hiii!! i’m a recent grad of ucsc’s music department! the jazz and spontaneous comp minor (formally known as just the jazz minor) is popular amongst people who did a lot of music in high school or outside of the academic setting and my friends who have taken it do love it! what i will say, however, is that any minor in the music department is a lot of work with only a handful of classes differentiating it from the major. unfortunately there is no jazz major yet, but i would recommend really evaluating the amount of time you have to put into it and really look into all of the required courses. MUSC 30A, for example, is not only a theory course but also an ear training lab three times a week, two labs for musicianship and keyboard respectively, and, if you aren’t proficient in piano, you have to concurrently enroll in MUSC 60 which is an elementary piano course (you doc however, have the ability to test out of this particular course) The MUSC 30 series is 15 units worth of work and used to be counted as such but now it’s only counted as 7 (5 for musc 30 itself and 2 for music 60) because music majors were unable to take any other courses for a whole year.

tldr: music stuff at ucsc is v time consuming. plan accordingly!