Let me show you a scene from American high schools: wide-eyed adolescents learn the difference between straight and swing time; pianists and guitarists learn to build basic major, minor and dominant seventh chords; mismatched groups of musicians trudge through complicated, overwritten charts. This is the current state of jazz education.

But it wasn’t always this way.

Like any cultural tradition, early jazz was taught in a non-formalized setting. Aspiring young musicians struggled along with records by Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller, sloppily learning the lines and changes by ear. When they finally had a teacher, it was not in a classroom with 20 other future jazzers — it was in a bar or on the corner, learning by doing from the eldest musicians who built the tradition.

Just as the painter Monet learned his skills one-on-one from Eugéne Boudin, young jazz musicians learned from their elders — it was the mentoring tradition on which early jazz was built.

Clark Terry at one time mentored Miles Davis, the great trumpet player and bandleader, in this tradition — so it’s only fitting that Davis was a mentor in his own right, training dozens of musicians who would go on to change jazz. Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley all got their start with the Davis band.

In 1982, Miles Davis helped to give a young guitarist named John Scofield a bit of exposure on his album Star People. Although not new to the scene (Scofield had been playing on albums since ’71), his appearance with Davis was a big deal. Davis had just come out of his “quiet years” (from ’76 to ’81, when Miles did not even pick up his horn), and his popularity was soaring due to the exposure.

Scofield grabbed attention right away for his short, tasty lines and gritty tone. “Who plays jazz guitar with distortion?” was the question everyone was asking. Glad to stand up and answer, “I do,” Scofield began a busy and critically-acclaimed period in his career, moving to label Gramavision in 1984 and releasing the well-received Blue Matter and Loud Jazz before the end of the decade.

Although Scofield was a graduate of Berklee School of Music in Boston, it took a job in the great Miles Davis Band to propel his career seriously forward and lay the foundation for the guitarist’s career as a bandleader.

Scofield’s career took a somewhat new direction in 1997; a direction that is still evident in his current work. In that year, the guitarist teamed up with jazz trio Medeski, Martin & Wood to make the popular and acclaimed A Go Go.

From Scofield’s chunky guitar riff on “Chank” to John Medeski’s spacey organ work on “Kubrick,” this is a different sounding album. The beauty of it is in its simplicity — Scofield’s lines are as tasty and gritty as ever, while Chris Wood and Billy Martin form such an understated, tasty rhythm pocket it sounds like they could groove forever.

But from the perspective of Scofield’s career, this is a much bigger deal. The guitarist — by 1997 a veteran and an old man at age 46 — was jamming with young neo-funk jazzers, the same crowd as Phish, Karl Denson and other “jam band” types. It was a new Scofield from here on out.

While 2000’s Bump was not well received, it did feature Scofield and a bunch of youngsters, as did Uberjam (2002) and Up All Night (2003). Both of these albums, recorded with similar bands, bring electronica into the mix, creating a sometimes-hyperactive modern sound that is predominantly funky yet ultimately jazzy.

This new direction, while it unleashed a new creative streak in Scofield, did not limit him to playing funky jam jazz. See Works for Me in 2001, or side project ScoLoHoFo’s Oh! in 2002 for straight-ahead, swinging jazz that doesn’t sound like a time warp.

The exposure provided by Scofield’s gig with Miles was obviously huge– but did that mentoring experience have a long-term effect on his career? Young jazz musicians these days, receiving most of their education in a formal setting, bring a different perspective to music than did Miles Davis (or even John Scofield) at the beginning of his career. The mentoring tradition is still alive, but it no longer forms the basis for teaching jazz — what direction will the music take under this new system of learning?

John Zeratsky’s “Jazz Activist” runs every other Tuesday in the Badger Herald. His other writings are available at johnzeratsky.com.