Jerry Coker, creator of the Jazz Program at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami and one of the architects of jazz education, passed away on Jan. 14 in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was 91.
Born in South Bend, Indiana in 1932, Coker dropped out of Indiana University to play saxophone with Woody Herman’s big band when he was just 21, wowing the legendary bandleader with his command of Herman’s entire repertoire. A musician, arranger, and composer, Coker also played with Stan Kenton, Frank Sinatra, Mel Lewis, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, among many others, and recorded multiple albums.
But his greatest impact was as a music educator and theorist who devoted most of his life to reshaping how people learned jazz. Coker was a major force in moving jazz from a music learned in smoky clubs and jam sessions to conservatories and higher education, helping elevate jazz’s place in American culture and the musical pantheon. Generations of musicians learned from Coker’s books, and knew him, along with Jamey Abersold and David Baker, as one of the “ABCs” of jazz education.
“He was a pioneer in bringing jazz education into the university,” said Whit Sidener (B.M. ’69 and M.M. ’72), a saxophonist and Coker student who succeeded him as head of the Frost jazz department. “Jerry saw jazz not as this mystery music, but as something people could learn about and get better at with instruction.”
Coker began focusing on education in the 1960’s, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Sam Houston State University and a doctoral degree at Indiana University. In 1966, he led the Indiana University Jazz Ensemble (where Sidener played sax) in a historic State Department sponsored tour of the Near and Middle East. That same year William F. Lee, third dean of the Frost School of Music, brought in Coker (whom he knew from Sam Houston University) to teach. The two men came up with the idea of a jazz major, part of Lee’s substantial expansion of Frost’s size, depth and status. But it was Coker who structured the jazz curriculum and worked to get the program accredited, making it one of the first jazz degree programs in the country.
“He was an inspiration for anyone who wanted to teach,” said Sidener, whom Coker brought from Indiana to study with him in Miami. Sidener would go on to a 40-year career at Frost as professor and chair of the Department of Studio Music and Jazz, retiring in 2013. “I never thought about teaching, but when I saw him do it, I thought ‘I could do this’.”
Coker also wrote more than 20 enormously influential books on jazz theory and technique, including Improvising Jazz, Patterns for Jazz, and The Jazz Idiom.
“Everybody bought those books,” said Gary Keller (M.M. ’80), a professor of jazz saxophone and jazz studies at Frost from 1982 to 2021. “[Coker] was a really fine musician who was incredibly articulate and totally passionate about conveying information. Everybody used to learn from copying records. Jerry took it a step further and figured out what people were doing.”
Coker left the University of Miami in 1974, going on to found and direct the jazz program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he worked until 1999. He was inducted into the Jazz Educators Hall of Fame in 1994.
Coker lost his wife of 68 years, jazz vocalist Patricia Fitzpatrick Coker, in 2023. He is survived by his son, Curtis, and daughter-in-law, Susan, and by generations of students and musicians changed by his work.
