Aging & Wisdom Quote by Miroslav Vitous

Vitous draws a bright, almost moral line between teaching as vocation and teaching as consolation prize, and you can hear the jazz musician's allergy to anything that smells like second-rate authority. The sting is in the defensive clarity: he is protecting the legitimacy of mentors who chose the classroom not as a refuge from failure but as an extension of artistry. In a field that prizes improvisational excellence and reputational pedigree, pedagogy can get unfairly treated like the minor leagues. Vitous refuses that hierarchy.

The subtext is about credibility and transmission. Jazz education, especially as it moved from bandstands into conservatories, has long wrestled with an anxiety: can something as living and situational as this music be "taught" without being flattened? Vitous answers by reframing the teacher not as a technician dispensing rules, but as a working artist making a deliberate handoff. He is also quietly calling out a certain kind of institutional gatekeeping, where titles and lesson plans can masquerade as mastery.

His repeated contrasts - wanted vs. had to, offer vs. cannot offer - function like a musician's comping: simple chords that keep returning, tightening the argument each time. The real target isn't failed musicians; it's the cynicism that assumes teaching must be evidence of failure. In Vitous's world, the best instruction comes from intent aligned with craft: people who teach because they are still in love with the music, and serious enough to want it to outlive them.