NEH Summer Institute July 2-27, 2007
Lesson Plans from the 2007 Institute (PDF)
Topics: Jazz and Biography, Jazz and Fiction, Jazz and Gender, Jazz and Race, Jazz and the Urban Landscape, Jazz and the Visual Imagination
Course Description: The summer institute will offer participants an exciting opportunity to learn about one of the most extraordinary art forms the United States has ever produced. You will learn how this art form, at the height of its popularity and power, deeply affected many aspects of American artistic and cultural life--vernacular speech, film, fine art, dance, literature, fashion, race relations, sex relations, and the business of disseminating art to the masses. The primary goal of the institute is to work with you to show how, through the study of the social, cultural, technical, and aesthetic history of a major American musical genre, jazz, you can rethink 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 lesson plans for their subject area using aspects of jazz.
Background Reading: Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (Oxford Univ Press, 1997)
To be read in its entirety before the start of the institute.
All reading materials will be on-line at the Olin Library, Washington University.
Old McMillan 149, Institute Classroom
Lopata House Rooms 10, 11, 16, 22, Curriculum Development Sessions
Morning Session (9:00-12:00) and Afternoon Session (2:00-5:00)
Sunday, July 1, 2007: Welcome and Registration
Opening Reception, 6-8 p.m., The Piano Lounge in the Village
Monday, July 2, 2007
Instructors:
Gerald Early, Project Director, Director of the Center for the Humanities, Merle E. Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Department of English, Washington University in St. Louis.
Patrick Burke, Assistant Professor of Music, Washington University in St. Louis.
Morning Session:
Professor Early will give participants an overview of the institute on the first day, explaining procedures and re-asserting the purpose and goal, including a brief examination of some aspects of American cultural and social history of the 20th century and some examples of the broad impact of jazz in American popular culture. Professor Burke will offer participants a music theory session for lay persons, explaining in elementary terms how to listen to jazz and to music generally: tapping out rhythms, recognizing chord progressions and key changes in a performance, understanding the bar-structure of the popular song and how the popular song works, learning how to understand what a jazz musician is doing during a solo and how jazz harmony works, and other matters of this sort. This will prepare the participants for the live and recorded music they will hear throughout the rest of the institute.
Theme 1: Jazz and American Social History
A. Jazz's Geography and Modern Urban Culture
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 St. 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.
Monday July 2, 2007: New Orleans
Instructor: Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
The first three 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.
Afternoon Session:
Reading:
Michael G. White, "The New Orleans Brass Band: A Cultural Tradition" in The Triumph of the Soul: Cultural and Psychological Aspects of African American Music, edited by Ferdinand Jones and Arthur C. Jones (Praeger, 2001). pp. 69-96.
Tuesday July 3, 2007: New Orleans (Continue)
Morning Session:
Reading:
Thomas Brothers, "Introduction" (pp. 1-8), and Chapter 4: Street Hustler (pp. 74-97) in Louis Armstrong's New Orleans (Norton, 2006).
Afternoon Session:
Film: New Orleans (1947), dir. Arthur Lubin, starring Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday
Wednesday, July 4th (A Federal holiday)
Thursday, July 5, 2007: Kansas City:
Instructor: Gerald Early, Merle E. Kling Professor of Modern Letters, Washington University.
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 the 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.
Morning Session:
Reading:
Frank Driggs, "The Territories" in Kansas City Jazz: from Ragtime to Bebop-a History, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 62-83.
Afternoon Session (Old McMillan 149, Classroom):
Instructor: Stephen Missey (Master Teacher)
a) Participants will be introduced to the curriculum development project-the compiling of a resource guide grouped by topic area for teaching jazz across the humanities;
b) The teaching assistants will introduce participants to the Wash. U. library, music library, and other available resources that will be used to help compile the resource guide;
c) Participants will meet with their topic group for introductions and the beginning of work on their guide.
Monday, July 9, 2007: New York
Instructor: Patrick Burke, Assistant Professor of Music, Washington University in St. Louis
Throughout the 20th century, New York has been the cultural capital of the United States and particularly central in the creation and dissemination of popular music as virtually all music publishing and music recording was headquartered here. If jazz became synonymous with any city, it was New York, where some of the major innovations in the music took place, especially in the 1940s. This session will be an overview of the jazz movement in New York, concentrating particularly on the 1930s and 1940s, when King was Swing and its court was New York, and when be-bop rose as a counter-movement to it.
Morning Session:
Reading:
Samuel B. Charters and Leonard Kunstadt, Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (Da Capo Press, 1981), pp. 185-192, pp. 207-221.
Afternoon Session:
Instructor: Stephen Missey (Master Teacher)
a) Participants will meet with their topic groups to discuss what's been presented so far and how to make use of that material for their work, and to present their first set of findings, review evaluative standards if necessary, and share a first annotation;
b) Participants will also have time to continue individual work on research and review.
B. Jazz and Social Issues
Tuesday, July 10, 2007: Jazz and Gender
Instructor: Sherrie Tucker, Assistant Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas
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 those 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.
Morning Session: Gender: A Useful Category of Jazz Studies
In this session, we will explore ways of understanding and teaching about gender-or ideas about femininities and masculinities-in relation to jazz history. What can we learn about gender from studying jazz, and what can we learn about jazz from studying gender? Particular attention will be paid to developing methods of teaching about gender in a jazz studies context.
Reading:
Elsa Barkley Brown, "Polyrhythms and Improvisation:Lessons for Women's History," History Workshop Journal (1991), pp. 85-90.
Herman Gray, "Black Masculinity and Visual Culture," Callaloo, Volume 18, Number 2, Spring 1995, pp. 401-405.
Sherrie Tucker, "Women" in Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed April 30, 2007), http://www.grovemusic.com.
Afternoon Session: Teaching Jazz History with Women and Gender In It
This session will offer teaching strategies designed to encourage students to think about gender as an important category (as intersected with race, class, and other social categories), and to notice when women and considerations of gender go missing from jazz history.
Readings:
Sherrie Tucker, "Rocking the Cradle of Jazz," Ms. Magazine, vol. 14, no. 4 (Winter 2004/2005), pp. 68-71.
Sherrie Tucker, "Uplift and Downbeats: What if Jazz History Included the Prairie View Co-eds," The Journal of Texas Music History vol. 2, no. 2 (Fall 2002), pp. 30-38. http://www.txstate.edu/ctmh/images/journal%20pdfs/jtmh_2-2_pdfs/grils.pdf
Wednesday and Thursday, July 11, 12, 2007: Jazz After World War II - Jazz as A Social Movement
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 Rock and Roll. It also began to lose 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, become 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 racial politics. Many of these issues will be dealt with in these sessions.
Wednesday, July 11: The Bebop Revolution
Instructor: Scott DeVeaux, Department of Music, University of Virginia
Morning Session:
Reading:
Scott DeVeaux, "Introduction," The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (University of California Press, 1997), pp. 1-31.
Afternoon Session:
Instructor: Stephen Missey (Master Teacher)
a) Participants will meet with their topic group to present and review their findings and share two new annotations;
b) Participants will have time for individual work on research and review.
Thursday, July 12: Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement (Morning Session)
Instructor: Ingrid Monson, Departments of Music and African American Studies, Harvard University
Reading:
Selected Chapter for Ingrid Monson's Freedom Sounds: Jazz, Civil Rights, and Africa, 1950-1967 (Oxford Univ Press, forthcoming September 17th, 2007).
Thursday, July 12: Producing Jazz in the United States (Afternoon Session)
Instructor: Jon W. Poses, Executive Director, "We Always Swing" Jazz Series
This class will give an overview of producing jazz in the United States today: Is jazz commercially successful? If not, what could be done to make it more commercially successful? Should there be a serious attempt to make it more popular? How is jazz promoted today in the United States? Is it promoted differently abroad? It also discusses the state of art presenting generally in the United States.
Theme 2: Jazz Abroad
This block of sessions will look at how the United States exported jazz to other countries, both officially and unofficially, as a true American art form. The institute will also look at how jazz has been adapted in other countries with a particular focus on our two case studies-Georgia and Japan. How did jazz develop in both places? Who plays it? Who listens to it? What is the status of the music there today? How has it changed over time? Has this music affected how Georgians and the Japanese see the United States? Has it affected how either country sees American race relations?
Monday, July 16, 2007: Jazz Goes Abroad
Morning Session:
Instructor: Gerald Early, Merle E. Kling Professor of Modern Letters, Washington University.
This session will look at some of the earliest manifestations of jazz in other countries, principally Europe, during the 1920s.
Reading:
Alyn Shipton, "Chapter 5: International Jazz to World War II" in A New History of Jazz, (Continuum International Publishing Group; New edition, March 2004), pp.358-381.
Afternoon Session:
Instructor: Penny Von Eschen, Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
This session will examine the United States State Department jazz tours of the 1950s and 1960s.
Reading:
Penny Von Eschen, "The Real Ambassador" in Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 58-91.
A State Department report on the tours so that it can give an example of the archival material.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007: Jazz in Georgia
Both sessions will be a thorough examination of jazz in Georgia including a lecture by writer and jazz critic Zurab Karumidze and performances by and discussion with two Georgian jazz musicians.
Morning Session:
Instructor: Zurab Karumidze, Director, US-Caucasus Institute, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia
A class about the perception of jazz in Georgia: aesthetic and political; this is going to be a crossing borders or a dialogue of cultures story-how one culture adapts a foreign art form.
Reading:
Joseph Jordania, "Georgia" in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, edited by Timothy Rice, Chris Goertzen, and James Porter (Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 826-849.
Afternoon Session:
Performance and discussion with Georgian jazz musicians: Tamaz Kurashvili and Zurab Ramishvili.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007: Jazz in Japan
Both sessions will be a thorough examination of jazz in Japan including a lecture by jazz writer Wayne Zade, an expert on jazz in Japan, and performances by and discussion with two Japanese jazz musicians
Morning Session:
Instructor: Wayne Zade is Professor in English at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.
Reading:
Atkins, E. Taylor, "Chapter One," in Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 19-43.
Afternoon Session:
Performance and discussion with Japanese jazz musicians Satoko Fujii and Natsuki Tamura.
Theme 3: The Uses of Jazz: Jazz and the Arts
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. During this block of sessions, the institute will also look at the connection between jazz and the popular songs of Tin Pan Alley and jazz and its connection to Hip-Hop and other forms of black vernacular popular music. In creative writing, not only has jazz been the subject of poetry and novels, particularly jazz musicians, 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. Film, also, has been enormously influential in its use of jazz. There have been several films made about jazz musicians from "The Jazz Singer" (1927) to "Mo' Better Blues" (1991). Even more important has been the pervasive use of jazz in scoring films, often by professional film scorers and composers but sometimes by jazz musicians themselves.
Thursday, July 19, 2007: Jazz in Literature
Instructor: Herman Beavers, English Department, University of Pennsylvania
Morning Session:
Reading:
James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues," in Going to Meet the Man (Dell, 1965), pp. 86-122.
Tracey Sherard, "Sonny's Bebop: Baldwin's 'Blues Text' as Intracultural Critique" in African American Review, Volume 32, no. 4. Winter 1998, pp. 691-705.
Afternoon Session (Continue):
Reading:
Leland Chambers, "Improvisation and Mythmaking in Eudora Welty's 'Powerhouse'" in Krin Gabbard, ed., Representing Jazz (Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 54-69.
Eudora Welty, "Powerhouse," in Stories, Essays, and a Memoir. (New York: Library Association of America, 1998) pp. 158-171.
Friday, July 20, 2007: The Jazz Legacy in Modern Dance
Instructor: Cecil Slaughter, Artist in Residence in Dance at the Performing Arts Department of Washington University.
Morning Session (the Mertz Studio, 10-12 am):
The program will cover Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Charles Mingus and give a brief overview of how jazz dance evolved in this country along with jazz music. The presentation will include influential African American choreographers and how the above mentioned composers influenced their works. We will look at how the sociopolitical environment inspired dance works that are considered modern dance classics from the jazz idiom during the 50's and 60's.
Evening Session (7:00 pm):
The groups will have a Farewell parting at Linda Riekes' House.
Monday, July 23, 2007: Jazz in Literature and Visual Art
Instructor: Robert O'Meally, Department of English, Columbia University
Sessions will examine jazz-infected fiction by James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison along with key critical readings.
Morning Session: Jazz in Literature
Reading:
Ralph Ellison, Living With Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings, ed. Robert G. O'Meally (Modern Library, 2001), pp. 43-49, pp. and pp. 179-195.
Ralph Ellison. "Richard Wright's Blues" in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, edited by Robert O'Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), excerpts: 552-553, 562.
Afternoon Session: Jazz in Visual Art
Reading:
"Introductory" in Seeing Jazz: Artists and Writers on Jazz, "Foreword" by Clark Terry, "Afterword" by Milt Hinton, and "Introduction" by Robert G. O'Meally (Chronicle Books, 1997), pp. 7, 9, 43, and 85.
Introduction to Part 3: "Jazz Lines and Colors: the Sound I Saw" in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, edited by Robert G. O'Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp.175-181, 224-242.
Tuesday July 24, 2007: Jazz, Tin Pan Alley, and Broadway
Instructor: Philip Furia, writer and literary critic
An examination of the history of the Tin Pan Alley song and how it became a repertoire in jazz
Morning Session:
Reading:
Charles Hamm, "It's Only a Paper Moon: or, The Golden Years of Tin Pan Alley" in Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (Norton, 1979), pp. 326-352.
Afternoon Session:
Instructor: Stephen Missey (Master Teacher)
a) The participants will have the first two hours of this session for individual work on their final resource list and personal statement;
b) Participants will then meet with their topic groups for a final report and for gathering and formatting their resource lists for submission.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007: Jazz and Film
Instructor: Session will be led by Jeff Smith.
An examination of jazz film scoring and a look at how jazz was presented in several Hollywood films
Morning Session:
Reading:
Krin Gabbard, "Whose Jazz, Whose Cinema?" Movie Music: The Film Reader, edited by Kay Dickinson, (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 121-132.
John Conomos, "Sonic Darkness: Notes Toward an Aesthetic of Jazz in the American Film Noir," Cinesonic: Cinema and the Sound of Music, edited by Philip Brophy, (Melbourne: Australian Film Television & Radio School, 2000), pp. 81-92.
Various film clips
Afternoon Session:
Screening of Elevator to the Gallows (1957, Directed by Louis Malle, Music by Miles Davis)
Special Section:
Thursday, July 26, 2007: River Cities (Morning and Afternoon Sessions):
Instructor: Dennis Owsley will lead discussion of the history of Jazz in St. Louis.
Jazz musicians came to St. Louis in the Spring of 1919 in the Fate Marable Society Syncopators riverboat excursion band. They arrived in the midst of a vibrant blues music scene and, after a short period of puzzlement on the part of St. Louis audiences, became a sensation. This course will examine the history of jazz in St. Louis from that event to the demise of the Black Artists' Group in 1973.
Reading:
Dennis Owsley, The History of Jazz in St. Louis, 25 pages online reading.
Theme 4: Listening to Jazz Music Performance - What is Jazz?
The institute will offer three evening sessions on Friday, July 6 and 13 and Wednesday, July 18 of actual jazz performances, 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 St. Louis at Jazz at the Bistro, a non-profit nightclub and educational initiative in St. Louis that provides a venue for nationally-known jazz musicians to perform and to educate at local schools.
Friday, July 6, 2007: Greg Osby Quartet
Friday, July 13, 2007: Red Holloway
Wednesday, July 18, 2007: International Jazz (Georgian and Japanese jazz musicians)
Curriculum Development Sessions:
Friday, July 6, 2007, Morning Session (Old McMillan 149, Classroom):
a) Gerald Early will discuss jazz and children's literature and the Center for the Humanities' collection;
b) Participants will meet with their topic groups to receive and discuss evaluative standards-what questions is the group seeking to answer with annotations?
c) Participants will have time to begin their individual research and review.
Friday, July 13, 2007, Morning Session:
a) Participants will meet with their topic groups to present and review findings and share two new annotations. Groups will also begin to discuss ideas for the essay that will introduce the resource list for their topic area;
b) Participants will have time for individual work on research and review.
Friday, July 20, 2007, Afternoon Session:
a) Participants will first meet by discipline/subject area rather than by topic group to share ideas and questions about teaching content and approaches generated by the Institute;
b) Participants will then meet with their topic groups to share two new annotations and finalize their ideas for the introductory essay;
c) Participants will have time for individual work on research and review.
Friday, July 27, 2007:
Presentation of curriculum material and Wrap-Up, Morning Sessions.