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Music is made everywhere in the world. Leave a small child to its own devices and, sooner or later, it will start banging on something and singing. It is something we feel and, in most cases, intuitively grasp. It is a language without particular signification. This makes it difficult to talk about music without diverting to emotional responses, fandom, or extraordinarily technical musicological terms. As Louis Armstrong is believed to have said: "If you have to ask what [jazz] is, then you'll never know".
Our goal is to find other ways of exploring this music. We will be looking at the music itself, aware that it does not and never has existed in a vacuum. We will be looking at it in its historical, cultural, and sociological contexts and the questions that we cannot avoid along the way are: what makes this American? and what/whose definition of culture are we working with?
I have chosen to focus mostly on the many traditions surrounding jazz, since a myriad of historians, critics, academics and observers see in jazz America's singular contribution to world culture. Musicians, critics, and academics alike invest jazz with a central importance and in attempting to describe it, connect it to such basic American myths as the American Dream, freedom, self-reliance and the development of a specific "Americanness". The history of this music is deeply connected to religion, slavery, racism, race and identity politics, three major wars, urbanization, civil rights and nearly any significant development in 20th century America. Our job is to explore and question these connections and the music itself.
The course is loosely organized into two-week units. In the first week of the unit, I will provide historical background for a specific time period, introduce a modicum of musical terms and give you a variety of in-class listening examples. We will also be looking at some excerpts taken from documentaries on jazz and its sister genres. In the second week of the unit, we will be delving deeper into related topics based on the reading texts. |
