Jazz is practice plus innovation for UCI director

When Kei Akagi played piano in Miles Davis’ band, the iconic trumpeter once gave him a simple and eloquent guideline: “I don’t care what you do as long as you mean it.”

For Akagi, who now directs the jazz studies program at UC Irvine, that supple philosophy is key to understanding jazz. And a recent Oscar-nominated movie is not.

“Whiplash,” which has racked up nods for Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay and more, stars Miles Teller as an ambitious drumming student in a New York conservatory and J.K. Simmons as his demanding teacher. Actually, “demanding” doesn’t quite cut it. Over the course of the film, Simmons’ character physically assaults the protagonist, hurls a chair at him and shouts — in a classroom — profanities that would make Quentin Tarantino wince.

Entertaining? Well, 95% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes think so. But amid all the hosannas, the movie has drawn a backlash from some who question its message about the nature of musical genius. And that doesn’t take into account the question of whether the sadistic music program in the film could exist in real life.

Last week, Akagi spoke with the Daily Pilot about his reaction to “Whiplash” and his own approach to music education. The following are excerpts from the conversation:

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Let’s start with the biggest question and work our way down from there. Do you think a real university professor could get away with what the teacher gets away with in that film?

Absolutely not. Someone like that, first of all, would never be hired. That kind of abusive behavior would come out in the various checks that any reputable institution is going to do when they hire somebody. And if, in fact, someone managed to keep that a secret when they came to, for example, UCI, and did something like that, they would not last one day.

That was my impression seeing the movie too. Now, granted, in the film we don’t know how long this guy has been teaching there. We don’t know what his job interview or his audition or anything else was like.

But it seemed to me, personally, that if you had this teacher who, No. 1, hits students in the classroom; No. 2, throws chairs at them; No. 3, makes them play until their fingers bleed; No. 4, screams the F-word; No. 5, makes racist and misogynistic and homophobic slurs — my feeling would be, within 24 hours of him doing that for the first time, there would be about eight students in the dean’s office telling them every single thing that had gone on.

Absolutely. And none of those actions are justifiable under any interpretation of the ethics and the rules written [by] an educational institution. So that’s very implausible.

So I was watching the whole thing — first of all, I’m not a movie critic by any means, but I thought the movie itself was very, very well done. I thought the acting was superb, and I loved the cinematography, just the rich use of warm, orange colors in various places. I really liked just the look of the movie. However, and this is just my opinion, I did not feel like I was watching a movie about music education. That was a movie about sports, about sports competition. The trope being used there was completely different.

I’ve heard people say that. I’ve heard people compare it to a sports movie, like you’re saying, to a prison movie. You think of these movies like “Unbroken” that take place in a POW camp.

Sure, or possibly a military-training movie.

Military, that’s the third one. Military. So I agree. They are kind of taking a story of that kind and setting it in the conservatory of a prestigious New York City university.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition from a moviemaking point of view, but highly implausible.

Well, tell me, then — now that we’ve established that movie as kind of a fantasy — tell me about your approach to teaching jazz. Let’s say that you had a drummer in the jazz ensemble here at UCI, and he was having a little trouble mastering the tempo. What would you do to make him a better drummer?

First of all ...

After you’ve thrown a chair at him, of course.

Right, sure, absolutely. The first thing any teacher, music teacher, needs is patience, because, especially at the higher education level — universities, conservatories — we’ve seen these students perform in auditions. And we’ve accepted them because we see something going on there, something in addition to mastery of skills at their level. Even if they don’t have that, we see, a lot of the time, just the spark of musical creativity. And that, to us, in the long run, is much more important.

I was hired by UCI to establish a jazz program, and the primary concern for me was how to balance two very, very sometimes different things in jazz. One is mastery of the history of what has already been done. You might call that the “conserving” component of the conservatory. In other words, you have to be taught, and you have to really understand, everything that’s gone on in jazz history and music history. But at the same time, you also have to act as if none of that happened and be utterly creative.

It’s interesting that you mentioned tradition and innovation. One thing that I felt watching “Whiplash” was that the filmmakers made jazz look like a very traditional — I would say, very objective — art form. In other words, if you’re learning to be a jazz drummer, it’s all about playing this beat exactly right, or playing it exactly the way so-and-so did on the recording. What I didn’t feel in the movie is that the teacher was really showing the students how to be innovative, how to improvise.

The other day, actually, I was listening to “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane, just listening to that incredibly detailed solo that he played. And I was thinking, objectively, is he playing it right? Is he playing it wrong, or is he just “meaning it,” like you say? Is he just playing what’s coming out of him naturally?

First of all, “Giant Steps” itself — Coltrane spent months practicing that before he brought it into the studio. And what he was doing on that piece hadn’t been done before. Coltrane, not just in “Giant Steps,” but throughout his entire career, obviously, was an incredible innovator. He’s one of the most innovative voices of the 20th century. But he was tremendously skilled, and he practiced.

Some people that I used to play with told me that they would go to Coltrane’s house, and Coltrane would come out to the living room — he would be practicing in the back, and he would come out to the living room — and say, “Hi” to whoever was visiting, and then promptly disappear back into his practice room and leave the person sitting there. Coltrane would practice 13, 15 hours a day. So here’s someone who was clearly blessed with creative genius but, at the same time, applied himself so ruthlessly to practicing and honing a skill.

As someone who teaches jazz at the university level, did that movie make you worry at all about student applications? Was there any anxiety that fewer students were going to apply to learn jazz at the university level if they’ve seen that movie?

That’s a good question. Actually, I hadn’t thought of that, because I don’t think that movie is realistic at all. But yes, that might happen. On the other hand, I worry more about students who would apply to a music program because they can’t make the distinction between music and athletics.

Because, you know, much as I respect athletics, the model there is not applicable to music straightforward like that. And if a student comes in with a tremendously competitive chip on her or his shoulder, that is going to get in the way of the music eventually. And that gives us one more thing that we have to dismantle so that they can really access the creative component.