I thought this would be an interesting course to take as I have played the alto saxophone since the fifth grade. I joined my middle school jazz band in seventh grade, and ended up playing jazz all throughout high school. That being said, I had a very rough knowledge as to where this style of music I had played for six years actually came from at the beginning of this course. I knew of some modern artists, I knew of many saxophone legends from Bird to Eric Marienthal, I knew jazz had something to do with New Orleans, but I didn’t know why or how jazz first emerged and developed into the form I was familiar with. I walked into the first lecture thinking that the class would probably focus on jazz in the 1920s to the 1930s with Bird and Gillespie, since that was what I knew the most about. Looking back, I had no idea how complex and intricate the development of jazz was.
As a jazz player, I was familiar with the fundamental concepts of the art, such as call and response, improvisation, syncopation, and other techniques. I had figured that these concepts were always an essential part of jazz and never put much thought into where they came from. From this course, I learned that many of these techniques were developed apart from each other and only came together when jazz began to gain more popularity. I did not know that call and response dated way back to the late 1800s with the slave trade in New Orleans. The work songs slaves would sing featured this technique and would eventually lead to the development of the blues. From the blues came even more concepts known in jazz today, and was one of the first types of music to feature vocalists singing with “jazz” instruments in the background. Another fundamental I was very familiar with was improvisation. I figured that, since improv is such a big part of jazz that it was just inherent to jazz. Little did I know that much of the early forms of jazz, from ragtime to blues to swing, were scripted and featured very little room for soloing. From lecture I learned that improv was heavily developed in New York in the early 1900s as a way for stride pianists, such as James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith, to maintain interest in their music. If these pianists didn’t react and come up with new, exciting material on the spot during their “cutting contests” at rent parties, people would lose interest in their playing and they would lose money. I had no idea that improv developed out of necessity for musicians to stay “in” with their listeners. These and many other fundamentals of jazz I took for granted for six years finally began to show their importance to the development of jazz through this class.
This class also broadened my grasp on who contributed to the development of jazz. I had naively thought jazz gained popularity from only a few musicians, namely Bird and Gillespie with their creation of bebop. I did not realize that jazz began in New Orleans, spread to Chicago and New York, then to the rest of the country because of the large community of jazz musicians and listeners that promoted jazz over the course of many, many years. Sure, I knew names like Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and Thelonious Monk, but I couldn’t fathom how much each contributed to the development of jazz. There was so much I didn’t know – Armstrong’s trek through the “big three” cities in jazz and his creation of swing, King Oliver’s influence on all other jazz bands during his time, Duke Ellington’s contributions to jazz despite the controversial race tensions he was presented with…
Coming in to this class, I thought I knew a decent amount about the history of jazz. Through this class, I discovered how wrong I was and learned not only the roots of jazz, but the social, economic, and historical conditions that influenced the way in which jazz was developed. I finally received some context for some of the big names I had heard before and found out what each musician had to offer to jazz during their time. I am really glad I decided to take this class and feel that I now have a much better understanding of the history of jazz than I had at the beginning of the course.
I enjoy how you incorporate your background as a jazz musician into what you expected to learn, as well as contrast it against your presuppositions of what you thought about the history of jazz. I too learned a lot about how jazz affected American culture, and it is surprising that it is not taught in American history of how large of an impact jazz had on American society.
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