ABSTRACT
The institutionalization of jazz education in the final decades of the twentieth century has meant it is now playing an increasingly important role in helping shape jazz in a way it did not in the past. In Europe, some institutions are less fixated with the dominant bebop-technicist pedagogy. As a jazz tradition was being shaped in America, a parallel tradition was being developed in Europe, shaped by its own aesthetic responses to the music. While this tradition hungrily absorbed the American vocabulary of jazz, some musicians sought to modify jazz from a European perspective. This legacy has a long history and is refracted in its jazz education today, which often follows American methodology, but can also reflect the needs and requirements of European jazz musicians and audiences. The result has been the emergence of what can only be described as a European approach to jazz education that has grown out of, and often runs parallel to, the basic American model.
