University of California, San Diego Extension

Jazz in a Post-Ken Burns World: 1960’s-Today with San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga

If you believe the PBS-TV series “Ken Burns’ Jazz,” America’s greatest music stopped evolving sometime in the 1960s. Not so. This five-evening course will trace jazz’s evolution since then, beginning with the controversial fusion movement spearheaded by Miles Davis and Weather Report, and including the sad transformation of fusion into the neo-elevator “fuzak” style. We’ll also focus on important artists and movements, from the envelope-pushing Ornette Coleman to recent acid-jazz upstarts like Charlie Hunter. And we’ll investigate how this all-inclusive, multicultural music has impacted world culture. Stops along the way will include the genre- leaping Art Ensemble of Chicago and other mainstays of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; the neo-chamber jazz popularized by Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek; the freewheeling M-BASE revolution, which launched such mavericks as Cassandra Wilson and Steve Coleman; the Wynton Marsalis-led neo-traditional jazz movement; and such varied artists as the World Saxophone Quartet, Joshua Redman, Regina Carter, Henry Threadgill, Don Byron, Panama’s Danilo Perez, Brazil’s Hermeto Pascoal and Germany’s Albert Mangelsdorff.

George Varga is the award-winning music critic for the San Diego Union-Tribune and Copley News Service, and a contributing writer to Jazz Times. He has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Cassandra Wilson to Cecil Taylor, Wynton Marsalis and Diana Krall, and written liner notes for numerous albums, including saxophonist Michael Brecker’s 1988 Grammy Award-winning Don’t Try This At Home. A former professional drummer, Varga has also been a featured panelist at the International Association of Jazz Educators’ annual conferences since 1990.

Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30pm, January 16-February 13 (5 nights) at Spruce Street Forum, 301 Spruce Street, Bankers’ Hill

Fee: $95 (full course only, no single-evening registrations) Section: 033200-5003 Course No.: MUS-40026

To register, call UCSD Extension at 858-534-3400, 451-7474, or 882-8000 or register on-line at www.extension.ucsd.edu

For information, call 858-534-8042, email [email protected] or visit www.extension.ucsd.edu/ahl