making up your own tune that somehow works with what the rest of the band is playing.

This is not easy stuff. For the musician, it means mastering scales and music theory. For beginning musicians, it’s learning a couple of scales and knowing how to play through the chord changes. For an accomplished musician, it’s all that and more because all the scales come in all sorts of variations, and most “real jazz” is barely written down. The few chicken scratches that pass for a “chart” are enough to get you started and stopped. The rest of it is up to the musicians to improvise on the spot. That takes more than an artistic urge or intent, it also takes craft, a point I’ll return to presently.

The fact that so many of our middle school kids play outstanding jazz music—and it is outstanding—begins and ends with Bob Athayde. He loves improvisational jazz and that’s why our middle school has three jazz bands, one of which shows up an hour before school starts to play.