The talented Next Generation Jazz Festival adjudicators offer more than judgement.

Foregoing college is not the kind of advice you’d expect to hear coming from a jazz master addressing a group of high school jazz talents competing at the Next Generation Jazz Festival.

“I was telling them the truth,” says acclaimed jazz drummer Matt Wilson, who recommended touring instead. “It’s about throwing yourself in situations that you’re not familiar with.”

Wilson has appeared at the Monterey Jazz Festival over the years in many different incarnations. In addition to leading the Matt Wilson Quartet, Arts and Crafts, Christmas Tree-O and the Carl Sandburg Project, he recently played at the White House with an Obama-sanctioned all-star group that included Herbie Hancock and Dianne Reeves. He’s appeared on 250 records as a sideman. He’s played on nine additional records as a leader and five as a co-leader. In 2010, JazzTimes chose Wilson as one of the top four drummers of the year; the Jazz Journalists Association voted him Drummer of the Year in 2003. Currently, the drummer is touring with the MWQ and special guest pianist John Medeski (of Medeski Martin and Wood fame), but this weekend, he’ll take a break from the tour and return to the Peninsula for his second year as an adjudicator at the Next Generation Jazz Festival.

During Wilson’s debut last year, he says the high schoolers moved him.

“There was this energy, a sense of surprise and a carefree approach to playing,” he says. “The college concerts were good, but the high school bands were adventurous and they weren’t working so hard at it. There was a rawness that I dug. They weren’t too cool for school.”

Wilson adds, “I’m not putting down the college groups, it just didn’t touch me. Maybe this year it will.”

The New York-based musician notes that one of his favorite high school ensembles last year was a Los Angeles-based organ trio, accompanied by trumpet and drums. After hearing the trio deliver a funky freeform original inspired by the Serenity Prayer, Wilson felt like each future moment these kids spend in a classroom takes time out of what could be a stellar professional career.

“I don’t know what they’re waiting for,” he ponders. “More knowledge? What’s that going to do? Why go to college? This fantastic group could just go out and play – it would be great to have their music heard.”

Wilson wants to make it clear getting out and having your music heard is still possible while attending college.

“It doesn’t mean you have to wait four years,” he says. “Book gigs and tour now. Develop a way of performing, a way of presenting music and have the music reach audiences and see where it goes.”

The three-day NGJF brings the country’s top student musicians (high school and college) performing in ensembles, competing for various awards – including the opportunity to perform in the main stage arena at the 58th Monterey Jazz Festival on Sept. 18 – and getting the straight from the jazz-pro adjudicators.

First-year adjudicator trumpeter Terell Stafford, who’s performed MJF as a member of Wilson’s Arts and Crafts, may have some very different advice regarding higher education for jazz’s brightest up-and-comers. Firstly, as the director of Jazz Studies and chair of Instrumental Studies at Temple University, he’s a proponent of a college education. But Stafford – founder and bandleader of the Terell Stafford Quintet and managing and artistic director of the Jazz Orchestra of Philadelphia – would champion college based on his own experience alone. Without college, he would’ve never found his longtime mentor, an undergrad instructor at Rutgers University who Stafford likens to the J.K. Simmons character in Whiplash.

“He didn’t tolerate mediocrity, which took getting used to,” he says from Denver International Airport. “Some students couldn’t handle it, but he prepared me for life.”

As draining as it was, Stafford considers himself lucky to have had that experience – Wynton Marsalis and Terence Blanchard were former pupils of the same instructor – in his final year before graduate school.

“After that, there’s not much that can rattle me in performance or in life,” he says.

Stafford, who will be judging large ensemble groups, describes large ensemble preparation versus prep for solo performances.

“With large ensemble playing you need to learn to listen and approach the tunes from a historical point of view and agree as a group on concept,” he says. “Performing solo entails a deeper focus on the language and vocabulary of jazz.”

As a first-year adjudicator, Stafford says his strategy is simple: He’s using groups that represent the best examples of large ensembles as measuring sticks, like the Count Basie Big Band, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra and The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis.

“Ellington and Basie are everyone’s benchmark,” Stafford says. “There has to be a certain sparkle and personality in the music as far as precision, that swing feeling, the ability to blend together as an ensemble.”

NEXT GENERATION JAZZ FESTIVAL Friday, March 27-29; see website for complete schedule and times. Monterey Conference Center, 1 Portola Plaza, Monterey. Free unless otherwise noted. www.montereyjazzfestival.org/NGJF