Downbeat magazine, the jazz world’s leading publication, has inducted Frost School of Music Dean Shelton G. “Shelly” Berg into its Jazz Education Hall of Fame. The honor reflects the substantial impact Berg has had on the jazz world over 46 years of teaching, particularly during the nearly 20 years he has spent leading the Frost School.
The induction was accompanied by an article in Downbeat’s November issue, which traced Berg’s unconventional career. It recounts Berg’s extraordinary trajectory as a widely lauded pianist who, despite never having had a formal jazz piano lesson, has worked on countless projects and with numerous acclaimed artists as pianist, bandleader, arranger, and composer, garnering a host of awards and multiple GRAMMY nominations. Although Berg created a revolutionary curriculum that transformed the Frost School, he never took a collegiate-level jazz course.
Berg, 70, enters Downbeat’s Jazz Education Hall of Fame as he prepares to retire this spring to devote himself to music full-time.
“I’ve thrown myself into my academic career,” Berg told Frost News when his retirement was announced last April. “While I have the vitality and health, it’s important for me to turn my attention towards making music and sharing it with audiences.”
But he also told Downbeat that working in music education has been profoundly rewarding. “I could not possibly have had a more fulfilled life,” he said.
Berg was a child prodigy who studied classical piano at the famed Cleveland Institute of Music, but picked up jazz piano playing with his father, an accomplished, though not full-time, jazz trumpeter. Berg majored in classical piano at the University of Houston (UH), but got a real-world jazz education playing six nights a week in a band that performed Latin, jazz, and Top 40 tunes, often jamming with musicians from the legendary jazz big bands of Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, and Count Basie.
Berg got his first taste of teaching while getting a master’s in piano performance at UH, as a teaching assistant in music theory. “After being a TA,” Berg told Downbeat, “I knew how much I loved to teach, because you can see when those light bulbs go off that you’re changing people’s lives.”
When he graduated at age 23, he was married with two children and took a teaching job at San Jacinto College, where he stayed for 12 years. In 1991, Berg became an assistant professor at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, staying for 16 years. He rose to the rank of professor and chair of Jazz Studies while also building a flourishing music career.
At Thornton Berg also began developing his ideas for music education, seeking to create a curriculum that would fuse traditional college training with the skills he had learned as a jazz artist, such as learning tunes by ear and improvisation. But he was rebuffed. When he took his ideas to Thornton’s curriculum committee, Berg told Downbeat, “The head of classical instrumental performance said to me… ‘I’ve never had to improvise a note in my life, and I don’t see why anybody would.’”
At the Frost School, however, Berg found an institution that embraced his ideas. He became Dean in 2007, and his greatest achievements as a music educator were here. Working with faculty leaders, he created the Experiential Music Curriculum, or “Frost Method,” a revolutionary re-imagining of conventional music education that merges creative skills like composition and improvisation, often in different music genres, with entrepreneurial and practical skills like marketing and production, which they’re encouraged to put into practice, from performing with famous artists like Pharrell Williams to producing their own concerts. The result is “Frost Built” students who are not only accomplished in multiple areas, but adventurous, resourceful, and ready to succeed in a complex, changing music world. The “Frost Method” has become a model for 21st-century music education.
“Our students know that they’re getting skills that their peers at almost every other school are not getting,” Berg told Downbeat.
Berg has received numerous honors for his work in music education. In 2000, the Los Angeles Times named him one of three “Educators for the Millennium.” In 2002, he received the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE) Lawrence Berk Leadership Award, and in 2003, he was named Educator of the Year by the Los Angeles Jazz Society.