JAZZ AND AMERICAN CULTURE

(Lecture). An overview of jazz and its cultural history, with consideration of the influence of jazz on the visual arts, literature, and film. The course will also provide an introduction to the scholarship and methods of jazz studies. We will begin with Ralph Ellisons suggestive proposition that many aspects of American life are jazz-shaped. How then might we define this music called jazz? What are its aesthetic ingredients and forms? What have been its characteristic sounds? How can we move toward a definition that sufficiently complicates the usual formulas of call-response, improvisation, and swing to encompass musical styles that are very different but which nonetheless are typically classified as jazz? With this ongoing problem of musical definition in mind, we will examine works in literature, painting, photography, and film, which may be defined as jazz works or ones that are jazz-shaped.” What is jazz-like about these works? Whats jazz-like about the ways they were produced? And how, to get to the other problem in the courses title, is jazz American? What is the relationship of art to nation? What is the logic of American exceptionalism? What do we make of the many international dimensions of jazz music such as its many non-American practitioners? And what do representations of jazz artists in literature and film tell us about what people have thought about the music?