Activism, Identity and Sound: 21st Century Jazz

Catalog description

This course will engage with the contemporary and changing jazz scene — including the work of dynamic artists like Esperanza Spalding, Ambrose Akinmusire, Nicole Mitchell and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah — as a means of telling “new” stories about jazz (with a special focus on identity, activism and the representation of traditionally marginalized voices). Conventionally, the story of jazz has often been upheld in terms of cultural triumph, as a transcendent response to African-American struggle. Jazz has also usually been presented as a story of succession, a chain of creative genius passing from one ‘Great Man’ to the next. These have been persuasive frameworks that define the art form by a canon and a fixed set of values, inscribing a kind of perimeter. What happens outside that borderline — the legacies of multiple avant-gardes, the work of cultural or commercial hybridists, and all too frequently the voices and vantages of women — is by this definition marginal, almost literally an outside concern. This class seeks to correct that marginalization by focusing on issues of intersectional identity and activism (including the #metoo and #blacklivesmatter movements and much more) as they relate to the evolving nature of 21st century jazz. Over the years, jazz has evolved with its circumstances through every station of its history—whether that meant tailoring performances to the length of a 78-rpm record or holding up a mirror to the moral and political turbulence of the 1960s. So the complicated cultural and technological landscape of the early 21st Century provides us with an exciting model for reconfiguring jazz history. In this course, students can expect to learn more about jazz music, as well as issues of identity, intersectionality, and activism, and to read pertinent cultural theory. We’ll also discuss how changes in the music refract and absorb our current…