“School for Cool is one of the most creative, comprehensive, epistemologically and substantively provocative, and just generally fascinating books I’ve read in recent years. At the core of it lies the complex nexus of improvisation, aesthetic traditions and their emergent reworkings, institutional practice, and the simultaneous socialization of young jazz performers into canon and creativity. In considering this array of subjects, Wilf provides a remarkably attentive and wide-reaching account of cultural production, reproduction, and transformation.”
— Donald Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
“School for Cool is a very original book within a new tradition of critical jazz studies that examines the contemporary scene of jazz education and socialization from the point of view of the tradition’s struggle for self-preservation, legitimization, and competition in the music industry. Wilf invites us to rethink the art of improvisation and convincingly argues that one cannot understand the paradoxes of jazz higher education unless one understands the changes in the club scenes and the types of young people who are, today, attracted to jazz as a profession.”
— Alessandro Duranti, University of California, Los Angeles
“School for Cool is thoughtful, provocative and well written, and addresses questions that might be posed for higher education in the creative arts more generally.”
— Times Higher Education
“From convocation ceremonies at Berklee, to rigorous classroom training, to extracurricular musical games that students devise and play outside of the colleges—it’s all grist for the author’s ideas and theories. Wilf raises a lot of provocative issues to which there are no straightforward resolutions. Nothing is as it seems; everything is subject to change and further scrutiny. These built-in uncertainties are part and parcel of Wilf’s rigorous manner of examining the thorny, overlapping conflicts and contradictions of jazz education that will play a role in shaping the music’s future. . . . School For Cool is a significant work of jazz scholarship that examines, analyzes, and leaves a thicket of conflicts and contradictions, which resist any end point or resolution. It’s a fitting tribute to a music that refuses to sit still and politely meet the expectations of those who wish to define it in limited, constricted, (and perhaps nostalgic) terms.”
— All About Jazz