In addition to Dean, Sullivan and Foote, jazz school at McGill is taught by fellow full-time faculty members Jan Jarczyk, a pianist and trombone player, and André White, MMus'90, a drummer, pianist and record producer, as well as part-time instructors drawn from the cream of the Montreal music scene.

The transition from nightclubs to school that Dean cites is one of the reasons why McGill's jazz program can be so selective.

	Saxophonist Mike Allen. Photo: bluedoorphoto.com

"Ideally you're looking for a kid who's going to be a jazz artist," Joe Sullivan explains, "a kid with a lot of creativity and artistic vision and at a certain level of competence. You can't get away with coming in here and being free and easy and just playing anything you like because you feel it. You have to learn the nuts and bolts of jazz, which has a tradition, which is a language of communication, in a sense, which has a vocabulary, both of repertoire and also of improvisational techniques and idioms."

Christine Jensen, for one, thinks these standards are crucial.

"The language there was really strong," she explained. "Everyone was very well trained in the bebop tradition. Once you learn that style, which is a very technical swinging side of jazz, you can go in any direction. You can go into more free playing, you can go back into more disciplined jazz playing, like big band stuff. You can go in any direction once you get that fluency under your fingers. And those are the kind of players I heard coming out of McGill."

One of the program's real strengths, according to Jensen, is its emphasis on performance.

"It was great to hear other people's ideas and to get out and support each other," she says, remembering her own experiences in combo seminar at The Alley. "But that's some serious playing time that you get to do, and I don't know if that situation exists everywhere else. Even when I talk to people that go to Berklee [School of Music in Boston] or NEC [New England Conservatory of Music] or the Manhattan School of Music, they don't have that gift of a club to work through their ideas."

That balance, between very specific learning requirements and real, creative freedom, is something that's been built into the curriculum from the start.

Kevin Dean explains: "I try to encourage students to pursue whatever it is they want to pursue, whatever their interests are. If they're interested in more outside stuff, knock yourself out. Do it. Form a band. But in the classes I think it's important that they learn the history of the music. Learn to play. Learn to control time and harmony in a traditional fashion. Because that's not going to hurt you, to learn how to do that. I think in the long run it's just good, solid jazz fundamental training. I mean, they graduate when they're 22: it's not like we're keeping them until they're 50. It still gives them plenty of time to do what they want to do."

Horn player and composer Christine Jensen.

After nearly 20 years has this kind of training created a common approach to the music, something that, in hindsight, might be called a "McGill sound"?

Mike Allen thinks it's possible. "It seems to be an ease that comes from being well trained and having a real good basis for understanding how to improvise." Allen cites saxophonists Kelly Jefferson and Steve Kaldestad, BMus'94, MMus'00, as examples. "Not only do they play their horns well -- that doesn't really change that much with the depth of a program -- it's how well trained they are. You can hear it in their playing. You can also hear it in the arrangements and the written work that people have done coming out of McGill."

At first, Kevin Dean is reluctant to identify a McGill sound, per se. But after some thought he, too, suggests a rough list of candidates: Mike Allen, Kelly Jefferson and trombonist Kelsey Grant's Quintet, pianist John Stetch, BMus'90, Christine Jensen, Joel Miller, and the Altsys Jazz Orchestra, led by trumpeter Bill Mahar, BMus'86. Above all, he singles out drummer Dave Robbins's new record, At the Mark.

"It's rooted in the tradition with a lot of original music," he explains. "Yet you can tell where he's coming from: he's coming from that Art Blakey-ish sextet/quintet thing. It swings, and the tunes make sense."

Whether an actual McGill sound exists is debatable. But in the end, there's definitely something tangible that binds many of these graduates together. Whether it's in Montreal or New York or, as Mike Allen explains, in Vancouver, there's a quiet confidence that comes from a blue-chip musical education.

"One thing I can tell you is that the McGill grads are having a real effect out on the West Coast. People have actually mentioned it to me -- that things have changed out here since a bunch of us came out in the mid-'90s. We seemed to bring something different. Whatever that is, I think, is partly the result of our training at McGill and our experiences in Montreal. Everybody I know that came out here after being in Montreal felt relieved: we didn't feel that we really had to prove anything anymore."

Greg Buium is a freelance writer and Canadian correspondent for Downbeat magazine.