Jazz is perhaps the ultimate “melting pot” style of music. It is a serious and difficult genre, steeped in intellectual tradition, and yet it often seems to absorb the best (and, some would say, worst) of popular culture in order to stay fresh and evolve. This mixed bag of musical ideas makes for a great many divisions in the jazz community, and the annual conference of the International Association of Jazz Education functions simultaneously as a way for gripes to be aired, and for the past, present, and future of the genre to be documented and discussed.