Adjunct Associate Professor and former chair of Sound Department and Exhibition Studies at SAIC
Education: Brown University, BA 1986 with honors; Northwestern University, PhD, Radio/TV/Film, 1994
Corbett has taught at SAIC since 1988 in the Sound, Liberal Arts, First Year Program, Art History and Video departments.

by Spencer Matern

Chicago native John Corbett currently teaches “The World of Jazz 1960-2000” at SAIC. He is an improvising musician, as well as a producer for the Unheard Music Series, a collection of rare jazz records re-released on CD. Along with Ken Vandermark, he has booked weekly jazz performances at the Empty Bottle since 1996. He also writes for the Chicago Reader and Downbeat magazine, and has published a collection of his interviews and essays, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein. Corbett’s work seems almost unlimited in its scope, as it has taken him from the grassroots to organizing this year’s Berlin Jazz Festival. I met up with Corbett at a café near his home on the north side of Chicago.

SM: I’ve come up with three words, “creativity,” “criticism,” and “pedagogy,” to describe the work you do, and I’d like to hear your take on them.
JC: Creativity, criticism and pedagogy [are] inter-related. I see my activities in these different areas as being complementary in the sense that you learn — it’s all about putting yourself in different perspectives.

SM: When you are playing, does the critic have to step aside?
JC: I see the critical faculty as being a part of the artistic process. And a lot of the musicians that I know and respect the most are very self-critical and are critical of people that they work with; critical not in the sense of saying that they say that things are bad or negative. I see [criticism] as being something that’s about distance. It’s about being able to distance yourself from something, and evaluation and assessment. Part of your job is to step back from your work and say, “Why am I doing what I’m doing?”

SM: In the interests of improving it, hopefully.
JC: To improve it, or to ask hard questions about it. I don’t always believe in progress, in that sense, but I do believe that you can ask questions that give you insights into why you’re doing what you’re doing that may suggest other avenues of approach that might yield different kinds of results. I try to do that as a critic, as a writer, and I try to bring that sense of [criticism] into my own music [and] my own work as a curator, too.

SM: I think that the critical process and curating all has a certain quality in it of wanting to pass on this knowledge...
JC: Well, I feel very strongly about pedagogy, in that I am interested in pedagogical processes, both as a teacher and as a producer. I’m still something of a relativist when it comes to assessment of work, so I do not believe that I have sole access to the infallible bullshit detector that can tell me whether a particular, let’s say musical performance, is a good one or a bad one. I can give you my rationale for my response to it, but I don’t believe that if you disagree with me you are de facto wrong. What that means is that I’m not interested in shoving my musical perspective down anyone’s throat and I’m not especially interested in creating situations that seem like they’re medicinal ... If people find things that I’m producing boring or tedious I hope they throw them out or never come to them again. I think it should be something where people get invested in it themselves, not out of any sense of obligation. As a teacher ... in a way I’m interested in trying to excite people about certain things or challenge them to think about certain things in certain ways, but to do it in a way that doesn’t have that top down approach, a way that has more of a sense that this has things that we can all make discoveries about. And I have to be frank — I wouldn’t be teaching if I didn’t continue to learn things the whole time as I was doing it. A good top down pedagogue thinks, “I know it all, I have to teach, I have to impart what I know to this person who is uniformed.”

SM: Because there is a finite amount of knowledge available.
JC: Right. I don’t believe in any of that. I think the combinations of information that we have make for infinite solutions to different questions. There may be preferred ones, there may be ones that are of different utility or different necessity, but the idea that there’s only one right way to do things or one right way to explain things, one right way to enjoy things, distorts the whole process, the whole polymorphous activity of learning, which to me is not so unilateral and not so linear. That’s how I see pedagogy functioning in the production that I’m working on.

SM: Increasing accessibility?
JC: Yeah. Maybe that’s a good way of putting it, ... I’m not interested in telling people what they should like or think or want, but in creating avenues of accessibility.