneering vocal jazz choirs. De Barros explains how

Seattle-area jazz luminaries such as Hal Sherman, Waldo King, and John Moawad were high
5
Overton Berry, interviewed by author, recording and notes, Seattle, Nov. 27, 2015.

6
Paul de Barros, Jackson Street After Hours (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1993), ix.

7
Ibid, 165.

8
Ibid, 202.
 McGovern 4

school band directors who had a thorough knowledge of the masterworks of jazz, as well as

professional experience on the working scene. The programs they started at Kent-Meridian,

Garfield, Franklin, Roosevelt, and Nathan Hale high schools all became well-recognized for their

precise ensemble playing and excellent arrangements, transcribed by hand from the original

recordings.9 Two factors largely contributed to the success of these high schools: skillful,

dedicated educators and limited financial support from the state and city-wide levies. After a

Boeing employee layoff in 1971 severely dented the local economy, the city cut arts funding to

public schools.10 In the aftermath, it was difficult for any school to maintain a jazz band without

private support from wealthy families and donors.11

From the 1970s onward, Seattle area public schools offering quality jazz education

programs became a privilege of mainly white, upper middle class students. Racial politics and

economic conditions played a profound role in moving Seattle jazz education away from its

black and working class roots. Throughout the first half of the 20th century up until the late

1960s, it was legal for realtors and property owners to refuse to sell or rent houses to minority

applicants.12 According to Quintard Taylor, a historian of Seattle’s black community, these

restrictive racial covenants confined the vast majority of Seattle’s African American population

into the Central District. By 1962, Garfield High School, located in this area, became the “first

predominantly black high school in the state when school district census figures indicated that it

was 51.4% black.”13 This contrasts starkly to Franklin, which was only 9.2% African-American,
9
De Barros, “The Dean of High-School Jazz,” The Seattle Times, Feb. 2, 2006.

10
Brian M. Rosenthal, “Seattle Schools’ goal,” The Seattle Times, Mar. 29, 2012.

11
Clarence Acox, interviewed by author, recording and notes, Seattle, Nov. 22, 2015.

12
“Racial Restrictive Covenants,” Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project,
http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/covenants.htm (accessed Mar. 1, 2016).
13
Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 210.
 McGovern 5

and is in even greater disparity with the majority of other public high schools in Seattle, such as

Roosevelt, which had fewer than five black students.14 Clearly, there was a problem of de facto

segregation, even though Seattle schools were not segregated by law. Thus, few Central area

students had exposure to the same high quality public school jazz programs that students in more

affluent neighborhoods did.

More explicit racial politics shaped the formation of the jazz department within the UW

School of Music. Whereas jazz programs in the public schools were established by white

musicians with degrees in music education, the push for jazz classes within the UW School of

Music came from Black Student Union (BSU) members’ demands for courses on African

American innovations in music.15 The school hired Joe Brazil under these circumstances. Under

him, “History of Jazz” became the most popular course in the School of Music, with enrollment

exceeding 300 students by 1970.16 Despite his popularity among university students, Brazil

became isolated from the music faculty. In a closed meeting in 1974, the School of Music

professors voted to deny him tenure. The BSU and many other students protested, accusing the

school of race discrimination, but to no avail. Brazil left at the end of his contract in 1976, and

jazz education at the UW was set back due to the tense environment and the music faculty’s

reluctance to accept it into the broader curriculum.

While jazz courses began to develop in Seattle’s public schools and colleges, various

activists such as Brazil and white bassist Chuck Metcalf began to provide jazz education

programs to children from poorer families, prison inmates, and other disenfranchised members of

society. Organizations like the Black Academy of Music and the Search for Education, Elevation
14
Taylor, 211.

15
“The Early History of the UW Black Student Union,” Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project,
http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/BSU_beginnings.htm (accessed Feb. 1, 2016).

16
UWSC, Presidents’ papers, Odegaard, “Proposed Program,” 18.
 McGovern 6

and Knowledge demonstrate that some Seattle educators were acutely aware of the racial and

classist inequities in school music programs and sought to counter these disparities by directing

community jazz orchestras that anyone could join at little to no cost. However, the lack of

consistent funding for these programs, as well as the high turnover rate of the faculty, who were

mostly professional musicians, prevented these efforts from significantly correcting the racial

imbalance in Seattle jazz education.17

The Seattle jazz scene’s transition from the authentic “bottle club” scene to the privileged

classroom contrasts from the development of strong grassroots jazz education programs in

Chicago and Los Angeles. Like Seattle, both of these cities were racially segregated due to

restrictive covenants, or “red lining.” During the 1950s, jazz scenes that were once vibrant in

minority neighborhoods like Central Avenue, Los Angeles’s equivalent of Seattle’s Jackson

Street, began to fade away.18 Despite this, Chicago and Los Angeles were able to maintain

successful cultural jazz education organizations. Prominent examples of these efforts are the

Association for the Advancement of Creative Music in Chicago and the Pan Afrikan People’s

Arkestra in Los Angeles.19 While nearly every major U.S. city faced problems of educational

inequality due to structural racism, Chicago and Los Angeles did not suffer from the same degree

of indifference from the white population that Seattle did. Seattle was and still is one of the

whitest cities in the nation by population percentage.20 While race relations in Seattle during the

1960s and 1970s were comparatively more peaceful than they were in Chicago or Los Angeles, it

17
UWSC, Presidents’ papers, Odegaard, “Proposed Program,” 13.

18
Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 42.

19
George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), x.

20
Charla Bear, “Why is Seattle Such a White City?”, I Wonder Why…?, National Public Radio (Seattle, WA: KPLU,
Jun. 28, 2012).
 McGovern 7

was much easier for the majority of Seattle’s white population to ignore issues like “red lining”

and the subpar state of public schools in minority communities. In the process known as “white

flight,” middle class Caucasian families in Seattle moved away from diverse neighborhoods like

the Central District to more affluent, suburban areas, where there were higher quality school

music programs.

With the establishment of suburban high school ensembles and college courses, Seattle

jazz education became distanced from its informal, working class beginnings on Jackson Street.

It shifted into the classroom setting of both public schools that served predominantly white and

middle class neighborhoods, and the conservative, academic environment of the UW School of

Music. While this had the positive effect of exposing new students and audiences to the music

and its history, it also raises the question, why did institutional jazz education not develop as

strongly among minority communities in the Central District, where the music scene once

flourished? Grassroots efforts at community jazz education were successful in places like

Chicago and Los Angeles.21 Why not in Seattle? This has much to do with the small size of

Seattle’s African American community relative to other major U.S. cities, its lack of resources

for music education in these neighborhoods, as well as the city’s complex history of racist

housing policies and segregation in the public schools.22 To put this in perspective, we will first

examine the factors that led to the development of the successful high school jazz bands in

Seattle.

Roots of Seattle Public School Jazz Education

21
Lewis, x.

22
Taylor, 235.
 McGovern 8

“Winning is Everything!” proclaimed the headline of a March 8, 1970 edition of The

Sentinel, a student newspaper from Nathan Hale High School in North Seattle. The title refers to

the success of the music programs’ jazz ensemble in the 1970 University of Nevada Jazz Festival

in Reno. This “invitational meet,” as the article puts it, pitted together 88 high school and college

bands from Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, and Utah.23 This was the second year in a

row that Nathan Hale won the “Grand Champion” award, supposedly an unprecedented

occurrence in the history of the festival. A photograph in the article depicts white band director

John Moawad cradling a three-foot high trophy, greeting a welcoming crowd as he returns home

to Sea-Tac airport.24 It is clear from the tone of the article that students, parents, and teachers

alike were proud of their jazz band and dearly looked up to its director, summarized in a

student’s quote that “four things make Nathan Hale’s jazz ensemble a West Coast Champion:

guts, devotion, hard work, and John Moawad.” For the community around Nathan Hale, as well

as other Seattle public schools at Roosevelt, Garfield, Franklin, and Kent-Meridian High

Schools, jazz was competitive, viewed like a sport. Festivals like those at Reno and Olympic

College motivated these bands to continue raising the standard for ensemble cohesion and

virtuosity.

This snapshot of the high school jazz education scene in the early 1970s provides us with

some idea of the atmosphere and prestige that Seattle and the Pacific Northwest schools were

developing in the wake of the growing national jazz education movement. School jazz programs

were still a relatively recent phenomenon. Faculty-endorsed jazz bands were virtually unheard of

before 1947, when North Texas State Teachers College (now University of North Texas) is said

23
Central Washington University Library Archives, Ellensburg (CWUL), Jazz Festival Programs, Norm Wallen, “1970
Reno Jazz Festival Program.”

24
Linda Hart, “Winning is Everything!” The Sentinel, Mar. 18, 1970.
 McGovern 9

to have established the first college degree in jazz, labelled as a “focus in dance band” to avoid

the unsophisticated connotations of the word “jazz.”25 However, it is often overlooked in the

historical record that a pioneering director named Bert Christiansen started a stage band program

at Central Washington State College (now Central Washington University, CWU) that same

year, quite possibly even before North Texas. Christiansen’s teaching style emphasized “total

musicianship”: that is, he wanted his students to be proficient at not just instrumental

performance, but also singing, composing, arranging, and teaching.26 Many performers and

educators who studied at CWU in these early years, such as Waldo King, Hal Malcolm, and John

Moawad, would go on to found their own successful jazz programs throughout the Northwest.27

Another early training ground for Pacific Northwest jazz ensembles was at Olympic

College in Bremerton, home of the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. Many talented performers,

writers, arrangers, and educators who worked for the military in the shipyard started at Olympic

with federal financial aid from the GI Bill.28 But the main impact that the school had on jazz

education was its Northwest Jazz Festival, started by director Wendal Jones, and carried to

fruition by Ralph Mutchler from 1960 through 1974.29 It was this festival that gave Seattle

schools like Nathan Hale early outlets to “show off” and learn from other bands, according to

Waldo King, who brought his bands from Garfield, Franklin, and Roosevelt High Schools almost

every year to the festival.30 Famous jazz writer, composer, and critic Leonard Feather wrote
25
Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed., s.v. “jazz education” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 477.

26
Jessica Bissett Perea, “Voices from the Jazz Wilderness,” in Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and its Boundaries, edited by
David Ake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 219.

27
Perea, 220.

28
CWUL, Jazz Festival Programs, Wallen, “Fifteenth Annual Olympic College Northwest Jazz Festival
Commemorative Program,” 1974.

29
Ibid.

30
Ibid.
 McGovern 10

about the festival in a 1966 issue of Downbeat magazine: “The general performance standard

was astonishingly high… The Northwest, it seems, is becoming intensely stage band

conscious.”31

Ralph Mutchler, a charismatic showman who ran the festival as well as directed the

Olympic College jazz band, was also a prolific writer and arranger of college and high school-

level big band music that “had substance,” according to King. Most written jazz band

arrangements or “charts” that were commercially available at this time were mediocre versions

of pop songs and show tunes. Many Northwest bands relied on talented local composers and

arrangers like Mutchler, who generously shared his charts like “Mopsy” and “Little Girl Blue”

with Waldo King’s and Hal Sherman’s Seattle high school bands. Mutchler’s charts were “in a

class of their own,” standing out from the stock arrangements that made up most stage band

libraries at the time.32 Other Pacific Northwest directors, including Jim Brush from the

Bremerton School District, Scott Brown (who succeeded King at Roosevelt in 1984), and Hal

Sherman from Kent-Meridian High School all cite Ralph Mutchler as a major influence on their

teaching careers, as well as a primary source for charts.33 It is clear that by the 1960s, jazz

educators in the Seattle area, trained at CWU and Olympic College, were establishing a

foundation that would grow into the tradition of excellent school jazz ensembles that continues

today.

31
Leonard Feather, “OC Jazz Festival,” Downbeat, July 26, 1966, 27.

32
George Wiskirchen, “If We’re Going to Teach Jazz, We Must Teach Improvisation,” Music Educator’s Journal, no.
62 (1975), 69.

33
Hal Sherman, interviewed by author, recording and notes, Seattle, Dec. 2, 2015; Scott Brown, interviewed by
author, recording and notes, Seattle, Jan. 11, 2016.
 McGovern 11

Waldo King started the first jazz program in Seattle high schools in 1960, when he was

hired as the director of bands and orchestras at Garfield High School. Funding was limited, as it

always has been for public school music programs, and at first, they did not even have a drum

set. Despite this, King recalls that the band became a sensation, playing at basketball games and

school dances.34 Other schools in the district began including “stage bands” in their music

curricula. By 1965, King felt that the Garfield student body became “unstable” and difficult to

teach due to the influence of Civil Rights and Black Power movement activists like Stokely

Carmichael, “who was nationally known for his hostility to white authority.”35 King, who is

white, left Garfield that year to teach concert band, stage band, and orchestra at Franklin High

School. In a short time, significant social and political change continued, no doubt through the

influence of the Black Power movement, intensified by Carmichael’s visit to Garfield High

School in 1967, and the formation of the Black Panther Party in 1968.36 From King’s

perspective, “adjusting school attendance areas, forced bussing, racial tensions, and the war in

Vietnam all had a negative effect on student attitude.”37 By 1969, he left Franklin to teach in the

music department at Roosevelt High School, which served an even whiter, middle class

neighborhood.

These were undoubtedly complex and tense times for both students and teachers in

Seattle. King’s reference to “adjusting school attendance” and “forced bussing” refer to the

School District’s efforts at the time to integrate the public schools, which were suffering from de

facto segregation. The city instituted a Voluntary Racial Transfer program in 1963, encouraging
34
Waldo King, interviewed by author, notes, Seattle, Jan. 19, 2016.

35
Ibid.

36
“The Early History of the UW Black Student Union,” Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project.

37
King, interview.
 McGovern 12

African American students, who made up the majority of Garfield’s student population, to switch

to other schools throughout the city, while conversely asking white students to transfer into

inner-city schools.38 To complement this, in 1968, they also started the first “magnet” fine arts

program at Garfield that reintroduced jazz into the curriculum, hoping that it would attract a

more diverse student body from all over the city. However, many members of the black

community were suspicious of these gestures. In a 1968 article in the Seattle P-I, the chairman of

Garfield’s Citizen Advisory Committee is quoted, explaining there is a “feeling that Seattle’s

black community has once again been presented with a worked-out program in which it had little

role or say.”39 Contrary to King’s use of the word “forced,” these programs were actually not

mandatory at this time. Consequently, they did little to diversify Garfield, whose student body

had become 80% African American by 1970 as many of its white students fled to private or

suburban schools.40 Despite the district’s efforts, the Seattle public schools remained heavily

segregated by the 1970s, and this restricted the availability of good jazz instruction to the whiter,

suburban high schools.

Jazz at the University of Washington

The first notable achievements in integration in higher education came from black

students taking matters into their own hands at the University of Washington. The BSU, founded

in early 1968, acted as a catalyst for integration on campus, and consequently, the broadening of

the school’s nearly non-existent jazz and black studies curricula. At the time of the group’s

creation, only 150 of the school’s 30,000 students were black, there were no classes offered in

African American studies, and there were only ten black professors, less than one percent of the
38
Taylor, 211.

39
John de Yonge, “Garfield Magnet Arts Plan Lacks Support,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jul. 30, 1968.

40
Taylor, 216.
 McGovern 13

faculty.41 The BSU concluded that the UW was institutionally racist, and staged a sit-in at the

UW administrative building on May 20, 1968. In a letter written to President Charles Odegaard,

they articulated their demands, which included giving the BSU “financial resources and aids

necessary to recruit and tutor non-white students,” the establishment of a Black Studies Planning

Committee under the direction and control of the Black Student Union, and hiring “black

representatives on the music faculty,” specifically two jazz musicians named Byron Pope and Joe

Brazil.42 President Odegaard agreed to their demands, and by the following autumn quarter of

1968, there were 465 black students, and a Black Studies major was initiated.43

However, the School of Music only opened up one faculty jazz position, a joint

appointment between the Black Studies Department and the School of Music, to which they

asked both Pope and Brazil to apply. Brazil, in a letter to Director Bergsma, cited in The Daily

student newspaper, stated, “I feel the pitting of our abilities against each other is a scheme to

divide the Black brothers. If this be the case, I want no part of it.”44 Pope was hired into the

position to teach a “History of Jazz” course as well as private saxophone instruction. He stated in

an interview that “black people in Seattle got angry because they felt that Joe should have

received the position;” Brazil had lived in Seattle longer than Pope and been a more active

member in the community.45 Although the efforts of the BSU had resulted in a more diverse

41
Taylor, 222-223; University of Washington Bulletin, General Catalog 1967-1969 (Seattle: University of
Washington Press), 10.

42
UWSC, Presidents’ papers, Odegaard, “Letter to President Odegaard,” (1968), 3-4.

43
Taylor, 223.

44
Tricia Kinch, “The History of a Tenure Decision,” The Daily, Apr. 20, 1976.

45
Byron Pope, interviewed by author, notes, Seattle, Feb. 1, 2016.
 McGovern 14

campus and more opportunities to study jazz at the University, it is clear that racial tensions

remained high, and that the Music School was reluctant to enlarge the jazz program.

Before we consider UW jazz in the following years, it is important to acknowledge the

history of the program. Although there are accounts of student-run jazz groups since the 1930s,

the School of Music refused to endorse an official jazz band class for a long time. A sympathetic

faculty member named Bill Cole, who also directed concert band, took it upon himself to lead a

stage band during the 1960s, part of the wave of jazz bands that took college campuses by storm

across the country, and largely influenced by Waldo King’s pioneering ensemble at Garfield.46

Cole would later teach classical concert band at the magnet program at Garfield (along with Joe

Brazil, who taught jazz).47 Thanks in part to Cole’s efforts, by 1969, according to the UW

general course catalog records, the school finally offered “Jazz Ensemble” as a course for

academic credit.48

However, Cole was not the only faculty member advocating for jazz education early on.

A 1966 article from the Seattle Times explains that Bill Smith, a white musician, was hired to

teach composition, improvisation, and music theory at the UW. Smith was already well-regarded

in both the classical and jazz worlds, holding a master’s degree in music from the University of

California Berkeley, as well as experience playing with jazz innovator Dave Brubeck. Bergsma

proudly proclaimed in the Times piece that Smith “is a recognized composer who also happens to

be a brilliant jazz clarinetist.”49 Smith originally taught “History of Jazz,” but would later also

46
Alex W. Rodriguez, “A Brief History of Jazz Education, Pt. 2,” NPR Jazz, National Public Radio (Seattle, WA: KUOW,
Jan. 8, 2013).

47
Yonge, “Magnet Plan Lacks Support,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

48
University of Washington Bulletin, General Catalog 1969-1970 (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 527.

49
John Hinterberger, “We Have a Find,” The Seattle Times, July 31, 1966, 33.
 McGovern 15

teach a course on jazz improvisation. Tom Collier, an up and coming percussionist and jazz

drummer at the time, who would later serve as a co-founder of the Jazz Studies major at UW,

attests that Smith was huge influence on him, encouraging him to continue playing jazz as well

as to pursue an academic career in it, which at the time was still a fledgling and marginal

discipline.50 The hiring of Smith, likely due to his “legitimate” status as a classical artist and

holder of an advanced university degree (as opposed to being solely a professional jazz

musician), brought an aura of academic respectability to the early UW jazz program.51

Yet, by the early 1970s, the Seattle P-I criticized the UW for being “very slow to respond

to the jazz education trend.”52 When the article was written in 1972, impressive jazz programs

were flourishing at Cornish School for the Arts, Central Washington State College, Olympic

College, and even local high schools like Nathan Hale and Kent-Meridian, which were earning

the Northwest national prestige at big band festivals.53 By comparison, the UW offered only two

jazz courses for one credit each. This was probably due to a cut in state funds, but the traditional

emphasis on European classical styles at the School of Music also still relegated jazz to a second

class status.54 Despite this, the most popular class taught in the School of Music at this time was

“History of Jazz” (though it was not yet offered for academic credit), first taught by Byron Pope,

then Joe Brazil.

50
Tom Collier, interviewed by author, recording and notes, Seattle, Jan. 20, 2016.

51
Ken Prouty, “A History of Jazz Education: A Critical Reassessment,” Journal of Historical Research in Music
Education, no. 26 (2005): 88.

52
Ed Stover, “Jazz Goes to School in the Northwest,” The Seattle P-I, July 16, 1972, 8.

53
Kurt Armbruster, Before Seattle Rocked (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 295-296.

54
Ibid.
 McGovern 16

Brazil replaced Byron Pope in the fall of 1969, after Pope suddenly left UW to take a jazz

lecturer job at Oregon State University.55 According to jazz historian Steve Griggs, Pope had

taught the “History of Jazz” course, given private lessons, and worked with the jazz ensemble. At

the end of the school year, he had recommended that the “curriculum and faculty be expanded to

include all forms of Black Music and that the program move from the School of Music to

Ethnomusicology,” but the UW ignored these suggestions.56 Pope left near the beginning of the

1969/1970 school year, so the School of Music actively sought out Brazil to replace him. Brazil

had been working as an engineering assistant at the Applied Physics Lab at UW; he accepted the

vacant jazz lecturer position, despite taking a cut in annual salary, because of his expertise and

deep passion for the music.57

As a teacher of “History of Jazz” and Black Studies at UW and the broader community,

Brazil served as an inspiration for many students. The School of Music “didn’t expect Joe’s

charisma,” states Dr. Edward Reed, now a faculty member at Seattle University, who had

worked as an unpaid Teacher’s Assistant for the “History of Jazz” class. When interviewed,

Reed spoke of how Brazil embodied and professed the Black Power movement, proudly wearing

traditional African garb to his lectures, and encouraging his students to follow their dreams and

not give up in the face of systematic oppression.58 Drummer Garry Owens also took Brazil’s

class, in awe of his associations with famous jazz musicians such as Herbie Hancock, McCoy

Tyner, and John Coltrane: “He didn’t come to write books, he came to play and teach. He taught

55
Byron Pope, interview.

56
Steve Griggs, “Joe Brazil: Justice for Joe,” Earshot Magazine, April 2012, 4.

57
Kinch, “The History of a Tenure Decision,” The Daily.

58
Edward Reed, interviewed by author, recording and notes, Seattle, Jan. 9, 2016.
 McGovern 17

me that I could be a revolutionary in art- defend it, keep playing, and keep hope alive.”59 Owens

was also a student at the Black Academy of Music, an organization outside of UW which Brazil

founded in the late 1960s, a socially conscious effort to educate anyone in the city who wished to

learn African-American music, play for charity, as well as help black students gain admission to

the UW School of Music.60 He utilized his extensive personal connections to help young students

and musicians meet professional jazz artists who were gigging in town, and would perform at

prisons and other venues as a community service. Current Garfield jazz band director Clarence

Acox fondly recalls how Brazil brought in legendary saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to a

Saturday morning workshop, where Acox got to play with him.61 Brazil was a beloved member

of the Seattle jazz community, but he would face obstacles at the UW.

Racial Politics of College Jazz Education

Developing the jazz program at UW was an uphill battle for Brazil. Although his

“History of Jazz” class was wildly popular on campus, the School of Music did not always

support his efforts to expand jazz education. Brazil would bring in some of the biggest names in

jazz through his personal connections with them, such as McCoy Tyner, but the School of Music

refused to allocate any money to make a video tape of the performances.62 On October 17, 1974,

the Black Studies Department and School of Music held separate meetings to discuss whether to

grant Brazil tenure, since Brazil was jointly appointed between the two units. The Black Studies

faculty unanimously voted to grant tenure to Brazil, but the School of Music voted against it.63
59
Griggs, 4-5.

60
Ibid, 3.

61
Acox, interview.

62
Kinch, “The History of a Tenure Decision,” The Daily.

63
Griggs, 6.
 McGovern 18

The College Council of the Arts and Sciences that reviews tenure cases sided with the Music

department’s decision. In an article in the Daily, Dean of Arts and Sciences George Beckmann

explained, “The council and I found serious deficiencies in the effectiveness of his teaching…

while we recognize his service to the Black community we noted that Professor Brazil has not

responded in meeting basic departmental requirements.”64 His tenure denial ignited the whole

city in controversy, and disparate articles with conflicting opinions were published in African

American newspapers such as The Medium and more conservative, white newspapers like the

Seattle Times.65 Many students protested, leading to the temporary closure of the music building

as well as foreboding statements in the Seattle P-I that “Brazil’s cool jazz class could today

touch off the school year’s first confrontation between UW minorities and activists, and the

University’s administration.”66

Students who rallied in support of Joe Brazil were not only advocating for his specific

case, but for a reform in the tenure system, and a greater attention to student voices in the

process. In a Daily poll taken shortly before the Brazil tenure rally in April 1976, several

students criticized tenure as a “rotten deal” that “keeps someone who isn’t good and gets rid of

the people who should be kept on.”67 It is also notable that other students agreed with the music

faculty’s decision that Brazil should not have been given tenure. “Few music majors think Joe

Brazil should stay,” a classical music student stated in the Daily article: “They’re making a racial

issue out of a teaching issue.”68 Brazil apparently was frequently late to class and taught a
64
Brian Haughton and Sharon Bibb, “Another tenure casualty: this time Joe Brazil.” The Daily, Dec. 11, 1974.

65
Connie Bennett, “Racism Hits the University of Washington Again?” The Medium, Dec. 18, 1974.

66
Joel Connelly, “Brazil’s Backers Ready to Strike,” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Apr. 21, 1976.

67
Wendy Marcus, “Some will boycott for Brazil, while poll shows others don’t know about it,” The Daily, Apr. 21,
1976.

68
Marcus, “Some will boycott for Brazil,” The Daily.
 McGovern 19

perspective that was “too pro-black for the University,” according to Byron Pope.69 Indeed,

Brazil did “ruffle the feathers” of UW School Music faculty when he suggested emerging

research that classical composers Beethoven and Haydn had black ancestry.70 While his teaching

style was likely unorthodox, students and faculty were divided over whether his tenure denial

was primarily about academic standards or racism.

Brazil filed a complaint of race discrimination with the King County Office of Civil

Rights (OCR) in 1975, as documented in the OCR’s Investigative Report, Joseph Brazil vs. the

University of Washington. The report indicates some faculty believed that “race was a factor in

the Music faculty’s vote… insofar as the faculty did not know how to understand or evaluate him

because of his race/cultural background as a Black jazz musician with little formal academic

training.”71 However, the report concludes that there is “no reason to believe” that there was

racial discrimination because it involved “serious questions unrelated to the Complainant’s race

regarding his… teaching ability, scholarship or performance record, and university service.”72

Professor Marc Seales, who has been a tenured member of the jazz faculty since the early 1990s,

explained it this way: “There are certain processes one has to go through to become tenured by a

university, and Joe didn’t meet those requirements.”73 Regardless of whether or not Brazil was

unfairly denied tenure because of his race, this issue showcases how jazz education had become

69
Pope, interview.
70

David Schaeffer, “Were Beethoven, Haydn black? Yes, says musician,” Seattle Times, Apr. 9, 1972.
71

UWSC, Charles Z. Smith papers, Charles Z. Smith, “Investigative Report: Joseph Brazil vs. the University of
Washington,” Case No. 1057754082 (Oct. 31, 1975), 14.

72
Ibid, 25.

73
Marc Seales, interviewed by author, recording and notes, Seattle, Dec. 3, 2015.
 McGovern 20

a lightning rod for debates about race and academic standards at UW. In the end, his appeal was

denied and he was forced to leave the school by 1976.74

After the Office of Civil Rights had decided that race was not a factor in the denial of

tenure to Brazil, tensions persisted on the UW campus. During the 1976 academic year, the final

year of Brazil’s teaching contract, the UW hired Milton Stewart, a black scholar of jazz from the

University of Michigan, to replace Brazil. According to a 1982 article in the Seattle P-I, Stewart

had a PhD in ethnomusicology as well as two masters degrees.75 In 1976, he was attracted to the

UW by the School of Music director, who desperately wanted him to teach “History of Jazz” and

the jazz ensembles the following fall quarter. Yet Stewart also received phone calls from

supporters of Brazil urging him to “turn down the position on principle,” as stated in a Daily

article from that year. Joe Brazil and members of the BSU believed that Stewart’s hiring was

merely a method to disguise the racism towards Brazil with a veil of legitimacy.76 Nevertheless,

Stewart began teaching as a jazz instructor in the fall of 1976.

However, in 1982, like Brazil, Stewart was denied tenure.77 The reasons for this seem

even less clear than in Brazil’s case. The director of the School of Music, quoted in a Seattle P-I

article from the same year, explained that the decision was made “regretfully and strictly on the

issue of record, teaching, and service.”78 Tom Collier, who had joined the jazz faculty as a small-

group instructor by 1982 (he had worked at the UW since 1980), stated that “Stewart had the

74
Kinch, “The History of a Tenure Decision,” The Daily.

75
Steve Miletich, “Stewart Wavers on Jazz Appointment Here,” The Daily, Apr. 22, 1976, 3.

76

Miletich, “Stewart wavers,” The Daily.

77
Brian Haughton, “Án echo as UW drops 2nd black jazz teacher,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Nov. 5, 1982.

78
Ibid.
 McGovern 21

opposite problem of Brazil” – although Stewart had a PhD, he was less “connected to the music”

than Brazil.79 However, Hubert Locke, the Dean of Graduate School of Public Affairs and a

member of the committee that hired Stewart, explained to a P-I reporter that he was an

“outstanding black scholar” who published “books and several papers, receiving several post-

doctorate grants from the University of Washington.”80 In the same newspaper article, Stewart

accused the UW of “conning [him] out of [his] job,” now certain that he was “used by the

university to ‘legitimize’ the School of Music’s termination of Brazil.”81

The UW careers of Joe Brazil and Milton Stewart showcase the racial politics involved in

the tenure process in UW jazz education. Renowned African American jazz educator David

Baker wrote that during the 1960s and 70s, the black jazz faculty hired at college campuses were

all too often expected to be outstanding in more ways than most of their white counterparts,

“possessing not only international-level performance skill but also an advanced degree,

administrative ability, and experience as a conductor.” Thus, if black teachers did not meet all

these standards, regardless of their other qualifications to teach jazz, they were unlikely to

receive tenure.82 In the OCR investigative report on Brazil’s case, one music professor stated that

Brazil did not deserve tenure because he had not garnered “much more than local recognition as

a jazz musician.”83 This ignores the fact that Brazil was renowned for his jam sessions in the late

79
Collier, interview.

80
Haughton, “UW drops 2nd black jazz teacher,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

81
Ibid.

82
David Baker, Jazz Pedagogy (Chicago: db Music Workshop/Maher Publications, 1979), as cited in Prouty,
Knowing Jazz: Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age (Jackson, MI: University Press of
Mississippi, 2012), 58.

83
UWSC, Charles Z. Smith papers, Smith, “Joseph Brazil vs. the University of Washington,” 12.
 McGovern 22

1950s at his house in Detroit, where he hosted and recorded with jazz legends John Coltrane and

Joe Henderson, among others.84

Similarly, Stewart faced challenges as the only black faculty member, despite his

academic credentials. A Mexican-American ethnomusicology professor at that time, Robert

Garfias, stated that “Stewart sort of isolated himself,” implying that Stewart was partly to blame

for his tenure denial; yet he also said, “That happens to minorities all the time. We’re

accustomed to being isolated.”85 Professor Seales declined to comment on Stewart’s case, though

he did say that “there are definitely politics involved in tenure decisions.” This issue continues to

be a delicate subject: The ambiguous comments from Garfias and Seales indicate the sensitive

nature of racial politics surrounding minority faculty tenure cases within college jazz education.

While the racialized struggle for jazz education at UW brought the attention of white Seattleites

to the issues of structural inequalities in jazz education, it did little to alleviate those inequalities.

Before the 1980s, the only groups that had some success in doing this were community entities,

independent of any formal institution.

Community Jazz Education

In 1968, several dedicated Seattle jazz educators began to make serious efforts to connect

the African American community to the jazz education movement in Seattle’s whiter and more

affluent neighborhoods. Brazil and local white bassist Chuck Metcalf co-founded the Search for

Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK), a summer school music program for

underprivileged students. As a one-time endeavor over the summer of 1968, the goal of SEEK

was to train 400 young people in jazz, rock, pop, and other vernacular music. Naturally, there

were no formally accredited teachers in these subjects, so the instructors were drawn from

84
Julian Priester, interviewed by author, notes, Seattle, Feb. 5, 2016.

85
Haughton, “UW drops 2nd black jazz teacher,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
 McGovern 23

practicing musicians within the city.86 Director Bergsma assessed the program in a proposal for

city-wide jazz instruction: the “turnover was great on this staff because of professional music

commitments on the part of instructors, and this resulted in too much flexibility in the program.”

However, he also acknowledges that “many students really learned something solid; many were

inspired; others kept off the streets and entertained.”87 SEEK was an experimental effort in

teaching music that resonated more with young people, and it may have been more successful

had there been greater economic support and incentive for the professional musicians who taught

it. Brazil and other educators used the lessons of SEEK to establish more effective programs for

community outreach.

Along with guitarist George Hurst and trumpeter Floyd Standifer, a veteran of the

Jackson Street scene, Brazil founded the Black Academy of Music (BAM) in 1967, which

offered free instruments and playing opportunities for anyone who wished to join.88 Notable

students such as Gary Hammond earned one of the first scholarships to study at the New England

Conservatory.89 It was through BAM that Robert Knatt and Wadie Earvin, both African

American Seattle jazz educators who did not have official jazz training, were able to gain a

deeper knowledge of the music and pass it on to their students at Washington and Meany Middle

Schools, located around the Central District. Knatt recalled the first gig that he played with BAM

was at a prison. He was stunned to see one inmate step up to play with the group: the inmate was

a “phenomenal guitarist,” finally receiving an outlet for his musical talent.90 Brazil received
86
UWSC, Presidents’ papers, Odegaard, “Proposed Program,” 13.

87
Ibid, 15.

88
Armbruster, 264.

89
Griggs, 3.

90
Robert Knatt, interviewed by author, notes, Seattle, Feb. 6, 2016.
 McGovern 24

several different grants to continue BAM, which was renamed the Brazil Academy of Music in

the mid-1970s. According to a 1976 Daily article, Brazil was awarded a $66,000 research grant

from Seattle Model Cities to help operate the academy, as well as funding from the National

Endowment for the Arts.91 The academy was also the recipient of a service award from none

other than the King of Sweden, Carl Gustof.92 Brazil’s knack for earning grants also helped in his

direct service to disadvantaged students the Seattle school district.

In 1970, the UW School of Music, Black Studies department, Cornish, and the Director

of Music for Seattle Public Schools, Jack Schaeffer, drafted a proposal for a broader city-wide

effort at jazz education, written by Bergsma. By now, the Boeing strike had hit the Seattle

economy hard, contributing to a 12% unemployment rate.93 Furthermore, a district double levy

failure caused significant cuts to arts funding in the public schools, so funding was scarce for

such a broad music education program. The board sent a grant proposal to the Rockefeller

Foundation, requesting around $300,000 in funding over a three-year period.94 The goal was to

train “50 to 60 individually selected students, ages 12 through the college level, from beginning

instrumental instruction to private and group instruction” in African American music.95 The

program sought to hire pianist Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi ensemble, who had been

performing for Brazil’s classes, as artists in residence. Furthermore, using Cornish and the UW

as rehearsal spaces, the program would pay for instruments for all public school students who

91
Kinch, “The History of a Tenure Decision,” The Daily.

92
Griggs, 7.

93
City of Seattle, “Brief History of Seattle,” Seattle Municipal Archives, http://www.seattle.gov/cityarchives/seattle-
facts/brief-history-of-seattle (accessed Mar. 1, 2016).

94
UWSC, Presidents’ papers, Odegaard, “Proposed Program,” 12.

95
Ibid, 1.
 McGovern 25

wished to partake, from elementary through high school. The ensemble, as well as Brazil and

other jazz musicians, would serve as instructors for the project. The Rockefeller Foundation

praised the effort, stating that “it could serve as a model, particularly for other institutions that

understand the importance of jazz in our culture but have not discovered how to deal with it in

academia.”96 Yet, they only offered $100,000 over two years. While this funding could most

likely have kick started the program, Bergsma and Schaeffer decided that it was not worth it.

According to Sam Kelly, Vice President of Minority Affairs, Brazil and the Black Studies

members of the proposal committee did not consent to this decision.97 Nevertheless, the proposal

was dropped, and a city-wide jazz education project in Seattle never materialized.

Brazil’s efforts to mobilize jazz education as a public service in Seattle echo the work of

similar black musician activist leaders such as pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams in

Chicago. Abrams was one of the co-founders of the Association for the Advancement of

Creative Music (AACM), a famous, large-scale, union-like musician’s collective that sought to

“cultivate young musicians and to create music of a high artistic level for the general public,”

free of commercial restraints, through conducting “free training programs for young, aspiring

musicians,” among several other public service goals.98 Many early AACM musicians received

formal music training at Wendell Phillips and DuSable High Schools, two inner city high schools

that housed legendary band directors Major Clark Smith and Captain Walter Dyett, both

infamous for their strictness and high standards for their students.99 But the AACM was created

largely separate from formal academic institutional backing, though it succeeded in earning
96
Griggs, 5.

97
Griggs, 5.

98
Lewis, 116.

99
Lewis, 12.
 McGovern 26

grants when the organization grew nationwide. It was established on the south side of Chicago,

an area with a large, black population due to strict racial covenant laws that were not abolished

until the late 1940s.100 As a result, even into the 1970s, Chicago remained heavily segregated

across the North-South border. Despite this, the AACM gained a large following of musicians of

all races, and its tight organizational leadership and momentum allowed it to gain national

notoriety and shine as a beacon of community activism through jazz and creative music.101

The similarities between Abrams’s and Brazil’s community outreach are astounding,

though certain key differences affected the outcomes of their efforts. While Brazil’s BAM

probably never possessed the same level of organization and number of participants as the

AACM, they had similar goals. Both dealt with educating youth in culturally relevant music

while still giving back to the community, however the difference in the size of these two

communities is striking. Chicago’s south side had experienced an unprecedented growth in its

African American population in the years following WWII, with an increase of hundreds of

thousands moving in.102 By comparison, in 1950, Seattle had a black population of 15,666, and

by 1970 it had reached only 37,868.103 More significant strides in community African-American

music education were made in Chicago for the simple reason that there was a large enough

community to support those programs and make their voices heard by white Chicagoans, despite

more overtly racist laws and practices than those in Seattle. Seattle’s black community simply

did not have a strong enough presence to overcome the indifference of the majority of the white

population to the city’s structural racism. Seattle music programs needed to hire more activists

100
Lewis, 2.

101
Ibid, 3.
102
Lewis, 3.

103
Taylor, 235.
 McGovern 27

and minority leaders like Brazil and Abrams in order to bring greater attention to the issue and

inspire meaningful change in the acceptance and availability of jazz education.

Racial Tensions Decrease

By the 1980s, Seattle finally successfully had hired several inspirational African

American jazz teachers, both in college and the public schools. At UW, after Stewart’s tenure

denial and subsequent firing, the School of Music hired a new director, Dan Neuman, who had a

background in ethnomusicology. According to Collier, Neuman professed from the outset that he

wanted to start a Jazz Studies major at UW, and this endorsement from the top was a significant

step towards the creation of the degree.104 At the same time, the Cornish Institute for the Arts

bulked up its jazz program by hiring notable bassist Gary Peacock to teach theory,

trumpeter/composer Jim Knapp to teach composition and direct the big band, and, perhaps most

notably, African-American trombonist Julian Priester, who had grown up learning music in the

fruitful Chicago cultural jazz scene of the 1950s.105 The competition from Cornish further put

pressure on the UW to address its lacking jazz department, and by the mid-1980s, pianist Marc

Seales, who is also black, was hired to teach private lessons and direct various ensembles. By the

late 1980s, Neuman commissioned Collier and Seales to write the proposal for a Jazz Studies

curriculum. Originally, this resulted in the first instance of a bachelor’s degree in Music “with a

focus on Jazz Studies,” appearing in the course catalogues by 1988, but by the early 1990s, it

was a full-blown major, separate from the general music curriculum.106 However, Seales needed

more financial incentive to stay as a teacher at UW, since his part-time position as a lecturer was

not lucrative enough to help raise his family in Seattle. Therefore, he applied for tenure, using his
104
Collier, interview.

105
Jim Knapp, interviewed by author, notes, Jan. 25, 2016.

106
University of Washington Bulletin, General Catalog 1988-1990 (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 158.
 McGovern 28

recordings as a professional jazz artist as a form of “published” output.107 In the early 1990s, the

School of Music awarded tenure to Seales, the first black UW jazz professor to earn such an

honor. This decision represented a lessening of racial tension over the acceptance of jazz at the

UW.

Meanwhile, the Seattle School district also made strides in providing more equitable jazz

education through hiring minority instructors in inner city schools. In an effort to save Garfield

High School’s band program, which had been in shambles after the departure of Waldo King in

1965, Principal Howard White reached out to Clarence Acox, an African American jazz

drummer and educator, who had recently earned a master’s degree in music education from

Southern University in Louisiana.108 Acox was hired in 1971 as director of the concert and

marching band programs at Garfield; the jazz band had been completely cut due to a lack of

funding. The significance of Acox’s hiring cannot be understated: it symbolically showed that

Garfield was committed to providing outstanding black teachers as role models in the arts.

Due to the “white flight” to suburban schools and the lopsided Voluntary Racial Transfer

program of the 1960s, enrollment at Garfield had plummeted from around 1,600 to under 1,000

by the early 1970s.109 But this did not stop Acox from working tirelessly to build the program

back up. As he explained in an interview, during the first decade of his hiring, he “wrote

arrangements, grabbed kids in the hallways who he thought might be able to play,” started jazz

band summer camps, and took his students to regional festivals, such as Mt. Hood Community

107
Seales, interview.

108

Acox, interview.

109
Nile Thompson and Carolyn J. Marr, “Garfield High School,” The Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State
History, 1862-2000, http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=10509 (Accessed Feb.
14, 2016).
 McGovern 29

College and the Reno Jazz Festivals.110 Additionally during the 1970s, Charles Chinn, an Asian-

American teacher, was hired to rebuild the jazz band program at Franklin High, which raised

successful musicians such as Kenneth Gorelick, better known as “Kenny G.”111 Knatt and Earvin,

trained at BAM to teach jazz, were also hired by the Seattle School district to teach at

Washington and Meany Middle Schools, which both served as “feeder” programs into Garfield

and Roosevelt. Local jazz historian and journalist Milton Krieger connects Acox, Chinn, Knatt,

and Earvin as the “next generation’s messengers,” passing on the tradition of cultural self-

empowerment, discipline, and life skills to their students, reminiscent of successful black

pioneers like Walter Dyett in Chicago’s DuSable High School.112 However, unlike Dyett, these

educators would face a radical change in their student demographic by the 1980s.

In 1978, the Seattle School district introduced the first mandatory bussing act in order to

correct the racial inequality in schools that had persisted for decades. At the same time, in order

to boost its reputation and attract suburban students, Garfield and Washington both began to

house the Advanced Placement Program (APP), a city-funded endeavor similar to the “magnet”

program of the late 1960s, to provide high quality education in math, sciences, and the arts for

gifted students, in order to further attract students from more affluent neighborhoods.113 These

two programs profoundly transformed the makeup of Garfield’s student population, which saw

an influx of white students into its arts program through the late 1970s and 1980s. By 1979, the

student body had gone from 81% African American to 60%.114

110
Lynn Darroch, “Rhythm in the Rain” (Seattle: Ooligan Press, 2015), 151; Acox, interview.

111
Brown, interview.

112
Milton Krieger, The Less Subdued Excitement (Bellingham, WA: Whatcom Country Historical Society, 2012), 112.

113
Thompson, “Garfield High School.”

114
Allie Holly-Gottlieb, “A Tale of Two Schools,” The Stranger, Apr. 27, 2000.
 McGovern 30

Yet, inequity in education continued. The vast majority of students enrolled in the APP

classes were white, and as a result, Acox and Knatt taught few minority students in their jazz

bands. However, the programs did begin to flourish. Under superb leadership, Garfield started to

rival Roosevelt, Kent-Meridian, and John Moawad’s Nathan Hale bands by winning the Reno

Jazz Festival in 1990 and many subsequent years since. After an APP parent organization raised

nearly $80,000 through auctions, bake sales, and the like, Acox was able to take the jazz band on

its first European tour in the early 1990s, simulating the experience of a professional, world-

touring jazz band.115 Since then, Garfield’s band has been able to offer scholarships and financial

assistance for private lessons, summer band camps, and providing instruments for some

underprivileged students. Progress has been made, but a lack of both state funding and racial

diversity in Seattle public school jazz education exists to this day.116

Conclusion

Former students and teachers within the Seattle music education scene during the 1960s

and 1970s often reference economic conditions as the main factor that hindered the development

and accessibility of jazz education for all students. They claim that there were no racial issues

within the ensembles themselves, which did occasionally have a few minority students, even in

predominantly white high school and college ensembles.117 It is perhaps true that race was a

minor factor when it came to performing the music itself. Nonetheless, it is closed minded to

believe that the story of jazz education in Seattle is free of racial politics. Quintard Taylor

explains that Seattle’s “apparent success, and its underlying failure, in its race relations

paradigm” has been its carefully crafted image as a racially liberal city that promotes the
115
Krieger, 113; Acox, interview.

116
Krieger, 113.

117
Norm Wallen, interviewed by the author, notes, Seattle, Jan. 15, 2016.
 McGovern 31

“illusion of inclusion.”118 The reality is that formal jazz education programs in Seattle were only

available to students whose families could afford the upkeep and offstage costs of these

ensembles.

My research on the funding and racial politics of Seattle jazz education contributes to the

ongoing scholarship on music education, race, and the history of Seattle. Seattle’s history of jazz

education is nationally unique due to the relative small size and influence of its African

American community, the de facto segregation of the school district, its nationally known top

ensembles, and its effective leadership of those ensembles. Individual teachers stand out, like Joe

Brazil, who pushed the status quo, fighting against the reluctance of the UW School of Music to

promote jazz education in both academic and community settings. Brazil, Chuck Metcalf,

Clarence Acox, and others sought to bring jazz back to the black community through programs

such as BAM, and the impact of these efforts can still be seen today.

While the student makeup of Seattle Schools jazz programs and the UW Jazz Studies

major remains predominantly white and wealthy, there are increasingly more efforts to provide

the same quality jazz education opportunities for minority communities and the working class in

Seattle. Practically every high school and college jazz program in the Seattle area now offers

scholarships for students who cannot afford the cost of instruments, festivals, and other ensemble

fees. At the grassroots level, the non-profit organization Seattle JazzED was founded in 2010 by

parents of Roosevelt and Garfield high school jazz band students to provide excellent jazz

education open to all Seattle-area students, regardless of their financial situations.119 Like

Brazil’s BAM, it features several professional artists and educators, like Clarence Acox and

118
Taylor, 239.
119
Peter Blecha, “Seattle JazzED: A Seattle Music Education Organization,” The Free Online Encyclopedia of
Washington State History, http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=11144,
(Accessed Feb. 20, 2016).
 McGovern 32

Robert Knatt, as instructors. One of JazzED’s cofounders, Laurie de Koch, summarizes the

problems of Seattle jazz education, with this statement:

Both of my children went through Washington Middle School and Garfield High
School and were very involved in the music programs there. I was very impressed
with the level of education that they were receiving -- and with the kind of impact
that music education had on kids in terms of developing character and giving
these kids life-skills. But, what was disturbing to me was how white the bands
were -- especially because both schools are located in a very urban part of our
community in neighborhoods that are historically very African American. So,
while my kids were benefiting, I was keenly aware of how inequitable the
situation was. And, the deeper I looked the more I could see that it was tied to
economic and racial disparity in our city.120

JazzED has made laudable strides in its mission, now instructing up to 350 students hailing from

75 schools in the Seattle area, with particular emphasis placed on providing performance

opportunities for women and minority children.121 While Seattle may never be able to recreate

the authenticity of the Jackson Street cultural jazz scene, through the continued effort of teachers,

parents, and students, the city can correct the racial and economic imbalances that have held

back an otherwise exemplary model of jazz education.

120
Laurie de Koch, interviewed by Peter Blecha, recording and transcript, Seattle, Nov. 3, 2015.

121
Blecha, “Seattle JazzED.”
 McGovern 33

Bibliography

Primary Sources

ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Central Washington University Library Archives, Ellensburg, WA (CWUL)

Wallen Jazz Festival programs

University of Washington, Special Collections, Seattle (UWSC)

Smith Charles Z. Smith papers
Odegaard Presidents’ papers

INTERVIEWS

Acox, Clarence. Interviewed by author. Recording and notes. Seattle, November 22, 2015.

Berry, Overton. Interviewed by author. Recording and notes. Seattle, November 27, 2015.

Brown, Scott. Interviewed by author. Recording and notes. Seattle, January 11, 2016.

Collier, Tom. Interviewed by author. Recording and notes. Seattle, January 20, 2016.

De Koch, Laurie. Interviewed by Peter Blecha. Recording and transcript. Seattle, November 3, 2015.

King, Waldo. Interviewed by author. Notes. Seattle, January 19, 2016.

Knapp, Jim. Interviewed by author. Notes. Seattle, January 25, 2016.

Knatt, Robert. Interviewed by author. Notes. Seattle, February 6, 2016.

Pope, Byron. Interviewed by author. Notes. Seattle, February 1, 2016.

Priester, Julian. Interviewed by author. Notes. Seattle, February 5, 2016.

Reed, Edward. Interviewed by author. Recording and notes. Seattle, January 9, 2016.

Seales, Marc. Interviewed by author. Recording and notes. Seattle, December 3, 2015.

Sherman, Hal. Interviewed by author. Recording and notes. Seattle, December 2, 2015.

Wallen, Norm. Interviewed by author. Notes. Seattle, January 15, 2016.

 McGovern 34

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS

Bennett, Connie. “Racism Hits the University of Washington Again?” The Medium (Seattle),
December 18, 1974.

Feather, Leonard. “OC Jazz Festival.” Downbeat Magazine, July 26, 1966.

Hart, Linda. “Winning Is Everything!” Nathan Hale High School Sentinel, March 18, 1970.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1968-1982.

Connelly, Joel. “Brazil’s Backers Ready to Strike.” April 21, 1976.
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