JAZZ GRADE EXAMS, UK AND WORLDWIDE

Charlie was Lead Jazz Consultant to the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) from 1998 to 2007, as a result of which thousands of kids and adults that had no opportunity previously are now playing jazz.

As Lead Consultant, he developed and led a team that pioneered a ground-breaking set of jazz exams and 52 associated publications for beginner jazz musicians in piano, wind and brass instruments.

He led the roll out of the exams in 92 countries, and did many jazz workshops with thousands of instrumental and vocal teachers in the UK and around the world, touring the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand several times. He also trained and led an international team of consultants and examiners, all pro jazz musicians in their own right.

In the days of IAJE (International Association for Jazz Education), Charlie also gave frequent clinics at US conferences including New Orleans (1999), Long Beach (2004) and New York (2005). With Jamey Aebersold, he was one of two members of the IAJE Resource Team, appointed to answer questions and write articles for teachers about teaching improvisation.

These ‘grade exams’ in jazz are now published around the world, and provide a curriculum and assessment framework for instrumental educators, mainly classically trained, enabling mainstream kids and their teachers to approach jazz for the first time with authenticity. Key principles were to introduce improvisation from day 1, to teach the skills of pulse, rhythm and groove, and to insist on working by ear as well as from notation. Another key feature was to enable real beginners to play new contemporary jazz compositions, alongside simple but authentic arrangements of standards and 12 bar blues.

Altogether the team commissioned and and edited over 75 compositions and arrangements by arrangers from all corners of the jazz world for piano alone, and a similar number for each of the other instruments involved. Allies and now lifelong friends from that time of intense creativity include Nikki Iles, Pete Churchill, Simon Purcell, Scott Stroman, Leslie East, Hywel Davies, Phillip Mundey, Michelle James and Katherine Knight.

Above all, the work involved establishing a team of expert jazz educators and examiners, who could establish an authoritative set of international standards that all teachers could work to. Together their team established 5 new levels of achievement (Grades 1-5) through the definition of innovative assessment criteria, which assess key jazz skills including improvising, working by ear and reading lead sheets. Charlie also wrote ‘Jazz Piano from Scratch’, an established tutor book for beginner jazz pianists, still available worldwide from Hal Leonard and ABRSM Publishing.

He has kept up his skills with occasional clinics in the US, and here he is in 2014, working with a high school big band in Bloomfield, New Jersey.