Murphy, who hosts The Morning Jazz Show on WYRE in Annapolis, has been an adjunct faculty member since the Peabody jazz studies program officially started in Fall 2001. The program has grown from 14 majors its first year to 26 undergraduate majors (and one graduate major) last academic year. Murphy is now joined by four fellow adjunct faculty and two full-time professors—jazz bassist Michael Formanek and department director Gary Thomas, a tenor sax player and flutist. The Peabody jazz studies program has been around long enough now that students who entered as freshmen have begun to graduate and test their education in the unforgiving world of professional music.

Those individual commencements mark a kind of graduation for the department as a whole. No longer is the Peabody jazz program trying to prove that it belongs at the 150-year-old conservatory or in the generation-old field of college jazz departments. Not only has it survived, but the program has assumed a distinctive personality of its own—a deliberate blending of the new trends in jazz education and learning jazz, as Murphy puts it, "the old-fashioned way."

Jazz education isn't a new concept. Older musicians have always passed along knowledge to younger ones. But the pre-1970 way of doing it—in the days before formal coursework—was hit-or-miss. When a young player sat in with an established band or jammed with older musicians at a nightclub, the experience was invaluable, but between performances there was a lot of hanging around, chatting about politics, and smoking cigarettes.

Academic jazz programs are designed to wring the inefficiency out of that system. You don't have to hang around waiting for a chance to play, because you know when your ensemble is slated for the jazz studio; you know when your private lesson is scheduled. Besides, there are always dozens of players prowling the halls looking for someone to play on their next demo or gig.

You don't have to wait for the backstage conversation to turn to jazz history and theory because you're taking those classes every semester. You don't have to learn everything by ear because you've been taught how to read. You don't have to hunt down classical teachers and collaborators because you're where musicians abound.

"What these students get that I didn't get coming up is all that theory," says adjunct faculty member Nasar Abadey, a drummer who performs locally, and across the United States and Europe. "They can take a recording, transcribe it, and then play it. It gives them a better idea of what's going on. I know a lot of drummers who came up in this music knowing how to use structure and harmony without knowing the theory behind it. But that's no longer enough; now you have to know the theory, too."

Indeed, says Murphy, "in jazz, the days of the self-taught musician who plays by ear are over. When classically trained pianists like Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner came along in the '60s, they set a precedent that everyone after them had to live up to. Young jazz musicians today are expected to have the reading and playing chops of a classical musician and the improvising skills of a composer. Classical musicians work very hard to learn to play the notes that someone else wrote, but jazz musicians have to do that and then also improvise new notes as if they were composing on the fly. As a result, they need to study theory and composition even more than classical students," says Murphy, who himself earned a master's in organ performance from Peabody.

The Peabody curriculum requires jazz studies majors to complete such courses as Jazz Theory, Jazz History, and Jazz Arranging and Composition. Because it's important to retain what's valuable about the old system of learning on the bandstand, says Thomas, "we try to set up a lot of the courses as jam sessions." The required courses he teaches in Jazz Improvisation I and II, for example, are set up in a small group format—piano (or guitar), bass, and drums/rhythm section. Thomas gives his students assignments and offers pointers as they play, but they're also encouraged "to work out the kinks in class," he says, by "stretching out"—playing extended solos on assigned tunes.

"Because jazz is a living art form, the teaching has to keep up with what's happening; it never stands still long enough to be codified," says Formanek. "You need faculty who are still out there in that world and who can present to students the real situations they may be thrown into. I tell them, 'You might have to improvise on a song you never heard.' People say you can't teach people how to improvise under pressure, but I believe that you can."

Adjunct faculty member Jay Clayton, one of the first singers to record composer John Cage's vocal music, says she was drawn to teach in the department by Gary Thomas' "vision." "He wants the students to become strong musicians with individual voices rather than copying older styles. He wants the teachers to all be working players who are traveling the world and going for it. As a result," says Curtis, "it's very much not like school; it's more like professional musicians rehearsing, practicing, and finding their way."

This approach has proven very appealing to prospective students. "I decided to come here after I met Gary and saw the design of the program," says tenor saxophonist Ian Sims, a senior this fall pursuing a double degree in engineering and jazz studies. "It was a fresh approach compared to what I was seeing at other schools. There was more opportunity to play with the faculty, more opportunity to play in both large ensembles and small. In the improv classes with Gary, for example, he didn't just hand us a sheet on how to do it. He made us transcribe solos and then apply the language we learned to our own solos. We always applied what we learned to actual playing."

In 1997, Baltimore native Dontae Winslow had already earned a Peabody degree in classical trumpet and was pursuing a master's degree, but he knew in his heart that he wanted to be a jazz trumpeter. He bugged Peabody Conservatory's then dean, Stephen Baxter, to start a jazz department, and Baxter asked him whom he would recommend to head up such a program. Winslow reached into his bag and pulled out a couple of CDs by fellow Baltimorean Gary Thomas.

The young trumpeter had already toured and recorded with the older tenor saxophonist, who had established himself as a major jazz figure, playing with bands led by Miles Davis, Jack DeJohnette, and Greg Osby, as well as leading his own well-recorded combos. The invitation for Thomas to teach some jazz improvisation classes at Peabody came at just the right time, he recalls. "I had been talking about getting off the road," he says. "I had been doing it for so long, and I wanted to do something that kept me grounded. Only a small fraction of what we do as touring musicians is actually playing music; most of our time is spent hanging out on trains and airports. Being on the road a lot, your chops stay in order, but the self-development aspect of composing and trying new things is hard to keep up if you spend most of your time in transit.

"What I found was I'd start something and then I'd go away and lose track of it. It was like reading a book; if you start and then put it down for a long time, you have to go back and start over. I found myself doing that a lot and it got old. This was a chance to get into a teaching position in my own hometown. Plus, a jazz program should be in Baltimore. The city has such a rich history in this music," he says, citing jazz greats like Cab Calloway, Eubie Blake, Billie Holliday, and others who played in and around Baltimore in the early to mid-1900s.

So Thomas began teaching part time in fall 1997 with Winslow and trombonist Stan Wilkerson (who had played with Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center before coming to Baltimore). But his classes were electives and all his students were classical players, who approached jazz as a side interest. By the summer of 2000, Thomas had received offers to teach elsewhere, and he told Peabody leadership that he needed some assurance that the Institute was going to launch a jazz program. With Baxter's encouragement, and financial support from M. Sigmund Shapiro, a local jazz buff and Peabody supporter, then Peabody Director Bob Sirota signed Thomas on to a full-time position. A gift from Max Corzilius helped to refurbish the jazz studio that bears his name and establish a scholarship in classical and jazz guitar. When the jazz program launched in the fall of 2001, Thomas became the first African-American director of a degree program at the Conservatory. He has just been named the inaugural holder of the Richard and Elizabeth Case Chair in Jazz Studies. "[Students] need to be in an environment where the music of their own country is studied with the same rigor that we study the music of Germany or Italy," Sirota said at the time the program launched.

"A jazz program doesn't just benefit the jazz students; it benefits everyone. It seemed ridiculous to have a music program in Maryland and to not have a jazz department."

Thomas' first challenge was assembling a roster of part-time faculty to handle most of the instruments. One of his first calls was to Murphy, who had played keyboards on five different Gary Thomas albums. Murphy, who had grown up in Howard County, MD, held down two very different gigs: pianist in the Latin-jazz band, the Rumba Club, and resident organist for the St. Ignatius Church in Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood. He quickly accepted the job offer at Peabody, which was, after all, just a few blocks from the church.

Another call went out to Formanek, who had just played bass on Thomas' latest album, Pariah's Pariah. Formanek was one of the top bassists in New York; he had taken over Charles Mingus' bass chair when the widow Sue Mingus launched the posthumous Mingus Big Band. Formanek had recorded with Fred Hersch, Tim Berne, Chet Baker, Lee Konitz, Marty Ehrlich and more, but he was looking to get away from the insecurity and constant travel of the freelance musician's life.

"I found I enjoyed teaching," he says. "It was a way I could take everything I'd ever learned about music and pass it on. By being forced to articulate these things to students, it reinforced those connections in my own mind; it reminded me that I didn't have to reinvent the wheel each time, that I had things to build on. So it ended up helping me even as it helped someone else."

By the time the recruiting dust had cleared, Thomas had successfully signed on trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, guitarist Paul Bollenbeck, alto saxophonist Greg Osby, drummer Howard Curtis, and trombonist Stan Wilkerson (Curtis, Wilkerson, and, most recently, Jensen, have since left the program). Later faculty additions to the program include vocalist Jay Clayton, drummer Nasar Abadey, and trumpet player Donvonté McCoy.

At first, remembers Thomas, some classical faculty and students were wary of the new department—not sure what to make of musicians who often made up the notes as they went along rather than reading them off a page. There was some nervous joking and feeling out in the Jazz Department's first years. Recalls Thomas, "I brought in jazz bassist John Patitucci [who also subs for the bassists in the New York Philharmonic] for a master class, and Jim Olin, the trombone teacher who plays with the BSO, came by afterward and said, 'Gee, I didn't know they were such good players.'"

But Formanek recalls a welcoming reception from his classical colleagues. "I figured the other faculty wouldn't take us seriously because we were the jazz guys," he says, "but it wasn't like that at all. Two of the composition teachers, Nicholas Maw and Christopher Theofanidis, had me in to talk to their classes; so did Paul Johnson, the classical bass teacher. That's not to say there weren't misconceptions. A lot of classical folks, even if they've listened to jazz, haven't listened to much that was recorded after 1960, so they don't know much about the last 40 years."

Peabody's new Director, Jeffrey Sharkey, says the Jazz Department helped lure him to the Institute. Improvisation, he points out, used to be a natural part of all classical music, not just early music. When soloists played cadenzas in concertos, they made it up as they went along. It was only later, when recordings became popular, that audiences began to demand perfection and soloists eliminated chance by emulating the famous cadenzas of Jascha Heifetz or Fritz Kreisler.

"The ability to improvise, to think four measures ahead to what you'll play next, is an important skill in all modern music," Sharkey maintained, "and our jazz faculty are experts at improvisation. I'd like to bring back a class on improvising for classical musicians. I'd like to see even more interaction between the classical and jazz departments. We learn so much from listening to music other than our own, to instruments other than our own."

Says Murphy, "More and more classical majors are taking advantage of the jazz program." Seven of the 13 members of last year's Lab Band were classical majors, he notes, and classical majors were also enthusiastic participants in courses such as Jazz Orchestra, Jazz Ear-training and Jazz Improvisation, and Jazz Arranging and Composition. "One of my best students is Chris Whittaker, a composition major who was curious about including some jazz elements in his composing. But as he got further into it, it began to affect everything he was doing. He got a job writing a string quartet for National Public Radio, and he used jazz harmonies and lines we had worked on in our lessons.

"On the other hand, the jazz majors are also taking advantage of the classical program. They get to write for a string quartet as well as a jazz big band. That's hard to do out in the world. I assigned one student to write a piece for string quartet and jazz trio. After he'd written it, he stood in the hall and grabbed classical and jazz students as they walked by until he had the right players to record his composition and hand me a CD."

When cellist Michael Kannen moved to Baltimore in the fall of 2002 to become the new director of the Chamber Music Department, he sought out Formanek because the bassist had been recommended by his son's jazz drumming teacher. Soon after that, Kannen was rehearsing for a concert with the Apollo Trio and he was trying to get a handle on the jazz idioms used in New York Nocturne, a new classical piece by David Schiff. He started peppering Formanek with questions, and that kicked off a conversation that ranged widely over music from Chopin to Coltrane and hasn't stopped yet.

"I've always admired musicians who are as versatile as possible," Kannen says. "In the classical world, I admire musicians who play everything from early music to modern composition; I especially admire Yo-Yo Ma for venturing into new musical worlds and growing with each encounter. I urge my own students to have the same open-minded curiosity, and I try to emulate that myself. Mike is interested in everything; if it makes a sound he wants to know about it. He's one of the world's great jazz bassists, but he's always handing me copies of Mahler symphonies or pop CDs to check out."

In 2005, Kannen was part of Formanek's Minor Infractions Ensemble, a septet that combined a classical string quartet with a jazz piano trio. The first half of the concert featured Formanek's arrangements of jazz standards for the non-standard instrumentation, and the second half featured the bassist's own compositions. More recently, Greg Boyle of Peabody's Computer Music Department composed The Gray Men for Kannen's cello, Formanek's bass, and computer electronics.

"It called for a lot of the free improvisation that Mike had been pushing me to do," Kannen explains. "I spend 99 percent of my time poring over old texts and trying to bring them to life—which is something I really love to do. But now I was being asked to make it up as I played and to respond to another musician who was also making it up. So you can imagine the adrenaline rush I got walking on that stage. I had so much fun."

The students aren't the only ones to profit from the new jazz department at Peabody. The larger jazz community in Baltimore has benefited from a chance to hear all the guest artists that the department has brought in for concerts—major figures such as Sam Rivers, Rufus Reid, George Garzone, Erik Friedlander, Don Braden, and Sheila Jordan. Peabody supporters William and Dorothy Nerenberg are helping to bring pianist and composer Uri Caine to Peabody this spring, and general program support has been provided by two additional sources—John Greenspan and the ALH Foundation. And the jazz faculty get something valuable out of it, too.

"Just seeing a student who comes into the program, with only a vague idea of what they're even trying to do, develop into a player with their own personality is really exciting,"Formanek says. "I've gotten to see that a lot over the years I've been here. And even though I'm the teacher, I get a lot back from the students. I'm always asking them what they're listening to and what they're thinking. They turn me on to things that I can use in my own music."

Pianist Joel Holmes, the first jazz major to complete the four-year program at Peabody, in 2005, is now on faculty at nearby University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and teaching jazz at his former high school, the Baltimore School for the Arts. "The most valuable thing I learned at Peabody was how to teach college and high school-level jazz courses," acknowledges Holmes, who also maintains an active performance schedule. "When it comes to teaching piano, I emulate a lot that I learned from Tim Murphy. When it comes to leading a big band, I learned a lot from the way Gary and Mike led their bands—how to know enough about the different instruments that you can make it work.

"I like teaching," says Holmes. "It's a way of giving back to the community, to make the younger ones appreciate jazz. It's a way of passing on the tradition."