Can a Five Year Old Play Jazz?

by Willie Myette

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This article introduces the new book Adventures in Jazz, which is part of a larger jazz curriculum for children called JazzKids®. JazzKids is an innovative approach to music education designed for young children and their families. The program offers opportunities for musical excitement and expression by augmenting traditional reading skills with original jazz repertoire, improvisation, performance, and parental involvement.

If you are a new teacher, you will find the JazzKids program to be an exhilarating and refreshing method to use with your students. For an experienced teacher, JazzKids materials will provide an exciting alternative to existing supplementary materials.

The Adventures in Jazz™ pieces were inspired by a need for a jazz repertoire suited for small hands while remaining accessible to students of all ages. The intent was to create musically viable repertoire based in basic jazz styles, while maintaining the aural tradition of jazz.

These songs are intended to be "experimented" with. The repertoire in the book provides students with fragmented ideas for use in later improvisational studies. The simple harmonic progressions of these pieces also lend themselves easily to transposition, an idea that most students are not exposed to in beginning studies.

If given the opportunity, students will amaze you time and time again if taught to use their creative spirit. Please allow students using these songs to create their own introductions, make up new endings, improvise, or recompose these songs to bring them to a higher creative plateau. These songs are for the kids - they belong to them.

For information on the JazzKids program, please visit JazzKids on the web at www.jazzkids.com. Thank you, and have fun!