No one is done with their education: Alan Jones Academy of Music

The niche jazz training program with a charismatic leader and a big impact.
Drummer and educator Alan Jones. Photo by Hiroshi Iwaya.
Drummer and educator Alan Jones. Photo by Hiroshi Iwaya.

It’s called The Alan Jones Academy of Music (AJAM), but from the moment you open the door, it’s clear this isn’t an ordinary academic setting.

“This is not a school. I am not a teacher,” says Jones. But since the Portland drummer, composer, bandleader and educator founded AJAM in 2009, a considerable number of the emerging jazz musicians in the Portland area — as well as a couple in New York and Los Angeles — have passed through AJAM as students, teachers or both. So there must be some learning going on.

The Art of Learning

Indeed, that so many have benefited from the AJAM experience is remarkable for a shoe-string program in a city with more than a dozen established jazz education programs, both public and private. But AJAM has a unique appeal: it’s designed for participants who are either on track to become professional musicians or already playing professionally.

“That’s not the entire enrollment,” Jones hastens to point out. “There are people who just love to play and want to learn. And there are younger people who haven’t made up their mind. But they are in the minority. This is a niche system that caters to people who are already really good. It’s an environment where we come together because we all care about the same stuff.”

And they come together in small ensembles, for private lessons, and for sessions on composition or songwriting, in a former southwest Portland mortuary that was constructed in 1888. Full of small spaces for practice or lessons, as well as several large rooms, it also includes offices for Jones, his son and daughter. One large space holds several pianos, multiple wind instruments, two drum kits, and a Hammond B-3 organ with a big Leslie speaker, as well as a set of weights and Jones’s motorcycle. In another sits a ping-pong table.

Students at the Alan Jones Academy of Music. Photo by Alan Jones.
Students at the Alan Jones Academy of Music. Photo by Alan Jones.

It’s a location as unconventional as the approach to teaching and learning that Jones promotes.

TEACHING AND LEARNING

“Almost all the teachers here are also students,” he says of the eight instructors currently working with a student body that varies in size from 70 to 100 participants.

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Several of them were rehearsing one afternoon in late September, including Matt Sazima on bass. He’s a busy pianist, vibes player, vocalist, and award-winning composer with a masters degree from CalArts. Olivia Fields, who recently completed a master’s degree from the University of Oregon, was playing alto sax. Drummer Noah Mortola spent the past two years as a student at AJAM rather than attending college and is now subbing in the internationally-touring Gino Vanelli Band. Guitarist Chris Clark-Johnson and pianist Paul Moyer filled out the ensemble.

Jones let each one kick off a tune, while he voiced encouragement and directed the energy; at the end of each, he’d offer a few observations about the way they navigated the form. Aside from the musical nuts and bolts, however, what attracts most of these emerging artists is the learning situation that Jones creates.

“Being in an environment where everyone’s a student — and Alan sometimes acts as a student, too — that’s positive for professionals who want to continue to learn but not have that detract from them being formidable artists in their own right,” says Sazima.

Matt Sazima playing vibes at The 1905. Photo by Reed Ricker.
Matt Sazima playing vibes at The 1905. Photo by Reed Ricker.

It’s not like a peer group session, however, because Jones is the leader. And he’s got a plan.

“Attention to detail and focus,” says Fields, who led a quartet at the Montavilla Jazz Festival this summer. “Alan is good at it and really values it in his teaching. I think it makes for really good musicians. I’m still learning the same things as when I was a student. It’s a never-ending rabbit hole of things to understand and notice. But Alan really believes in his students and their potential, especially if they are aspiring to do something and whole-heartedly believe they can do it.”

Olivia Fields at The 1905. Photo by Lloyd Lemmermann.
Olivia Fields at The 1905. Photo by Lloyd Lemmermann.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

Notable Portland artists who have passed through or are still participating in the AJAM experience include bassist Garrett Baxter, pianist Kieran Raphael, trumpeter Noah Simpson (one of the most widely-heard of Portland’s young professionals), and perhaps the most-renowned of the AJAM alumni, saxophonist Nicole Glover. 

As one of its first students, Glover’s career illustrates AJAM’s place in a crowded field where nearly all community colleges and universities offer some sort of jazz program. In addition, a number of smaller organizations cater to different demographics, such as Ben and Michelle Medler’s Portland Youth Jazz Orchestra (read ArtsWatch’s feature story) and Vanguard Big Band, Bryant Allard’s M.U.S.E. after-school jazz program, the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble’s annual Young Jazz Composers program (read ArtsWatch’s feature story), and Chris Brown’s monthly “Behind the Scene with the Chris Brown Quartet,” to name a few.

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Portland’s jazz community has long been known for nurturing young talent, and in addition to those programs, bandstand mentorship has for decades provided a kind of graduate education. AJAM participants like Glover have received instruction from many of those sources.

“I wasn’t her only teacher by a long shot,” Jones says of the saxophonist, who’s now a rising star in New York. She attended AJAM for two years while still in high school, then, after two years at William Patterson College in New Jersey, came back to AJAM for another five years, both as a student and a teacher while also working and recording with George Colligan and Jones.

“These are people who by all metrics are already done with their education,” says Jones. “But no one is done with their education. I’m not,” he adds.

Sazima concurs. “I came to AJAM as a professional musician who’s playing out several times a week and hopefully making pro level music. Finding a resource that allows me to continue to get better is pretty invaluable,” he says. “With Alan, I have zero doubts that he wants me to be the best player I can, and that he wants to work in collaboration to find out what that best version looks like.”

Of course a number of the area’s emerging jazz artists have gained their education through more conventional means, like Jones himself, who graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 1980. They also continue to learn on the job in a fluid scene where artists must hustle their own gigs in a changing array of small venues for audiences of their peers. In jazz as in all the arts, there are many paths to the truth.

THE REWARDS

Keeping this vision of jazz education alive is a responsibility made more difficult for Jones by what can generously be described as a rather loose tuition system. But that burden is well worth the intangible payoffs he receives.

“I spend a lot of my day playing drums, playing piano, playing bass, and that process of interacting musically with other people who are at a high level is really beneficial to me,” says Jones. “It’s inspiring to be around people who are as engaged as the people in AJAM are. And I keep in touch with what’s going on in the world; otherwise I’d just be hanging around with people my age. On top of that is the giving back aspect. It’s necessary for the community to keep this influx of very high level musicians coming into the scene.” 

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Students at the Alan Jones Academy of Music. Photo by Alan Jones.
Students at the Alan Jones Academy of Music. Photo by Alan Jones.

LIKE NO ONE I’D EVER MET

“Most of the people here say, ‘I know what I want,’” Jones says, and claps his hands. “‘I know where I’m headed.’” He claps again. “‘Let’s get there!’” Clap, clap, clap.

You won’t go to sleep in sessions with Jones. Indeed, it’s often the force of his personality that draws people into the program.

“I really loved Alan’s presence,” remembers former student Adam Lamb (then known as Adam Schweitert), “the way he carried himself, the way he spoke. Like no one I’d ever met. And I just wanted to be around him.” So Lamb, who lived in Oregon City at the time, drove an hour each way for AJAM rehearsals.

“Just watching Alan perform, talking to him person-to-person,” says former student and AJAM teacher Cyrus Nabipoor, who has also taught at Loyola University; “he was one of the really important teachers who made me the musician I am today.” Nabipoor, whose second album came out early this year, returned to AJAM in 2023 along with guitarist Jack Radsliff (also with a recent second album) to help get the program going again after the pandemic.

Not every AJAM participant ends up a professional musician. Lamb, for instance, has been teaching yoga in New York City for the past ten years. But he doesn’t regret the time he spend in AJAM.

“When I moved to New York,” he explains, “I had the idea that I’d continue playing. But it turned out that I was really at AJAM for the mentorship and life skills that Alan taught, and when he was no longer in my life, the draw to play music was no longer there. He kept me in music longer than I would have otherwise, because I was learning so much about listening and being present, and teamwork, leadership, and integrity. But primarily I learned to live adventurously.”

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That might be the most important accolade for Jones, who also prides himself on that very approach.

THE ADVENTURE EVOLVES

Jones has been a force on the Portland jazz scene since the early 1980s, when he first started playing and recording with bassist David Friesen, worked with Jim Pepper, and later performed with “the father of the walking bass,” Leroy Vinegar. In 2000, he released the album, The Leroy Vinegar Suite.

He’s played with top-flight peers as well, including pianist Randy Porter, a long-time member of Jones’s Sextet. He lived in Paris and Vienna between 1988 and 1995,  and returned for a couple of years in 2005. He was never completely absent from Portland, however, and a continued to tour with Friesen. In the late 1990s, his Sextet often packed the venerable Jazz de Opus with 30-somethings. And in 2008, he operated a basement club called The Cave across the street from Portland State University that also drew a younger crowd.

Today he’s a lean and active 62 years of age, and has been an avid rock climber for many years (one of his albums is titled Climbing). But, as he says, “your body stops moving the way it used to, so I’ve had to make adjustments.”

And it’s led to a different attitude toward the drum kit. “I practice the instrument more than I ever used to,” he says. “It’s a meditation. It’s a type of experience I crave. And I didn’t use to. When I was younger, all I cared about was going out and playing for people. Now I find there’s a lot of beauty and satisfaction by myself. I still love and appreciate when I play with other people. But I play out a fraction as much as I did.”

When he does lead his “Social Music” quartet — which often features former AJAM participants Noah Simpson and Garrett Baxter — connecting with listeners is a priority.

“They are as much a part of the music as the musicians playing it, and an integral part of the whole energetic exchange. So the music is a social gathering, and I like to remember that when I play.”

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COMING HOME

Since his 1998 album, Unsafe, was released, his approach to performing and composing has changed, too; the title of his 2019 album, You Took Me Home, offers a clue to the difference 25 years have made. For instance, all the compositions are ballads. And as the album was being made, Jones and his wife bought the home where he grew up.

“The way I express time has evolved,” he says. “I still like to play the way I used to — call it ‘elastic’ — and that’s still a major component of the way I want to express the music. But underlying that, I’ve learned a lot about the stability of metronomic time.”

In fact, Jones attributes much of his evolution to AJAM. “I’ve probably grown more as a musician and as a human being in the past 10 years than I did in the 30 years before,” he says. That’s evident in his approach to composition, too.

“In the days of Unsafe,” he says, “it was more stream of consciousness writing. I’d just write what I was hearing and allow that to take it’s own shape. Now I like songs. I really love great melodies, I love great song structure. That’s what You Took Me Home was about — composing songs that people could enjoy as songs, that you could sing back.”

Don’t worry, though. He still rides a motorcycle and plays his hand-made drums barefooted. And those ballads on You Took Me Home? They’re still plenty complex and offer the instrumentalists considerable freedom to improvise.

But no matter what direction he takes, “Alan always expresses the joy of his life through music,” says his friend Andy Middleton, an instructor at the Vienna Conservatory in Austria.

The emerging and aspiring artists at AJAM trust that he’s there to help them express their lives through music, too. And to do so as top-flight professionals in a highly-competitive field. For that, they trust, it’s not schools or teachers you need–it’s the Alan Jones experience.

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Lynn Darroch has written about jazz and other music as well as producing general arts features for The Oregonian, Willamette Week, Jazz Times and other magazines and newspapers. His book, Rhythm in the Rain - Jazz in the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, Portland State University, 2015) covers jazz in the region - and how it was shaped by social, economic and geographical conditions.

His work on jazz also appears in books such as The Encyclopedia of United States Popular Culture (Popular Press) and Jumptown: The Golden Age of Jazz in Portland (Oregon State University Press). He edited the Jazz Society of Oregon's monthly, Jazzscene, for seven years.

Darroch also edited the book Between Fire and Love: Contemporary Peruvian Writing, has contributed articles to the Oregon Encyclopedia Project on Oregon artists, and he hosts a weekly show on KMHD 89.1 FM. He was on the faculty at Mt. Hood Community College, 1989-2007.

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  1. Virgil Funk

    Anyone who knows Alan Jones, can verify the truth telling of this article. Yes, he is musician-composer and teacher, but he is far more…it is something your know for sure when you meet him. I hope YOU have a chance to do so.

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