Creative Music Since 1959

Catalog description

This course will survey the changes in creative improvised music in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, Europe, and Asia starting from the year 1959 to the very present day. However, even several years prior to that 1959, creative music began to outgrow its musical and social origination locations (e.g. “jazz”) and widen its approaches to innovation, performance, and methods. Subsequently, creative musicians sought to expand upon the idea of so-called jazz through works that—largely stemming from black experiences—champion an aesthetic of resistance, reflection, risk, and inclusion. Artists situated outside of creative music (due to their own agency or that which was foisted upon them) have pursued ideals often considered in opposition to those of creative musicians. This course, addresses these debates to gain greater insight into artists’ motivations and reasons for gravitation towards particular aesthetic and social locations. Is the objective to become famous? To expand one’s consciousness, including their own? To please the listener? To play music for themselves and fellow musicians only? To maintain the definition of “jazz” as music that includes “traditional” stylistic aspects such as blues and swing (in other words, to “save jazz from itself”)? To argue that the “jazz tradition” does away with these aspects (including the “j-word” itself) and instead celebrates “innovation” and inclusion? Pursuing these questions, the course seeks to illuminate entanglements of music, race, ethnicity, gender, and class. We also will examine related issues such as radical collectivism, mis- / under - /representation, non- / commercialism, and diaspora through various readings, listening to and viewing recorded performances both during and outside our meetings.