“What you’re about to embark on will be the greatest adventure of your young life” - Bruce Springsteen told the Boston College Class of 2024 via a Zoom call from his New Jersey home studio as the featured speaker of the school’s annual 'First Year Academic Convocation'. Springsteen continued - “You can waste it, you can half-ass your way through it, or you can absorb every minute of what you’re experiencing, and come out on the other end an individual of expanded vision, of intellectual vigor, of spiritual character and grace, fully prepared to meet the world again on its own terms”. Students also had some questions for Springsteen...

Education initiative FutureDJs first managed to get DJ decks recognised as an instrument for GCSE assessment. Last week they went a big step further - London College of Music Examiners published a syllabus that offers grade certifications on CDJs (decks for manipulating music from CDs or digital files). This puts them on a par with classical and jazz instruments, and provides detailed criteria for teachers assessing GCSE-level pupils who work with CDJs. Guardian reports on the big move forward.

Fewer than 10 percent of the students who graduate with jazz degrees from American universities are Black, although they make 12,7% of general population, and in 2017 only 1 percent were Black women (over 6% in general population), New York Times reports about the issue of race in music, jazz in particular. It says that "over the past 50 years, the music has become entrenched in academic institutions. As a result, it’s often inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it: young Black Americans". Georgia Anne Muldrow, a student in the jazz program at New York's New School, goes deeper with her insight about the very character of jazz taught in schools: "At the center of the teaching would always be the idea that jazz is not about race. And it absolutely is. It was absolutely about where people weren’t allowed to go, which made them travel in their music".