Subject Area: Music

Since its beginnings around a century ago, jazz has consistently enthused listeners with the inventiveness, expressiveness and virtuosity of its performers, and the variety of its styles. Beginning with African American chants, field hollers, early blues and urban dance forms, this course traces a history of the music, outlining the development and details of various styles of jazz, both in the United States and abroad. Tracing the changing locations in which the music has developed, it examines the roles of individual artists and musical collectivities in the innovation of styles. It investigates the dissemination of jazz through emerging media technologies, and notes the influence of other music on jazz musicians: popular music, rhythm and blues, soul, rock, classical music and world music, such as Latin American music, French gypsy music, South African kwela and mbqanga. As jazz has become the scintillating soundtrack to many lives, the course examines both the practical use of jazz as sound and image in film, literature and the visual arts, and some of the many meanings listeners have ascribed to it. The course introduces students to critical debates surrounding jazz: debates of race, authenticity, ownership, gender and commercialization. The course engages students in the process of informed listening.