Some towering jazz in Roxbury

I'll always look at African America as the heart of jazz while being happy to acknowledge its cosmopolitan basis with contributions from people everywhere.

I presented Ornette Coleman at the channel in 1987 and co founded a a series at your alma mater in the 80s called World Class Jazz at the Joint that gave musicians money for free concerts that were held in the Winer Wing at Usdan and broadcast by WBRS.

Berklee is an avaricious trade school with exorbitant tuition that essentially promulgates standardization and mediocrity in something that is about individuals expressing their imagination in a cooperative setting. They dumbed it down and then keep loading a conveyor belt lad of grads onto the job market who won't have music careers. They end up in the mail room at BU or some such. It's like Ponzi education for more than $120,000 a credential.

You can learn all you need about music in any decent state university for a fraction of that and, since it's music, you'll just end up waiting tables or doing some cubicle job.

I also have some friends who graduated from there, Bern Nix, the late David S Ware and Denardo Coleman. Matt Lavelle dropped out and is better for it.

In order to prop up their reputation, they have essentially dominated the region's live music scene, so people like Richard Abrams or Matthew Shipp are mostly shut out. I learned about this stuff in the mid 70s at U Mass, Amherst where they took the bold step of just hiring African Americans so I got to know Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Michael Gregory Jackson and Max Roach.

That little college town was orders of magnitude more 'world class' than stuffy Boston.

And what's funnier is that my space is upstairs from a renta music venue that is mainly used by music school types from all three schools for pretend concerts that no one attends. I'm quite familiar with their current 'output'.