Creating A Musical Dialogue American Music and the Jazz Age

Explore the unique American music of the Jazz Age (1920’s to 1940). Create a musical dialogue, improvising melodies using the blues scale in jazz style. Carter Leeka St. Albert Schools

I. Overview of American Music from the Colonies to the Industrial Revolution. A. Colonial Music B. Music in Early America C. Expanding West D. Civil War E. Industrialization II. American Music in the 20th Century: The Search for the American Voice A. Classical “Art” Music B. Patriotic Airs: The Star-Spangles Banner C. Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood. D. Folk and Blues E. Jazz F. Popular Styles after World War II III. What is Jazz? (from The Red Hot Jazz Archives www.redhotjazz.com) The music called Jazz was born sometime around 1895 in New Orleans. It combined elements of Ragtime, marching band music and Blues. What differentiated Jazz from these earlier styles was the widespread use of improvisation, often by more than one player at a time. Jazz represented a break from Western musical traditions, where the composer wrote a piece of music on paper and the musicians then tried their best to play exactly what was in the score. In a Jazz piece, the song is often just a starting point or frame of reference for the musicians to improvise around. The song might have been a popular ditty or blues that they didn't compose, but by the time they were finished with it they had composed a new piece that often bore little resemblance to the original song. IV. Listening to Jazz: Hearing the Musical Elements A. Melody B. Harmony C. Rhythm D. Dynamics E. Timbre (Tone Color) F. Texture G. Form: 12-Bar Blues

Creating a Musical Dialogue pg. 2 V. Jazz Lyrics: a. The Blues: A A B b. Jazz Poetry: 1. Vachel Lindsay: The Santa Fe Trail A Curse for the Saxophone 2. Langston Hughes: Dream Boogie 3. Sterling Allan Brown: Ma Rainey 4. Abel Meeropol (Lewis Allan) “Strange Fruit” – Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Diana Ross VI. Using Jazz to Create a Musical Dialogue a. Singing Scat b. Playing an Instrument (recorder) c. Using the Pentatonic (Blues) Scale: D E G A B d. Call and Response e. Using Variation: Rhythmic and Melodic f. Musical Dialogue: i. Question ii. Answer iii. Statement g. Using Math to get started: Fibonacci and his sequence h. Let’s Create

Composers and Performers active in the 1920-1940 period

Classical “Art” Music Aaron Copland Virgil Thomson Howard Hansen Roy Harris William Grant Still William Schuman Walter Piston Edgar Varese Roger Sessions John Philip Sousa

Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood George Gershwin Irving Berlin Harold Arlen Cole Porter Richard Rodgers George M. Cohen Jimmy McHugh Jerome Kern

Folk and Blues Woodie Guthrie Pete Seeger Ella May Wiggins W. C. Handy Aunt Molly Jackson (Mary Magdelene Garland) Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) Gertrude “Ma” Rainey Bessie Smith Robert Johnson

Jazz Duke Ellington Count Basie Louis Armstrong Fats Waller Benny Goodman Fletcher Henderson Jelly Roll Morton Glenn Miller Coleman Hawkins Tommy Dorsey Billie Holiday Creating a Musical Dialogue pg. 3 Resources:

The Red Hot Jazz Archives www.redhotjazz.com

Smithsonian www.smithsonianjazz.org Lesson plans, recordings

Public Broadacasting www.pbs.org/jazz/classroom/ Lesson plans for the Ken Burns “Jazz” DVDs and book/CD set www.vsarts.org VSA Arts resources for educators and parents, “Let Your Style Take Shape” (Fibonacci in art and music) http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/ American Cultural Heritage by decade

Do It! Play Recorder (Jame Froseth, G.I.A. Publications) w/CD – elementary recorder method using improvised variations

Exploring the Blues (Music Alive series) w/CD and reproducable pages – 8 lessons with extensions on the blues

Sounds of the Cities (Music Alive series) w/ CD and reproducable pages – 8 lessons with extensions on regional popular music styles

The Blues – Teacher’s Guide (w/CD) to the PBS series presented by Martin Scorsese (www.emplive.com ) Experience Music Project

American Music: A Panorama by Dan Kingman, Schirmer Books, 1979