Pat Harbison, Trumpeter/Jazz Educator

Pat Harbison is Professor of Jazz Studies at Indiana University, a position he has held since 1997.  He graduated from the University of Louisville and received his Masters from the University of Indiana, where he studied with renowned jazz educator David Baker.

He has taught at the Aebersold summer jazz camps since 1974.

Pat Harbison didn’t realize what opportunities would come when he started taking lessons with Jamey Aebersold at age 13.  Aebersold was 26, had just completed the first Play-A-Long recording, and was recruiting promising young players to teach in his basement studio in New Albany, Indiana.

Your association with Jamey Aebersold gave you the chance to watch the business grow first hand.

I can vividly remember the first 12 or 15 albums—the whole production process and the hoopla of getting a new album to practice with.  I’ve been there forever.

How did the summer jazz camps build the Aebersold Play-A-Longs business?

The workshops are inextricably linked to the publishing Play-A-Longs business.  I don’t know how you talk about the business model of one without talking about how it interfaces with the other.

I feel like it (the camps) has got to be a loss leader for the publishing business.

You’d get everybody in the door for the blue light special and then the impulse buying continued unabated the year round.  That is, if you went to a music camp you bought the Aebersolds by direct mail or at a music store for the rest of your life, as long as you were still playing.

When I started teaching at the camps, about 85 percent of the students were between the ages of 16 to 21 or 22.  Now, 50 percent of the students or more are over 40.  They are lifelong learners.  The lifelong learning, the non-institutional aspect, is a large part of what he has done.

Knowing Jamey as I do I really think that all of this was in his mind. He has this kind of altruistic, almost evangelical, urge on behalf of jazz, but even more so about creativity itself.