In some schools in the US and Europe, the whole music curriculum is structured around jazz, while in others no music is offered at all or the approach is purely that of the Western classical canon. In US high schools, the big band tradition thrives, albeit often using pastiche core repertoire of varying degrees of musical and educational worth. While there are precedents for this in the tradition from Jelly Roll Morton to Duke Ellington and Gil Evans, such pieces and training styles do not bode well for the future creative development of the music. In the UK, however, the Associated Board's Jazz Piano and Ensembles Syllabuses offer pioneering improvisation-based assessment. They must be able to hear as a jazz musician, know what to look for when listening to jazz, and know how to speak the language and behave like a jazz musician in the music and around it.
Jazz also involves a particular way of interacting with a musical starting point.
It is the art of personalising and inflecting a given tune by embellishing, reharmonising and generally transcending the material in a flexible and open formal structure. Recent research also indicates that at the centre of all jazz education should be the way musicians work together in groups. Seen in this light, jazz is not a musical vocabulary as much as a set of musical conventions for interacting with other musicians. Educators maintain a delicate balance between two contradictory views within jazz. One asserts that learning to recreate the rich traditions of the past is important.