Dear Colleagues:

Gerald Early

It is with great pleasure that I am writing to inform you about our National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute for high school teachers that will take place from July 5 to July 29, 2005, at Washington University in Saint Louis. It is entitled “Teaching Jazz as American Culture” and it will offer participants an exciting opportunity to learn about one of the most extraordinary art forms the United States has ever produced and how this art form, at the height of its popularity and power, deeply impacted many aspects of American artistic and cultural life—vernacular speech, film, fine art, literature, and fashion—and American social and commercial life—race relations, sex relations, and the dissemination of art to the masses. The primary goal of the institute is to work with teachers to show how, through the study of the social, cultural, technical, and aesthetic history of a major American musical genre, jazz, they can reconfigure aspects of teaching history, literature, music, art and film while broadening students’ understanding of the political, social, and commercial impact that an artistic movement can have. Participants will develop a curriculum integrating aspects of jazz.

This institute does not simply ask the question, what is jazz? It asks, as well, the questions, how did jazz become so uniquely tied to American national life and character? How did jazz shape and define 20th-century American life, the century that is commonly referred to as the American Century? If you are interested in learning how technology, racism, gangsters, nightclubs, rebellious youth, sex, immigration, and urban life all combined to generate a compelling form of popular music and popular dance called jazz; and if you are interested in learning about the techniques and aesthetics of jazz, how and why jazz players do what they do on the bandstand, how the art of making improvised music actually works and why it has attracted both musicians and fans, this institute is for you.

To check out current Institute happenings visit our News and Events page.

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Jazz came along with the rise in popularity of the phonograph in the 1910s. It also rose during Prohibition. Thus, it was both an unorthodox, modern expression connected to a new technology and a music associated with the marginal, the outlaw element of American society: blacks and the children of working-class immigrants. Jazz, in its early days, was seen as a social menace (many respectable middle class people, both black and white, saw jazz in the 1920s in much the way many middle class adults see Rap today). Because of the phonograph, jazz spread quickly and seemed pervasive. Musicians were able to learn about jazz much more quickly than older forms of music because of records and people were able to hear it much more readily. It seemed almost a revolutionary music because of this, which both frightened and excited people. This only increased with the coming of radio as a popular medium during the Depression.

There have always been different forms of jazz. In the 1920s, sweet jazz (more staid with less improvisation) and hot jazz (wilder with more improvisation that appealed to the young) vied for different audiences. Jazz could range from being a highly polyphonic musician’s music to something that sounded very much like the popular tunes of the day. Over the years of its history, some jazz musicians tried to fuse jazz and classical music, jazz and Latin American music, jazz and country music, jazz and atonal music, and jazz and Rock music, with varying degrees of success. The institute will look at the early days of jazz, the disruption that jazz caused, and the various types of jazz that have been created.

To be sure, jazz deeply affected the younger generations who grew up with it. It became more than music. It became a mood, a sensibility, an artistic movement, like Dadaism or Surrealism, only reaching far larger numbers of people. Jazz became even more. It was a style, an attitude, an aesthetic. Jazz, or something like it, was used in films from the earliest days of sound. (The first major movie with sound was called The Jazz Singer, starring singer Al Jolson. Whether the music in the film was jazz as we know it today is less important than the fact that a Hollywood studio marketed the film as being about something that the public at the time accepted as jazz.) Jazz influenced a range of classical composers from Milhaud to Debussy to Stravinsky. It influenced writers of popular songs and Broadway like Gershwin, Berlin, Arlen, and Mercer, among many others. It influenced writers, in both large and small ways, from Eliot and Hemingway to Kerouac and Ellison, from Langston Hughes and Vachel Lindsay to Amiri Baraka and Yusef Komunyakaa. It influenced artists like Jackson Pollock and Romare Bearden, choreographers like Martha Graham and Balanchine, dancers like Astaire, Ann Miller, the Nicholas Brothers, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Jazz somehow captured the sense of energy, spontaneity, exuberance, and improvisation that became associated with modern America, with the American national character of the 20th century. The institute will have sessions dealing with jazz and literature and jazz and film.

Jazz affords us a compelling story about the relationship between art and commerce, for jazz was a highly successful, popular dance music. It has now become a highly technical, subsidized art music with a small audience. This transformation is by itself an incredible story of the journey of an American art form and its complex levels of acceptance within this society. Jazz has been a music that has been marketed around the world, both commercially and politically. The State Department promoted jazz as authentic American art by touring jazz musicians around the world in the 1950s. Today, jazz is used as background to sell all sorts of upscale items—from diamonds to expensive cars. This change in jazz will be examined at several points throughout the institute.

Jazz tells the story of race in America. If many of the leading jazz innovators were black, nearly all of the people who wrote about and recorded this music were white. In interesting ways, jazz brought blacks and whites together, as it also, in other ways, kept them apart. The audience for jazz has always been mixed, and sometimes, blacks and whites have been attracted to different forms of jazz. In the 1950s, for instance, blacks liked organ trio jazz and soul jazz a great deal more than many whites did. The institute will look at the tangled story of race relations in jazz, including a session on jazz and the civil rights movement.

Jazz also raises questions about gender and popular music. Women singers—from Billie Holiday to Peggy Lee, from Blossom Dearie and Anita O’Day to Betty Carter and Dinah Washington—have been prominent in jazz, but famous women instrumentalists have been much less so, with the exception of women playing the piano. That is beginning to change in today’s world with several well-known women instrumentalists, but what few people know is that women have always played a range of instruments in jazz, and there have been several noted women jazz composers and women’s bands. Women also owned nightclubs and were jazz record producers. Today, a fuller story of women in the history of jazz is beginning to be told and you will learn about that story in this institute.

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Jazz is a city music, made possible by the way urban life conjoins high and low cultures. It grew as African American populations in major cities grew and as the new eastern European immigrants in the late 19th century arrived. Because of the location of this institute in the Middle West at Washington University in Saint Louis and because the Middle West was so important in the development of jazz and American popular music, more so than is often officially recognized, there is a particular emphasis in this part of the institute on jazz in the Midwest and jazz’s connection to river cities.

New Orleans (Tuesday July 5 and Wednesday July 6, 2005):

The first two sessions deal with the origin of jazz in New Orleans, giving the teachers a basic understanding of New Orleans style jazz, its major players including King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Bechet, four of the most important players in the history of this music, and the urban cultural milieu that produced this music, the particular mix of races and the particular form of racial culture that shaped New Orleans. Bruce Boyd Raeburn will lead these sessions.

Saint Louis (Thursday July 7, 2005):

The institute wishes to take advantage of its location and provide some sessions on the connection between Saint Louis and the development of jazz. The teachers will be encouraged, on their own, to visit the Scott Joplin House which provides not only good ragtime performances but a vivid account of Joplin’s time in Saint Louis. Saint Louis was central to the development of jazz in the middle of the country because of its importance as a river city. Jazz traveled along the inland American waterways in far more complex and striking ways than most scholars had previously thought. Saint Louis was one of the centers for ragtime in the United States (the 1904 World Fair attracted ragtime players here from around the country) and Saint Louis and its near environs of southern Illinois (Alton, East Saint Louis) produced such musicians as Clark Terry, Miles Davis, Grant Green, Oliver Sain, Oliver Lake, and Fontella Bass, and young musicians like Russell Gunn, Todd Williams, Jeremy Davenport, and Peter Martin. William H. Kenney will lead discussion of the history of Jazz in Saint Louis.

Chicago and Saint Louis (Monday July 11, 2005):

The institute will continue its examination of Saint Louis in the afternoon session on Monday, July 11. It will also look at Chicago, another important Midwestern location in the development of jazz and African American urban life. Chicago was one of the important destinations of the post-World War I black migration. King Oliver and Louis Armstrong migrated to Chicago by 1922. The legendary Austin High School white jazz players, including Benny Goodman, Jimmy McPartland, and Bud Freeman developed in Chicago. William H. Kenney and Gerald Early will lead these sessions.

Kansas City (Tuesday July 12, 2005):

The story of jazz and the city would not be complete without a consideration of Kansas City, which reshaped the music as swing in the 1930s and gave America probably one of the most important jazz bands in history with Count Basie’s orchestra. Kansas City also gave us alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the roots of the new jazz movement that was called Bebop. The story of jazz in Kansas City, and the American heartland territories, which Ralph Ellison so eloquently described in his essays in Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, will be the subject of this session. Gerald Early will lead this session.

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Jazz has had an enormous impact on other art forms in the United States. These sessions of the institute will focus on two such art forms, creative writing and film. In creative writing, not only has jazz been the subject of poetry and novels, particularly jazz musicians, (works such as Dorothy Baker’s Young Man With a Horn, William Melvin Kelley’s A Door of Patience, and the poetry of Ted Joans come to mind), but writers have been influenced by jazz as an aesthetic proposition, wanting to achieve a sensibility in their writing that mirrors what the jazz musician does. Ginsberg spoke about how jazz influenced his seminal book Howl, and critics have referred to novels like Ellison’s Invisible Man and Kerouac’s On the Road as jazz novels, largely because of the way they were written. Ted Joans’s poetry again fits in this category. Film, also, has been enormously influential in its use of jazz. There have been several films made about jazz musicians from The King of Jazz, about Paul Whiteman (1930) to Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues (1990), from Young Man with a Horn (1950) to The Rat Race (1960) to Bird (1988). Even more important has been the pervasive use of jazz as soundtrack music for countless movies, often by professional film scorers and composers. But even jazz musicians like Duke Ellington have scored a Hollywood film, Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Quincy Jones, born and bred in jazz, is a well-established film composer, and trumpeter Terence Blanchard has virtually become Spike Lee’s personal scorer.

Jazz in Literature (Wednesday July 13, Thursday 14, Monday 18 and Tuesday 19, 2005)

Sessions will examine a range of literary works from the poetry of Langston Hughes to the essays of Ralph Ellison, to jazz stories by James Baldwin and Eudora Welty. Robert G. O’Meally and Herman Beavers will lead these sessions.

Jazz and Film (Wednesday July 20 and Thursday 21, 2005)

Sessions will examine a range of films from jazz short subjects to Sammy Davis, Jr’s A Man Called Adam (1966). Jeff Smith and Krin Gabbard will lead these sessions.

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Why have so few women become known as jazz instrumentalists? There seems no indication that women are not as drawn to music as men or that women are less capable of becoming great performers. Why have women in jazz largely been known for singing or, if as instrumentalists, as pianists? Professor Sherrie Tucker will examine issues of gender and jazz looking at the social construction of gender, the gender coding of instruments, why women instrumentalists have been so little known, and what kind of conditions have women had to work under to be professional jazz musicians.

Gender: A Useful Category of Jazz Studies (Monday July 25, 2005) Sherrie Tucker will lead this session.

Teaching Jazz History with Women in It (Tuesday July 26, 2005) Sherrie Tucker will lead this session.

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Several significant changes occurred to jazz after World War II. It became an art music rather than a dance music. It lost its popular audience to Rhythm and Blues and to Rock and Roll. It also lost most of its youth audience. Jazz tried to accommodate itself to these changes in many ways: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it began to use some of the devices and techniques of Rock to attract younger listeners with moderate success; it experimented with collectives formed by musicians who wanted to escape the commercial pressures that they felt distorted the music they wanted to play; jazz, in some circles, became more ethnic or more African American in its sensibility; some jazz musicians decided to return to the so-called roots or traditions of the music, while others experimented with incorporating more elements of classical or atonal music. Despite these various ways to reach people or to develop an audience, jazz’s popularity continued to shrink. Jazz was also buffeted by the winds of social change, principally by the civil rights movement and changes in how both the country and African Americans saw race and practical racial politics. Many of these issues will be dealt with in these sessions.

The Bebop Revolution (Wednesday July 27, 2005) Session will be led by Scott DeVeaux.

Masculinity, Race, and the 1960s: (Wednesday July 27, 2005) Session will be led by Gabriel Solis.

Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement (Thursday July 28, 2005) Session will be led by Ingrid T. Monson.

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Jeremy Davenport at Jazz at the Bistro. Photo © 2000 Dennis C. Ownsley

The institute will offer three sessions (each Friday but the last of the institute) of actual jazz performance, so that the teachers might learn how jazz performances are structured, why jazz musicians do what they do on the bandstand, the nature of the training it takes to be a professional jazz musician, and why some people choose this as a career. The performances are done in conjunction with Jazz at the Bistro, a non-profit nightclub and educational initiative in Saint Louis that provides a venue for nationally-known jazz musicians to perform and to educate at local schools.

The Aesthetics and Structure of the Music (Friday July 8 and Friday 15, 2005)

The Structure of Jazz and the Structure of African American Music, an Overview (Friday July 22, 2005)

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Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in Saint Louis, where he also serves as director of the Center for the Humanities. He has written extensively on jazz. His essay, “The Passing of Jazz’s Old Guard,” was selected as one of The Best American Essays of 1986. He served as consultant for Ken Burns’s Jazz, contributing an essay to the book that accompanied that series. He was the editor of the book Miles Davis and American Culture that accompanied the exhibition. He has been a teacher at summer institutes in the past, including institutes on the Harlem Renaissance, African Americans in the Midwest, and the civil rights movement.

Linda Riekes has years of experience in the Saint Louis public schools in a variety of jobs. She is a highly respected and energetic administrator. She has organized NEH summer institutes in the past, including one on the Harlem Renaissance with the National Alliance of Black School Educators. She has assisted Gerald Early in the summer institute on African Americans in the Midwest.

Bruce Boyd Raeburn is Curator, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, and is a specialist on the history of New Orleans jazz and jazz historiography. Recent publications include “Early New Orleans Jazz in Theaters,” Louisiana History, vol. XLIII, no. 1, 41-52, “King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Bechet: Menage a Trois, New Orleans Style,” in The Oxford Companion to Jazz, ed. Bill Kirchner.

William Howland Kenney is professor emeritus of History and American Studies, joined the Kent State faculty in 1966. An expert on the culture of American music and a professional jazz clarinetist, he is on the board of editors of the Society for American Music’s quarterly journal, American Music. Kenney is the author of two major monographs: Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-30 and Recorded Music in American Life: the Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945. He is currently working on a third titled Jazz on the River: Music, Race and National Identity on the Mississippi and Ohio, 1900-1978.

Robert G. O'Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of American Literature at Columbia University. He is the founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, which is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of jazz music. He is the author of Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday and The Craft of Ralph Ellison, and the editor of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, New Essays on Invisible Man . He also collaborated on two documentary films: Lady Day and Duke Ellington.

Herman Beavers is Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania. Beaver’s specialty is 19th and 20th Century African American literature. The most notable course is in African- and Jewish-American literature, which he team-teaches with Professor Elisa New: "Exodus and Memory" and "Intimacy and Distance: Faulkner, Hurston, Welty, and Wright."

Jeff Smith is Associate Professor and Director of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis. He is the author of The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Music, a study of the ascent of the pop-oriented film score in the 1950s-1970s. In addition to his writing on film music, he has written articles on images of women and on the Hollywood blackliSaint. An accomplished pianist, Prof. Smith has played for silent film showings at Washington University and elsewhere.

Krin Gabbard is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. A specialist in film studies, he is the author of Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (1996). He is the editor of Representing Jazz (1995) and Jazz Among the Discourses (1995).

Sherrie Tucker is Assistant Professor of American Studies at University of Kansas, and author of Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s. Current research projects include authoring a research study on women in New Orleans jazz for the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, and an oral history of the dance floor at the Hollywood Canteen during World War II. She has recently been honored as the recipient of the fourth Louis Armstrong Visiting Professorship at the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University.

Scott DeVeaux is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Virginia. He is a jazz historian and the author of The Birth of Bebop: a Social and Musical History (1999), Jazz in America: Who's Listening (1995), and coeditor of The Music of James Scott (1992).

Gabriel Solis is Assistant Professor of Music at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A specialist in African American music, Dr. Solis has done ethnographic and historical research with jazz musicians and capoeiristas in the United States. He views black music in both American and diasporic perspectives. He is completing a book on contemporary performances of Thelonious Monk's music, titled Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making.

Ingrid Monson is Professor of Music and Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. Professor Monson specializes in jazz, African American music, and music of the African diaspora. She is author of Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, winner of the Sonneck Society's Irving Lowens award for the best book published on American music in 1996. She is editor of The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective in 2000.

Gene Dobbs Bradford is the Executive Director of Jazz at the Bistro, a Saint Louis-based not-for-profit jazz program. From 1999 to present, he is credited with building the organization's contributed and earned income from $375,000 to $650,000. He has vigorously begun new and exciting initiatives in education and community outreach. An accomplished musician himself, Mr. Bradford holds a degree in Double Bass performance from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. In 1994, Mr. Bradford was chosen as Operations Manager of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra; in 1995 he was promoted to Director of Operations and is facilities manager for Powell Symphony Hall and the Saint Louis Symphony Community Music School.

William C. Banfield is Associate Professor of music and holds the Endowed Chair in Arts and Humanities at the University of Saint Thomas. He also serves as director of American Cultural Studies there. He teaches composition, courses in African American and popular music history, orchestration and courses focusing on enhancing music curriculum in graduate music education. He is a composer, guitarist, and author.

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The 2005 NEH Summer Institute, “Teaching Jazz as American Culture,” will take place at Washington University in Saint Louis from July 5 to July 29, 2005. Washington University, a prestigious research institution, is located in an unincorporated suburb just outside the city of Saint Louis. Washington University, ranked among the top dozen universities in America by US News and World Report, offers a full range of research facilities for participants including several campus libraries (including a music library), internet access, a large campus bookstore, up-to-date, air-conditioned classrooms with the latest technological equipment, and several large parking lots. There is a fee for purchasing a campus parking permit. NEH Summer Institute participants will be granted privileges to use the Washington University’s libraries and computer facilities.

Participants will be housed in dormitories located on the campus of Washington University. The newer dorms cost $27.00 per day for single occupancy and $23.00 for double occupancy. The older dorms are $21.00 per day for single occupancy and $18.00 per day for double occupancy. In the new dorms are four-person suites and each suite has a private bathroom and a common room. All suite common rooms are furnished with couch, chair, and end table. All bedrooms are furnished with a bed, desk, chair, dresser, and bookshelves. In older dorms, all bedrooms are furnished with a bed, desk, chair, dresser, and bookshelves. Bathrooms and living rooms are shared on each floor. All the dorms are air conditioned.

The City of Saint Louis offers many attractions including a first-rate art museum, one of the finest zoos in the world, a science center, a history museum, a botanical garden, and many other cultural institutions. One can see Major League baseball games at downtown Busch Stadium and there are many fine restaurants, as well as number of shopping malls in both the city and the surrounding suburbs. Participants will have the opportunity to visit the Scott Joplin House, the Black History Wax Museum, and the Ville, the historic black neighborhood of Saint Louis where Annie Malone, the famous hair products entrepreneur, started Poro College, where Sumner High School, the first high school west of the Mississippi for blacks was established, where such noted black celebrities as Chuck Berry and Dick Gregory grew up.

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The institute wishes to bring together high school teachers from various disciplines, especially English, History, Social Studies, Art, and Music. But the institute will accept applications from any high school teacher regardless of discipline. It will also accept applications from qualified non-teachers such as high school librarians, media specialists, and museum staff.

How to Apply

The application form is available on-line at this page. You can also request to receive the application in the mail by writing to:

Gerald Early, Director
The Center for the Humanities
Washington University in Saint Louis
Campus Box 1071
One Brookings Drive
Saint Louis, MO 63130

Or you can make an application request by calling Amanda Beresford or Jian Leng at 314-935-5576 between the hours of 8:30 am and 4:30 pm Monday through Friday. Any questions about the application procedure can be directed to Amanda Beresford or Jian Leng.

The deadline for completed applications is March 1, 2005. Successful applicants will be notified on April 1, 2005.

Participants will receive a stipend of $3,000.00. These stipends are intended to cover travel expenses to and from Saint Louis, books and other research expenses, and living expenses for the duration of institute. Participants who do not, for whatever reason, complete the full tenure of the project must refund a pro-rated portion of the stipend. Stipends will be paid twice during the running of the institute: half on the first day of the institute and half during the last week.

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Participants will receive in-serve credit for participating in the institute.

We hope that you might be willing to spend part of your summer in a city by the Mississippi River to learn a bit about how a nation came together under a groove and behind a beat on a dance floor, how a music went from being hot to being cool, how we Americans learned to talk jive and be hip, how an art form grabbed our hearts and minds and, for a time, refused to let go, and how that art form still speaks to us as Americans, even though it has ceased to be our national music. It is a story about success and failure, rise and fall, strengths and weaknesses, limitations and possibilities. It is, more fundamentally, a story about national pride and about heroic resiliency: it is the story of American jazz.

Sincerely Yours,

Gerald Early, Director
The Center for the Humanities
Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters
Washington University in St. Louis
Campus Box 1071
Old McMillan Hall, Room S101
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
Phone: (314) 935-5576
Email: cenhum@artsci.wustl.edu
http://cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu

To check out current Institute happenings visit our News and Events page.

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