Transcribing is a fundamental teaching tool for jazz musicians, and its practice originates long before jazz music became a part of music education and academia. Jazz musicians require a proficient amount of technical skill, dexterity on their instrument, and overall musicality on their instrument. Most importantly, Jazz music demands a dedication to authenticity. To create authenticity, musicians must actively listen to recordings of authentic jazz music, and perform along with those records. This process is called transcribing. Transcribing process involves an extraordinary amount of ear-training and attention to detail, even more so than other forms of music in academia. Musicians who practice this process regularly develop a “jazz vocabulary”, or a set of performance practices and musical phrases that define the genre. Over time, musicians will internalize these practices, and their own improvisations and creations in jazz performance will remain rooted in jazz authenticity (Hinz 1995).

Transcription is built into the history of jazz music. Unlike the Euro-centric classical practices of music notation, performing and practicing jazz music was a strictly auditory endeavor (Hinz 1995). Musicians learned to internalize and imitate the music other musicians performed when performing. Over time, this practice led to a semi-standardized set of idioms and practices in jazz music. One example is the predominant use of “call and response” passages, where one musician would play a musical motif (or “lick”, in jazz terminology), and the rest of the horn section would repeat the motif in unison. While academia’s adoption of jazz music led to a stronger implementation of notation and music literacy, jazz’s unique idioms, licks, and vocabulary are a key element in performing the music authentically (Alperson 2016).

When comparing jazz music’s practices with the content of this course, we can see similarities between transcription and speech development, specifically the phonetic development of regional speech patterns, accents, and dialects. Children are able to replicate the speech patterns of their parents with incredible accuracy to pitch, cadence, and inflection (Astruc 2012). A child’s mind possesses the plasticity to recreate the sound target’s inflection to incredible detail, especially in more “musical” languages like Spanish (Astruc 2012). The process is often more difficult for jazz students, who often learn to transcribe at an age where the brain does not possess the same characteristics of plasticity (Petinou 2016). In academia, jazz transcription takes the innate process of early speech development and applies it artificially to create authenticity within the genre.

Hinz, B. (1995). Transcribing for Greater Musicality. Music Educators Journal, 82(1), 25-63. doi:10.2307/3398881

Petinou, K., & Theodorou, E. (2015). Early phonetic development in typically developing children: A longitudinal investigation from Cypriot-Greek child data. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 30(1), 12-28. doi:10.3109/02699206.2015.1095244

Astruc, L., Payne, E., Post, B., Vanrell, M. D., & Prieto, P. (2012). Tonal Targets in Early Child English, Spanish, and Catalan. Language and Speech, 56(2), 229-253. doi:10.1177/0023830912460494

J. (Producer). (2014, May 22). How to Transcribe Songs [Video file]. Retrieved July 12, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8vp7W-hCVI

Alperson, P. (2010). Symposium: Musical Improvisation. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 68(3), 273-299. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6245.2010.01421.x