Return the Gift

It's Monday afternoon, around 2 pm, when 20 or so Northeast Portland fifth-graders come barreling into the band room at King School. Inside the threshold sits their teacher, 68-year-old trumpeter Thara Memory, a hardened member of the jazz old school. He's missing a few digits on each hand and walks on a prosthetic right leg—the ravages of diabetes. As his students take their seats, Memory, balancing on a cane, makes his way to the front of the classroom.

"Band!" he shouts.

The students sit up straight on the front half of their plastic chairs, instruments down, staring ahead.

"Attention!" they shout back in unison. And then class begins.

Memory, as soft-hearted as he is steel-willed, is one of Portland's top jazz educators. In the past five years, nearly half the graduates of his high-school program, the Pacific Crest Jazz Orchestra, have gone on to attend prominent conservatories across the country. His most famous student, singer-bassist Esperanza Spalding, has won four Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist in 2011. (Memory and Spalding shared a Grammy in 2013 for their arrangement of Spalding's "City of Roses.") He began teaching the in-school band at King to start kids playing even younger.

Music education has become increasingly important to the preservation of jazz, and Portland nurtures the future of the idiom better than almost any city its size. Graduates of the city's jazz programs have gone on to attend the Manhattan School of Music, Juilliard, Berklee College of Music and other prestigious institutions. The Portland Youth Jazz Orchestra, American Music Program and Alan Jones Academy of Music, among others, amount to a sea of extracurricular jazz studies, where hundreds of students learn to, as Memory says, "get to the root of the matter."

As jazz faded in popularity in the 1970s, players like Memory and drummer Mel Brown turned to teaching, out of fear the tradition might be lost. Jones, the drummer who founded the Alan Jones Academy of Music, was one of the early benefactors of the first systems.

"I had those mentors," he says. "I played with them when I was 15, 16 years old, and traveled. But those gigs aren't around anymore. You can't just hop in a van and go on the road like you could. I think that we are filling in that style of education."

Many educators in Portland keep the music close to its roots, focusing on the traditions of transcription and ear training. It's not just the music that teachers try to keep it pure, but also the environment where students practice. In any given rehearsal, Jones says, "I'll suggest that we are in the recording studio, and you've got one take to get it right because we are out of money. Ready, go! Or, I'll say, 'You're now playing in front of 10,000 people at an international jazz festival. Count it off.'"

These methods combine and snowball, says saxophonist Hailey Niswanger, an alum of Memory's Pacific Crest Jazz Orchestra, as well as the American Music Program and Portland Youth Jazz Orchestra. After graduating from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she went on to perform with Esperanza Spalding, Wynton Marsalis and Ralph Peterson. Niswanger's 2009 debut album, Confeddie, released was she was 19, was deemed one of the top jazz albums of that year by NPR. She chalks up her early success to the musicians who surrounded her in the programs she attended in Portland.

"I was getting inspired and turned on to music by my teachers and mentors, but also by who was sitting next to me in the sax section," Niswanger says. "The caliber of the other musicians I was playing with was phenomenal. There are so many Portland students who have gone on to be really serious players. I mean, even back then, they were very serious players."

The top players coming out of Portland are getting big gigs, and many are being hired by their former teachers. Farnell Newton, a trumpet player who performs with R&B singer Jill Scott and funk legend Bootsy Collins, recently hired a former student, trombonist Kyle Molitor, to tour with Collins' band. "That's what music education is for," Newton says. "It's not just for them to have knowledge, it's for them to go out and achieve."

"All we are really doing is cleaning up after what was in the schools years ago," says Ben Medler, who runs the Portland Youth Jazz Orchestra with his saxophonist wife, Michelle. To him, the success of his program has little to do with how many Grammys his former students have won. "We've always said that if school programs became so stable again that PYJO failed, that would be success."

Though he's collected several awards himself, Memory agrees that achievement in the realm of music education cannot be measured in hardware. To a certain degree, it has nothing to do with music at all.

"These kids come with a whole lot of baggage, but we show them how to put it on the off-ramp," Memory says. "I think that is the real thing that we show them: to put it on the off-ramp, so that they can make their way in life." But, as he admits just before the wave of fifth-graders come storming through his door, "I bet you there are some Esperanzas in there."

MORE: Check out WW's picks for the top five shows at the Portland Jazz Festival here.

WWeek 2015