A few years ago I moved from a large system to a small school. Most of what ATSSB does holds up under that change, which is not nothing. The All-State jazz process doesn't.

Start with the backing track, which I don't think should exist at all. TMEA doesn't use one. Their kids play an etude by themselves, and nobody has made a case that this gives a panel a worse read on a player. We already accept that logic inside our own organization, since the concert band audition runs on etudes rather than excerpts yanked out of literature. Jazz is the one place we didn't do it.

The rhythm section makes the argument by itself. A drummer's whole job is to establish the groove, and we audition him by having him chase one. The bass player has the same problem. Nobody hires a rhythm section to follow.

The material is uneven for the same underlying reason, which is that all of it came out of charts written to be performed rather than to be graded. A screaming lead trumpet part ends up in the same tune as a bass trombone book of pads and the occasional riff. Inside one excerpt you'll get sixteen bars of real technique followed by something a good eighth grader could sight read. Big Easy Parade, for one.

How hard the recordings are to follow depends on what speaker happens to be in the room. Three Meter Skeeter buries the bass and kick far enough down that the pulse disappears without some low end behind it. A jazz waltz was a strange pick to begin with, but that's a separate conversation. I've also heard the count into Big Easy Parade was inaudible in more than one room, which is rough on a kid expected to come in on a gliss.

Then improvisation came out of the region audition, and I still don't know what to do with that one. Teaching it is intimidating. Kids are scared of it. Both true, and neither one changes the fact that improvising is what jazz IS. Take it out and what's left is jazz adjacent. Some short ATSSB tutorial videos covering the basics, with a resource list for the students who want to chase it further, would do more about the fear than deleting the requirement does. There's an uglier problem underneath it that TMEA has too, which is the kid who memorizes a written out solo, or the kid whose director wrote it for him. Nobody catches that in the audition room. You catch it at the concert, when the same kid can't find his way through a blues. I have no clean fix for it.

The judging problem is really a staffing problem, and I want to be careful here, because the people volunteering for those seats are doing us a favor. But fill enough rooms and some of those ears haven't been given any idea what they're listening for. A kid who swings hard and clips a couple of notes lands under a stack of kids playing note perfect bebop with dead straight eighths, and we ranked those backwards. The rhythm section rooms are worse. A bass player who can walk his butt off gets dinged for not following the page note for note, because nothing in the process tells the panel that leaving the page is the job. No answer for that one either, at least not inside the contest as it currently exists.

I have no idea how you formally propose anything to ATSSB, so I'm floating it here.

1. Commission etudes. Written for every wind, plus guitar, piano, and bass, over standard changes. One bebop, one ballad, one in a third style, and for our purposes that third one probably ought to be Latin or funk. No track behind any of it. Drums need their own version, and I'll be honest that I can't work out how you do a drum audition without something to play against, which is the exact thing I spent the top of this post complaining about. If somebody has a better idea there I'd rather hear it than defend mine. I know that TMEA has etudes written to be performed with backing tracks, and then a set of standard grooves with improvisation.

The objection I'd expect is that etudes are harder to teach to a whole class at once, and that one deserves a straight answer, because it's pointing right at what I think is actually wrong here. When the audition material is a chart, it can be rehearsed. And the moment it can be rehearsed, part of what we're ranking is how much class time a program has, how many days a week the jazz band meets, and how good the director is at drilling a tune. Those are real things. They just aren't the kid. A player at a school with a jazz period and a director who knows the idiom gets measured against a player whose band meets twice a week at seven in the morning, and nothing on the sheet accounts for the difference. It turns into a scoreboard between programs, and all of us play to it, because we'd be fools not to.

An etude can't be drilled as an ensemble. The kid has to take it home and work it out, which is the whole point of an individual audition, and it's the only version of this that prepares him for anything past it. Nobody ever got better at jazz by being walked through a third bone book in class. You get better alone in a practice room with something hard, and then you go play it with people.

Rotate a set of standard changes for the improv portion. Standard Blues, Minor Blues, Rhythm, So What, Autumn Leaves. Require it at region. Not to run anybody off, but to make them take a risk in the one room where taking a risk is the whole idea. It's how everybody reading this got better at it.

Train the judges. Anyone sitting behind that curtain should know what they're listening for, and right now we don't give them much help. We'd never put a concert band in front of a panel that hadn't mastered what a band is supposed to sound like, and I don't know why the jazz kids should be held to a looser standard than that. Full band auditions avoid this because a trained musician can follow a page and hear what's working. Jazz gets handed down by ear, and most of what counts was never in the ink.

I'm not pretending any of this is THE answer. There are probably practical problems with every one of these ideas that I haven't thought about, and I'd rather hear them than not. But this is a real gap in a system that otherwise treats our students well, and somebody has to say so out loud first.