Jazz Studies W3100,
section 001
Jazz and American Culture:
Gender, Race, and Jazz
This course is not a survey of styles and musicians, but an introduction to theories of gender and race (in conjunction with other social categories such as class, nation, and sexuality) as lenses for studying how people have used jazz to struggle over ideas that mattered to them. How have these often intensely social and political improvisations over gender and race shaped our understandings of jazz history? Who played it, wrote about it, listened to it, danced to it, argued about it, policed it, marketed it, rebelled to it, survived to it? Through intensive reading, listening, writing, and discussions, students will gain and sharpen skills in analyzing meanings of gender and race as they circulate in jazz contexts. While focused on jazz, the skills gained in this course will be transferable to other topics in cultural studies and popular culture studies. Students will also gain historical knowledge of jazz as a participatory social, cultural, economic, and political set of sounds and practices, including little-known histories of women jazz instrumentalists.
In addition to standard requirements of attendance, completing assigned readings on time, and participating in discussions, each student will be required to complete the following assignments:
(1) Five short papers on the readings. Each student will be responsible for the timely completion of five short (3-5 pages) papers engaging that week’s readings, in accordance with topics posted on this Courseworks site. Timely is defined for this purpose as Thursday in-class submission (unless otherwise noted) of a paper responding to the readings for that week. There are 13 opportunities to hand in one of these short papers. The good news is that you only need to turn in five of these for the whole semester. You may turn in up to two additional weekly papers for extra credit (5 pts each) if you wish. These are short papers, but you will notice that they are worth a considerable percentage of your grade. (40% of grade).(2) Listening journal. Each student is required to listen to jazz each week, and to keep a loose leaf legibly hand-written or typed journal recording her or his own observations to these listening experiences. Write about what you hear, what the music makes you think about, and how you might connect something from our readings, films, discussions, and lectures to the listening experience. Weekly listening should include at least one discussion of an example of each of the two following categories: (1) the required weekly listening linked to the Courseworks syllabus for that week; and (2) any music of your choice that is marketed as jazz or that "sounds like" jazz to you. You might take this selection from your own collection, from the library, etc., or you may write about music that you hear in movie soundtracks, TV commercials, elevators, radios, concerts, restaurants, etc. What kinds of social meanings do various forms of jazz carry today? What kinds of associations have we, as particularly located subjects, been socialized to link to jazz? Write entries in your journal throughout the semester. Will be collected 9/28, 10/19, 11/9, and 12/9. (20% of grade).
(3) Final Written Assignment. Early in the semester, you will sign up for a biography or autobiography of a jazz musician. The culminating assignment for this class is a 7-10 page paper that analyzes this book. Instructions will be distributed with specific analytical tasks for writing about how the jazz text you read relates to the themes of this course; in particular, how does it represent gender, race, and jazz? This is not a book review, nor a research paper, but an analysis of a biographical or autobiographical representation of a jazz musician. DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE POSTED ON OCTOBER 26. First draft due 11/18, final draft due 12/16. (30% of grade).
(4) Class participation will count for the remaining 10% of the grade.
TECHNOLOGY
This course will rely heavily on Courseworks. The listening examples and weekly topics will be posted on the on-line syllabus, as will many of the readings.
Books
Linda Dahl, Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen (New York: Limelight, 1989).
Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (The Free Press, 2001).
David Hajdu, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (North Point Press, 1996)
Norma Miller, with Evette Jensen, Swingin’ at the Savoy: the Memoir of a Jazz Dancer (Temple University Press, 1996).
Kathy Ogren, The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
Additional articles
Electronic Reserve readings can be accessed via the Courseworks on-line syllabus by all registered course participants. They are also on file with the Reserve Desk at the Music Library in Dodge Hall.
Sept.
7: Introduction: “What is this course and what isn’t it?”
In this course, we will study how people have used jazz, historically,
drawing from cultural studies approaches that take culture as "a
place where people make meaning under conditions that they usually do
not control" (George Lipsitz). What has jazz meant to people in various
times and places, as a site for struggling over meanings of gender and
race? How might we organize our study of jazz in ways that can teach us
about these meanings? How do we study jazz, or any musical practice, as
a site of historically situated competing social and political ideas that
matter to people beyond the bandstand? What tools will we be learning
and using in this class? How will these tools be useful beyond this course?
Sept. 9
NO CLASS MEETING, BUT THERE IS AN ASSIGNMENT
Even though we are not meeting Sept. 9, please read the required article
for today and submit one question or comment on it via email to me:
SherrieTu@aol.com. You may wish to send me terminology used by the panelists
in this article that are unfamiliar to you, or you may wish to comment
on a particular panelist's position, or you may have another question
or comment based on a particular moment in the discussion.
Required Reading (electronic reserve article):
"Don’t Know Much About History: Historiography and Popular Music Studies: Transcript of the IASPM/US 1997 Plenary Session," Journal of Popular Music Studies vol. 8, 1996, 57-89.
Sept. 14 Strategies for Studying Jazz History for Social Meaning
Required Reading (electronic reserve articles):
Scott Deveaux, "Constructing the Jazz Tradition," from Robert O’Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (483-512)
Lawrence Levine, "Jazz and American Culture," The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 102, No. 403 (Jan.-Mar. 1989), 6-22.
Joachim E. Berrendt, "The Styles of Jazz," from The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond (Sixth Edition), 3-59.
Listening Assignment:
Worksongs, blues, spirituals, ragtime examples posted on Courseworks
Sept. 16
Jazz Historiography and Social Meaning Continued: Deconstructing the Jazz
Tradition
Required Readings (electronic reserve articles):
Guthrie Ramsey, “Cosmopolitan or Provincial?: Ideology in Early Black Music Historiography, 1867-1940," Black Music Research Journal 16(1), Spring 1996, 11-42.
Elsa Barkeley Brown, "Polyrhythms and Improvisation: Lessons for Women's History," History Workshop Journal (1991), 85-90.
Susan Cavin, "Missing Women: On the Voodoo Trail to Jazz," Journal of Jazz Studies vol. 3, no. 1, Fall 1975, 4-27.
Sept. 21
Gender, Race, and the Emergence of Jazz
Film: Marlon Riggs, Ethnic Notions (58 minutes)
Required Readings:
Book:
Linda Dahl, Stormy Weather, Part I.
Electronic reserve articles:
bell hooks, "Eating
the Other," from Black Looks
Listening Assignment
New Orleans listening examples posted on Courseworks.
Sept. 23 Gender, Race, and Early New Orleans Jazz: Various Historiographical Spins
Required Reading (Electronic Reserve)
Mahalia Jackson, with Evan McLeod Wylie, “Somewhere Listening,” from Movin’ On Up (NY: Hawthorn Boosk, 1966
William Russell and Stephen Smith, "New Orleans Music" from Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith, ed., Jazzmen (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1930), 7-37.
Sept. 28
Gender, Race, and Jazz in the "Jazz Age"
This week, we will explore the proliferation of meanings jazz in
the 1920s held for African American and white writers and audiences. What
musics were called "jazz" in the 1920s and who listened to them?
How did the term "jazz" simultaneously come to signify the music
played by King Oliver and the life-style of affluent white characters
in novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald? Why were people so adamantly “for”
or “against” jazz? What meanings did jazz express for African
American and white fans and detractors of 1920s new music? Why were most
African American writers, artists, and composers of the Harlem Renaissance
(with the exception of Zora Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes) more interested
in emerging classical forms of African American music than they were in
jazz? How can a study of multiple jazz meanings increase our understanding
of gender and race in 1920s America?
Required Reading (book): Kathy Ogren, The Jazz Revolution (all).
Listening Assignment: Musical examples from the 1920s posted on Courseworks.
Assignment Due Listening Journal #1
Sept. 30 Reading "Jazz Fiction" for Social Meaning
Required Reading (stories on electronic reserve):
Langston Hughes,
“These Blues I’m Playing” (1934)
Eudora Welty, “Power House,” (1941)
both from Marcela Breton, Hot and Cool: Jazz Short Stories.)
Oct. 5 Who
Counts as a Jazz Musician? Jazz Biography and Autobiography #1:
Norma Miller, Swingin’ at the Savoy
Over the next three weeks, we will read selections from three very different
books that focus on individual jazz musicians. As a dancer, Norma Miller
presents a view of jazz history that is rarely seen in jazz history books.
Though Billie Holiday is perhaps the most famous vocalist and woman in
the history of jazz, and Billy Strayhorn collaborated with one of the
most written about jazz figures, Duke Ellington, the biographies by Farah
Jasmine Griffin and David Hajdu also resist the usual modes of jazz
biographical and historical representation. What is at stake in these
texts? What critiques do they implicitly and explicitly make regarding
other representations of jazz figures?
Required Reading (book): Norma Miller, Swingin' at the Savoy (all).
Listening Assignment
Oct. 7 Norma Miller, continued
Assigned
Readings (electronic reserve articles):
Russell Gold, "Guilty of Syncopation, Joy, and Animation: The
Closing of Harlem's Savoy Ballroom," Journal of the Society of
Dance History Scholars, Spring 1994, 50-64.
LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, "Swing ... From Verb to Noun," from Blues People
Oct. 12 Jazz Biography #2: Billy Strayhorn. David Hajdu, Lush Life
Required Reading (book) David Hajdu, Lush Life (1st half)
Listening Assignments: Music of Billy Strayhorn posted on Courseworks.
Assignments Due: Sign-ups for Jazz Biography or Autobiography
Oct. 14 Billy Strayhorn, continued
Required
Reading (book)
Hajdu, Lush Life, 2nd half.
Oct.19 Jazz Biography #3: Billie Holiday. Farah Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday
Reading Assignments (book):
Farah Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, all
Listening Assignment
Music of Billie Holiday on Courseworks.
Assignments Due:
Listening Journal #2
Oct. 21 Billie Holiday, continued.
Reading Assignments (chapters on electronic reserve):
Angela Davis, “Introduction” and “When a Man Loves a Woman” from Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Random House, 1998).
Oct. 26
Gender, Race, and Brass: Women Instrumentalists of the "Swing
Era"
Instructions for final written assignment will be distributed
today.
Required Reading (Book)
Linda Dahl, Stormy
Weather, Part II & III
Required Listening Assignments
Women jazz instrumentalists of the 1930s and 1940s on Courseworks.
Oct. 28 Gender, Race, and Brass: All-Woman Bands of World War II
Required Readings (electronic reserve article):
Sherrie Tucker "Nobody's Sweethearts: Gender, Race, Jazz, and the Darlings of Rhythm," American Music 16(3), Fall 1998, 255-288
Nov. 2 NO CLASS: ELECTION DAY (but there will be listening assignment)
Listening Assignment: World War II musical examples
Nov. 4 World War II Continued: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Nation in the "Late Swing Era" Unlike the patriotic tunes of World War I, the music that represented America during World War II was the big band swing that had become the dominant popular music form in the U.S. during the previous decade. We will take a look at some of the articulations of swing and nationalism, and the struggles that took place in late swing era contexts in both mainstream and marginalized swing big bands during World War II
Required
Readings:
Sherrie Tucker, "Uplift and Downbeats: What if Jazz History Included
the Prairie View Co-eds,” The Journal of Texas Music History
2(2) Fall 2002, 30-38
George Yoshida, "Of Jive Bombers and Stardusters: Dance Bands in
'Assembly' Centers and Detention Camps," from Reminiscing in
Swingtime: Japanese Americans in Popular Music, 1925-1960 (San Francisco,
1997).
Nov. 9 Post-War
Jazz--Contested Sounds and Meanings: Swing, Bebop, New Orleans
Revival
The rise of the new style "bebop" in the 1940s generated new
controversies in jazz discourse. Developed during the American Federation
of Musicians recording ban, and while many musicians' careers were on
hold "for the duration" of the war, bebop struck many ears as
radically disconnected from previous styles and meanings: as variously
militant, "hip," modern, urbane, pretentious, chaotic. How did
bebop's innovators, fans, and detractors perceive and contribute the music's
meanings? How are these related to the war, to 1940s civil rights struggles
of African Americans, of black soldiers' war experiences, of labor booms,
mass rural to urban relocations of thousands of Americans, and uprisings,
based on racism and rebellions against racism, in U.S. cities, including
the “zoot suit riots” in Los Angeles?
Film:
New Orleans (Part I)
Required Readings:
Bernard Gendron, "Moldy Figs and Modernists: Jazz at War (1942-1946),”from Krin Gabbard, ed., Jazz Among the Discourses (Durham: Duke, 1995).
Required
Listening: Examples of bebop, swing, “trad.” What
were the critics fighting about?
Assignments Due:
Listening Journal #3
Nov. 11 Post-War
Jazz: Gender, Race, and Hipness
What is hipness? Why are we studying it in this class? Did postwar
women have access to "hipness"?
Film:
New Orleans (Part II)
Required Readings:
Ingrid Monson, "The Problem With White Hipness: Race, Gender, and
Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse," Journal of
the American Musicological Society XLVIII(3) (Fall 1995), 396-422
Norman Mailer, “The
White Negro,” (originally published 1957)
James Baldwin, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy," from
Nobody Knows My Name (1961).
(You may also wish to review bell hooks, "Eating the Other," from Black Looks from earlier in semester)
Nov. 16 INSTEAD OF MEETING AT OUR REGULAR CLASS TIME,
PLEASE ATTEND THE WOMEN AND JAZZ EVENT AT THE CENTER FOR JAZZ STUDIES,
8:00 PM, DETAILS TBA.
Listening Assignment:
Relevant listening examples will be posted on Courseworks.
Nov. 18 Discussion
of Tuesday's event, and the film, New Orleans
Assignments Due:
First Draft of Final Written Assignment: Analysis of a Jazz Biography or Autobiography
Nov. 23 Gender,
Race, and Jazz in the Civil Rights Movement
Jazz discourse of the 1950s and 1960s is a place where we can explore
a multiplicity of radically changing meanings of race and gender
in a variety of jazz contexts, including the Civil Rights Movement, Black
Arts Movement, and Cold War. How did production and consumption
of jazz in the 1960s reflect and contribute to ideological and material
struggles about race relations and how were these gendered?
Required
Readings (on electronic reserve):
Robin D.G. Kelley, "Dreams of a New Land," from Freedom
Dreams
Selections from Art Taylor's Notes and Tones
Listening Assignment: 1960s examples on Courseworks.
Nov. 25 NO CLASS
Nov. 30 Black
Nationalism, Internationalism, and Beyond
How has jazz functioned in the context of African American and Pan-African
cultural politics? What role did jazz collectives play in Black Power
and other African American political and social movements of the 1960s
and 1970s, from community grass-roots organizing to nation-based models,
to international struggles such as Third World Liberation? How were issues
of gender attended to in these jazz collectives? What are the overlaps
and differences among African American political and musical organizations
of this time? Can free jazz exist in an unfree world?
Required
Readings (electronic reserve):
Valerie Wilmer, Chapter 7, "The AACM--Chicago's Alternative Society,"
and Chapter 12, "You Sound Good--for a Woman," from As Serious
As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz (112-126, 204-210)
Angela Davis, "Black Nationalism"
Listening Assignment: Examples from avant garde collectives, 1960s-1990s
Dec. 2 Jazz and the Women's Liberation Movement, Any Overlap?
Required
Readings:
Books: Linda Dahl, Stormy Weather, Part IV
Articles (on electronic reserve):
Bernice Johnson
Reagan, "On Coalition"
Toni L. Armstrong, "The Great White Folk Music Myth"
Dec. 7 Contemporary Debates: Gender, Race, and Jazz at Lincoln
Center, New Technologies, Jazz and Hip Hop, Ken Burns's Jazz, and…?
What are the struggles over meaning occurring today in jazz contexts and
institutions and what are we to make of them?
Required
Readings (on electronic reserve):
Herman Gray, "Jazz Tradition, Institutional Formation, and Cultural
Practice: The Canon and the Street as Frameworks for Oppositional Black
Cultural Practices," from Elizabeth Long, ed., From Sociology
to Cultural Studies: New Perspectives (Blackwell books, 1997), 351-373
Lara Pellegrinelli,
"Dig, Boy, Dig," Village Voice.
Andrew Bartlett, "Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip Hop Sample"
Required Listening:
Examples of sampling in jazz.
Dec. 9 Wrap-up: Listening to Gender, Race, and Jazz in the Present
Required Readings (electronic reserve):
Greg Tate, "Introduction," Everything But the Burden: What White People are Taking From Black Culture
Carl Hancock Rux, "Eminem: The New White Negro"
Assignment
Due: Listening Journal #4
FINAL DRAFT OF WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT DUE: DEC. 16, 5 PM
