Jazz in American Life.”

Catalog description

This course is a historical and stylistic survey of the jazz tradition from its beginnings to the present that situates jazz’s extraordinary expressions and conventions into contexts informed by the particular people and communities that created them. Above all, jazz’s diversity is tied to similarly diverse communities, where it often reflected and inspired the complex realities of Black men and women’s search for equality and power. The blues, for example, are studied as a musical convention originating in 1920s popular music, where its frank expressions of sexuality represented a new reality for the community of Black men and women that lived in the first generation after the abolition of slavery. Swing in the 1930s and 40s was, by contrast, a form of music that reached into spaces of economic and geographic mobility for Black musicians like Fletcher Henderson. Enhancing the focus on the individuals that shaped jazz, students will read essays by the musicians themselves, clearly positioning jazz as an extension of Black music making and community.