Education Quote by Kevin Eubanks

Eubanks drops “fortunate” like a quiet thesis statement: in jazz, your education is the bandstand, and the richest syllabus is other people’s vocabulary. The line is basically a résumé of curiosity. He’s saying he learned by collision - by putting his guitar inside other musicians’ systems and letting the friction teach him.

Then comes the curveball: calling Sam Rivers “fundamentalist.” On paper it sounds like a diss, but in musician-speak it’s closer to a warning label and a compliment at once. Rivers, an avant-garde titan who could sprint from standards to abstraction without blinking, wasn’t “fundamentalist” in the narrow, conservative sense. The fundamentalism here is about fundamentals: an almost doctrinal seriousness about the core materials of music - time, harmony, interval, tone, the discipline of listening. Rivers could blow the roof off a form, but only because he knew exactly where the load-bearing beams were.

The subtext is apprenticeship under pressure. Playing with “different schools” suggests stylistic pluralism - swing, fusion, post-bop, free - but Rivers represents the teacher who doesn’t grade on vibes. He demands fluency, not taste; accountability, not personality. Eubanks also slips in a cultural argument about jazz lineage: the most radical players often aren’t iconoclasts who reject tradition, but craftsmen who interrogate it so hard it breaks open.

It’s a musician’s way of describing rigor without romanticizing it: you get “fortunate” by surviving someone else’s standards.