Portland Jazz Hero
Oregon
Drummer and bandleader Alan Jones, who has been a force on the Portland jazz scene since the early 1980s, has had an even more important impact as an educator. It’s that work that makes him a Portland Jazz Hero.
His Alan Jones Academy of Music (AJAM) is a shoe-string endeavor 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. And many notable Portland artists have passed through or are still participating in the program. Perhaps the most-renowned of his alumni is saxophonist Nicole Glover, a rising star in New York City now and a member of the group Artemis.
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. Jones has created a situation not found in other local educational experiences.
“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.
Alan’s not in it for the money, since tuition is a pay-as-you-can proposition. Teaching is instead a responsibility he feels incumbent as a result of the mentorship he received from Portland masters who have included the bassist David Friesen, the Caw/Creek saxophonist Jim Pepper and bassist Leroy Vinnegar.
“On top of the giving-back aspect,” Jones says, “it’s necessary for the community to keep this influx of very high level musicians coming into the scene.
“These are people who by all metrics are already done with their education. But no one is done with their education. I’m not,” he adds, though he graduated from Berklee College of Music in 1980.
Jones lived in Paris and Vienna off and on between 1988 and 1995, and returned to Europe for a couple of years in 2005. He was never really absent from Portland, however, and continued to tour with Friesen. In the late 1990s, his Sextet often packed the venerable Jazz de Opus with 30-somethings. In 2000, he released an album, The Leroy Vinegar Suite. And in 2008, he operated a basement club that drew a younger crowd called The Cave, across the street from Portland State University.
Over his career, Alan Jones has changed as a drummer and composer, an evolution he attributes to his work at 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,” says this Jazz Hero teacher who is still learning — and attracting the best young talent to a school different from any other.
— Lynn Darroch
2024 JJA Jazz Hero
