For most of my teaching career, I believed there were two types of students.
Those who liked jazz.
And those who were wrong.
Experience eventually softened that position.
Only slightly.
The student in question arrived in my classroom sometime in the late 1990s. I won’t use his real name, partly because I can’t remember whether he ever gave me permission and partly because there is a reasonable chance he now works in finance and would rather people didn’t know he once described Miles Davis as “music for people waiting for a bus.”
He was sixteen.
Bright enough. Funny when he wanted to be. Completely uninterested in anything that had happened before Oasis.
Every year I ran the same exercise.
I would play a selection of recordings from different periods and ask the students to write down whatever came into their heads. Not musical analysis. Not theory. Just reactions.
Most students approached this sensibly.
He approached it like a man reviewing household appliances.
Duke Ellington was “too tidy.”
Charlie Parker was “showing off.”
Bill Evans sounded “like someone apologising.”
When I played Kind of Blue he wrote:
“Nothing happens.”
I still have that piece of paper somewhere.
Or at least I think I do. It may be in the same box as three missing spectacles and a receipt for a trumpet I no longer own.
For two years I tried.
Every teacher has one student they quietly adopt as a personal challenge.
Not because the student is difficult.
Because something about them refuses to fit the pattern.
He wasn’t disruptive.
He wasn’t lazy.
He simply didn’t hear music the way I expected him to.
I brought in recordings.
I explained context.
I spoke enthusiastically about improvisation, rhythm, phrasing and interaction.
He remained entirely unmoved.
One afternoon he listened patiently to an entire Thelonious Monk track before saying:
“It sounds like he’s making mistakes on purpose.”
I remember staring at him.
Then realising that, from a certain point of view, he wasn’t entirely wrong.
The years passed.
He left school.
I assumed that was the end of the story.
Most teachers discover fairly quickly that you become a minor character in hundreds of other people’s lives. They remain significant to you long after you disappear from theirs.
Then, perhaps fifteen years later, I was standing in a supermarket.
Not a romantic location for a reunion.
Nobody writes songs about meeting beside discounted washing powder.
I heard someone say my name.
I turned around.
There he was.
Older, obviously. Married. Slightly balder than seemed fair. Carrying enough groceries to suggest he had children.
We exchanged the usual conversation.
Where are you now?
What are you doing?
How long has it been?
Then he laughed.
“You’ll never believe this,” he said.
Those words rarely lead anywhere sensible.
“I’ve started listening to jazz.”
I thought he was joking.
He wasn’t.
Apparently it had started during long drives for work.
One record became three.
Three became ten.
Then somebody gave him a copy of Blue Train.
After that, according to him, things got out of hand.
“I finally understood what you were talking about.”
Teachers spend years imagining that sentence.
Usually it arrives too late to be useful.
I asked him what had changed.
He thought about it.
Then he said something I still remember.
“I stopped trying to understand it.”
That was not the answer I expected.
But the older I get, the more I think he was onto something.
Many people approach jazz as a puzzle.
They search for rules.
They worry about recognising the right names.
They feel they are supposed to appreciate it in a particular way.
The musicians themselves often seem far less concerned.
They listen.
They react.
They trust their ears.
Perhaps that is all he eventually did.
We stood talking beside the supermarket entrance for twenty minutes.
Long enough for both of us to forget why we had gone there in the first place.
Before leaving he said:
“You know that Monk record you played us?”
I nodded.
“I quite like it now.”
I laughed.
Partly because I was pleased.
Partly because it had only taken twenty years.
Teaching is strange like that.
You rarely find out which lessons mattered.
Most disappear into the noise of everyday life.
A few reappear decades later in places you never expect.
A supermarket.
A train station.
A chance conversation.
A former student carrying shopping.
You spend years throwing small stones into the water and then, long after you’ve forgotten about them, a ripple appears somewhere downstream.
I still think about that conversation occasionally.
Not because he became a jazz fan.
Because he reminded me of something teachers often forget.
People arrive when they’re ready.
Not when you’re ready.
And sometimes the lesson doesn’t begin until after the classroom has disappeared.
