Music: Jazz Goes to College

For a long time, campus dons, like a lot of other folk, took the view that jazz is best learned, if at all, as it used to be: in nightclubs, in Storeyville houses, at Mammy's knee or some other low joint. It took just one book, though, Gunther Schuller's lovingly scholastic Early Jazz, published in 1968, to confirm that jazz could stand up to the same kind of penetrating musical analysis usually accorded classics like the Beethoven quartets or the Wagner Ring cycle. Lately, jazz has swung into the academies like one of the old Woody Herman Herds thundering up Manhattan's...