Teaching Jazz As American Culture Lesson Plans
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TEACHING JAZZ AS AMERICAN CULTURE LESSON PLANS NEH SUMMER INSTITUTE The Center for the Humanities Washington University in St. Louis July 2-27, 2007 contents Foreword ……………………………………………………………………………… iv Gerald Early, Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, Department of English iv Director, The Center for the Humanities Jazz and Biography ………………………………………………………………… 1 Robert Edwards, Annie Joly, Frank Kovarik, Alice Lee, and Gerry Liebmann Jazz and Fiction ……………………………………………………………………… 21 Ken Froehlich, T. J. Gillespie, Judith Nador, Melissa Papianou, and Elizabeth Patterson Jazz and Gender …………………………………………………………………… 45 Amy Dilts, Aimee Hendrix, Hope Rias, and Franklin Webster Jazz and Race ………………………………………………………………………… 59 Robert Evans, Allen Stith, Herbert West, and Keith Westbrook Jazz and the Urban Landscape …………………………………………………… 72 Monica Freese, John Gornell, Patrick Harris, Mark Halperin, and Jerome Love Jazz and the Visual Imagination …………………………………………………… 85 Judy Gregorc, Rob Matlock, Martha Jewell Meeker, Ellen Rennard, Laura Rochette, and Larissa Young iii foreword Teaching Jazz as American Culture and as an attractive form of identity for young people. But jazz also represents a markedly different story Now, a word or two before you go. I must make from, say, country and western, rock and roll, rhythm clear to you once again why we were all here and what and blues, hip hop and rap. None of these forms of we all tried to accomplish in these last four weeks. It music has so dramatically lost its popularity and none was never my intention to encourage you to make your has become a conservatory music. It is the ways in students fans of jazz. It was never even my intention which jazz serves as a paradigm for the formation of to make any of you jazz fans who were not inclined to mass taste and the ways in which it is not a paradigm, be so. The point of this exercise was to show that jazz because of its failure to maintain itself even as a music was an important music, a highly influential music, at with a sizable niche audience, like, say, hardcore one point in its existence. And, for that matter, it still country music or gospel music or heavy metal, that remains an important music. It was an important music makes it fascinating and instructive to examine and to in the shaping of America as we know it. I also wanted think about. We can learn as much from an art form’s to show that jazz was a good music, a music worth failures as we can from its successes. But then again listening to and worth playing, at least at a certain time perhaps jazz hasn’t failed. Who says that an art form in the life of this nation. But I did not desire anything needs a mass audience to be considered successful? beyond that point and it was not necessary to desire In what ways can we understand how an art succeeds anything beyond that point. In fact, personally, you could independent of the marketplace? Perhaps jazz has still hate jazz and think it important to teach something succeeded because it has become a highly elitist art. about your subject through it. That’s what I wanted to Maybe that is what God and man intended for it. achieve, that realization. So, why do this institute on jazz and what do I So, forget about the art form as something you hope we accomplished this month? I designed this should either like or dislike. Think of it purely as a cultural, institute to get you to think about your subject in a fresh artistic, and social specimen. That is all I want you to way and to think about the humanities in a fresh way, get from this. Jazz is a specimen of a special sort, a an interdisciplinary way where a specific subject can rich sort, and can be very useful to you as teachers in suddenly become a whole. What I wanted to do here what you teach. In some respects, I think you would be was to have you see jazz from many different angles better teaching it if you’re not a fan of it or at least not so you can comprehend not only the complexity of wildly passionate about it. If you are more objective the subject but also its endless riches and how each about it, you are more likely to think about it as a time a new aspect of the subject is revealed, an aspect scientist ideally thinks about the work in a lab, rather that you already know gets re-revealed and refreshed. than in the way a true believer thinks about his or her So, you learned about jazz and the rise of the religion. After all, as I suggested to you from the start, American cities, about what cities had to offer young jazz may not be a word that was invented to describe a professionals and young artists on the make, how the form of music, but rather to describe something about city has the institutions, organizations, and, finally, the the spirit or consciousness that brought a particular audience to support new and different art. You learned type of music or art into the world. Jazz is a word that about jazz and its influence on and interaction with describes the impulse of how to make things new for other arts, such as jazz and literature, where a number both the creator and the audience. of writers have been influenced by this music as a creative inspiration. We noted how jazz influenced visual Yet it must be remembered that jazz arose at the artists like Romare Bearden and how it influenced and beginning of the twentieth century, the century of was shaped by modern dance. We also saw how jazz music, when music, through technological invention, has been a subject in Hollywood and independent films, became a widespread passion, an alluring object of and how it has been used in animation. And we learned consumption. The story of jazz is the story of the rise how composers used jazz to score films. We learned and fall of a musical idiom, of an art movement, of a about jazz in other countries—Japan (where for some kind of identity that was both popular and elitist. This musicians jazz represents individuality in a culture of makes the story of jazz important, because it has intense conformity) and Georgia (where jazz for many become the paradigm for virtually every other musical of the musicians of an earlier generation represented idiom that has flourished as the nation’s popular music political freedom)—how jazz in other places is like iv American jazz in some ways but also different in some easy listening jazz. There is still an audience for this of the emotional and artistic needs that it fills. Finally, music and it is possible for a performer to make money we examined various ways that jazz and American from it. Exactly who does listen to jazz today and why? social history interconnected: from the segregation of We never explored that. So we hardly exhausted the women in jazz and the gendered way that music is subject and we could have easily been here for another seen, to the connection between jazz and civil rights, three or four weeks. and jazz and black masculinity. In addition, you saw and heard live jazz performances every week, and had the But I wanted you to think about the humanities opportunity to talk to professional jazz musicians about anew, how a subject like jazz can tie together many their craft. We covered many things in four weeks. things, for yourselves and your students, and how this can affect how your students think about many But as much as you may have learned, there is also things. I wanted to offer this institute because I am much that we did not touch upon: think about writers a teacher and wanted the opportunity to work with like Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Toni Morrison, other teachers. I know some of you are thinking that John A. Williams, William Melvin Kelly, and Yusef the institute was informative but how do you get your Komunyakaa, who have all written important works with students to listen to jazz, even for a moment, a music jazz themes. Josef Skvorecky’s The Bass Saxophone, that seems foreign to many of them. But the difficulty is which I think is the single greatest piece of fiction the whole point. First, as teachers, we can never really about jazz, was never mentioned once during our reach our students through what they already know and institute. We never talked in much depth about jazz and are likely to explore without our effort or encouragement religion: we never discussed the jazz ministry of the late as teachers. I think, frankly, it is pointless to teach Lutheran minister, John Garcia Gensel. We did not look students Hip Hop. They are already motivated to know at the Church of John Coltrane in San Francisco. We it because it is so intricately tied up to a sense of who did not consider the influence of Christianity or Judaism they are. We must move our students to look at things on jazz or why several noted black jazz musicians like outside themselves and outside their experience. Yusef Lateef, Ahmad Jamal, Art Blakey and others Otherwise, what is the point of a humanities education? converted to Islam. We talked about jazz and race but That is what the humanities are supposed to do, enrich we did not look specifically at the relationship between your own capacity for understanding human experience blacks and Jews in jazz, which is actually more to the by taking you outside yourself and into something point because by and large most small record label else.