Instructor: Sherrie Tucker, American Studies, University of Kansas
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 11 am 2 pm (sign-up sheet linked to Blackboard) Bailey 213-G, or by appointment. SherrieTu@aol.com
For up-to-date syllabus, please refer to Blackboard site for this class throughout the semester.
Course Description
No music is as widely associated with the United States than jazz. It often associated with American democracy, either as epitomizing a culture of individual expression and social equality, or as a critical struggle against an undemocratic government and society. While usually acknowledged as African American in origin, jazz has been subject to debates about cultural ownership and meanings of race throughout its 100 year history. Interdisciplinary scholars in American Studies and African American Studies and other fields have found the cultural history of jazz and its meanings to be a rich source for exploring race, class, democracy, commerce, and social struggle in the US and its international travels. Until recently, most jazz scholarship overlooked women instrumentalists (especially those who played instruments other than piano), masculinist language of jazz criticism, and constructions of racialized masculinity within jazz discourse. Increasingly, scholars have incorporated analyses of gender as intersected with race and other categories, yielding new insights into jazz and American culture.
The purpose of this course is to explore jazz and American culture through lenses of gender and race. This interdisciplinary course is intended for upper division undergraduate and graduate students interested in developing theories and methods for studying gender, race, and music in historically, culturally, politically, and socially specific ways. No previous study of jazz is required, but if you do have a background in jazz, your expertise is welcome. Through readings, listening, writing, film viewing, discussions, and collaborative research on women, gender, race, and jazz in a Kansas City and vicinity, we will explore social meanings that creators, fans, and detractors have associated with jazz in particular historical moments, sites, and scenes of musical interaction. There are many ways to study jazz; the approach this class takes is through exploration of struggles over social, cultural, and political meanings of race and gender.
Jazz & American Culture, Fall 2014
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Assignments
1) Weekly Listening Blogs: Post two paragraph-length blog entries on ten different weeks. In these, describe your experience of listening attentively to two musical examplesone selected from weekly listening examples on Blackboard, and one of your choice. For your selection, you may choose any music in any setting, but it must either be marketed as jazz, or it must sound like jazz to you. If the latter, be sure to explain what about it strikes you as jazz or jazz-like. People perceive and describe music in many different ways. You satisfy this requirement (1 point) by listening to music, and writing about your perceptions in your own way, using language available to you. You receive top credit for this assignment (2 points) by linking your perceptions to the readings in a meaningful way. 20% 2) Three short papers (3-4 pages each) to be assigned throughout the class. These papers are assigned one week in advance, and are based on questions that I will provide. There will be four opportunities to do these, and you may choose which three you want to do. If you do more than three, the three best grades will count for the total. 30% 3) Attend three performances (virtual and/or live). There will be several opportunities throughout the semester to attend virtual and live jazz performances. You receive credit for this attendance after you blog about it. On a week that you attend a performance, please devote both paragraphs of your listening blog to writing about it in lieu of other listening examples. 15% 4) Collaborative Research Project: Each member of this class will contribute to the creation of a website pertaining to gender, race, and jazz in the state of Kansas. Using the tools we have learned throughout the course, students will conduct primary source research, and author or co-author at least one substantive entry. 25% 5) Participation: Includes regular attendance, preparation, listening, and contributing to in-class discussion. In regard to class discussion, I realize that most of us are more comfortable in either the speaking or listening mode. Both are required in this class. Please see me if either presents a challenge and we will strategize together. 10%
PLUS (Graduate Students Only): lead one discussion of a reading (negotiated with me) and submit one 7-10 page paper (instead of a third short paper) that extends a theoretical move from this class that may be useful for your larger work. Please meet with me early in the semester to strategize an assignment that optimizes your ability to fulfill the course goals in a way that is meaningful to your graduate work (grade will be averaged into 30% with the three short papers).
Course Readings:
Required Text: Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Duke University Press, 2008) All other readings will be available on Blackboard. Jazz & American Culture, Fall 2014
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Brief Weekly Outline (What follows is a sketch. Always check Blackboard for listening examples, assignments, adjustments, and readings.)
Aug. 27: What is this thing called Jazz? Introduction to key concepts
Not all of the music called jazz today was called jazz at the time it was created. Not all of the music that has been called jazz by musicians and audiences in the past is included in published accounts of Jazz History today. What is Jazz and for whom is it important? Our first session is an introduction to some of the key concepts used within Jazz Studies when researching jazz histories, scenes, and sounds as sites of social and political practices and ideas that mattered to people.
Readings/Listening/Assignments: None for this first class session.
Sept. 3: No class meeting, but there are readings, listening, and a short written assignment is due to me via email at 8 pm
Required Readings (on Blackboard): Lawrence Levine, Jazz and American Culture, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 102, No. 403 (Jan.-Mar. 1989), 6-22. Eric Porter, Introduction, and A Marvel of Paradox, What is this thing called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (UC Press, 2002), xiii-xxi, 1-53 Kevin Whitehead, Why Jazz? 1-18
See Blackboard for film clip and short written assignment
UNIT I: HISTORY, MEMORY, & HISTORIOGRAPHY
Sept. 10: Enduring Love & Theft: Raced and Gendered Legacies of Minstrelsy
How do jazz musicians, fans, historians, critics, producers, and scholars grapple with the closely intertwined histories of jazz and minstrelsy? How does this historical relationship inform ongoing struggles over gender, race, and jazz? Film: Marlon Riggs, Ethnic Notions (58 min)
Required Reading (on Blackboard): Jayna Jennifer Brown, Little Black Me: the Touring Picaninny Choruses, from Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008), 19-55 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy, Representations 39, (Summer 1992), 23-50. Deborah Gray White, "Jezebel and Mammy: the Mythology of Female Slavery," from Arn't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, 28-61 Jazz & American Culture, Fall 2014
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Suggested Reading (on Blackboard) Michelle Wallace, Uncle Tom's Cabin: Before and After the Jim Crow Era, TDR vol. 44, no. 1, Spring 2000, 136-156 Laurie Stras, "White Face, Black Voice: Race, Gender, and Region in the Music of the Boswell Sisters," Journal of the Society for American Music vol. 1, issue 2, (2007), 207-255.
See Blackboard for readings, listening, and short written assignment
Sept. 17: Jazz in the ArchiveMEET AT MAIN ENTRANCE (ABOVE THE CAR PARKING AREA) SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY (NOT SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART) 1450 Poplar Lane (behind Strong Hall)
6-7 pm: Sherry Williams, Curator of Collections, will show us some of the archival materials on jazz that are housed at KU. Spencer is one of several archives where you may conduct research for the collaborative assignment.
7:-8:30: Discussion: How is an archive different than history, memory, and historiography? What are the relationships? What did you see (or not see) in Spencer that surprised you? If you were to go back tomorrow, what would you want to see again or search for and why? We will brain-storm on possible research to pursue for the collaborative research assignment.
Required Readings (on Blackboard): Susan Cavin, Missing Women on the Voodoo Trail to Jazz, Journal of Jazz Studies vol. 3 (1975) no. 1, 4-27 Nadine George Graves, Preface: Surviving the Silence, Beginnings, Influences, and a Performance Reconstruction, The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: the Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theatre: 1900-1940, xi-50
Paper #1 assignment posted (Due Oct 1)
Sept. 24: Jazz History as Site of Struggle
Jazz historians often note the contexts of struggle from which the music emerged. Yet, even the ways in which jazz historians have battled one another over how to tell the story have often been sites of struggle. What is at stake? How do we understand underrepresented histories? How do we learn to tell new stories in relation to histories that have been told so many times they have become common sense? Can there even be such a thing as Jazz History if the ways in which people have told jazz history in writing and film have been sites of struggle over meanings about gender and race (and other social categories)?
Lecture: Scratching the Historical Record: Gender, Race and Jazz Jazz & American Culture, Fall 2014
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Required Reading (Big Ears) Rustin and Tucker, Introduction, Big Ears 1-28
Required Readings (on Blackboard): Elsa Barkeley Brown, Polyrhythms and Improvisation: Lessons for Women's History, History Workshop Journal (1991), 85-90 Scott Deveaux, Constructing the Jazz Tradition, Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 25, No. 3, (Autumn, 1991), 525-56
Suggested Reading (on Blackboard): Joan Scott, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis
Oct. 1: Revisiting the Cradle: Gender, Race, and Early Jazz: Research Strategies How might we use an intersectional analysis of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation to re-examine the birthplace of jazz and the style that continues to travel by the place name New Orleans jazz? We will xploration of attempts to account for hidden histories and history as many voices talking at once.
Sign-ups for research topics for collaborative web-site on gender, race, and jazz in Kansas.
Required Reading (on Blackboard) Sherrie Tucker, Introduction, A Feminist Perspective on New Orleans Jazzwomen, New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, 2004, 1-20
Required Reading (Big Ears) Lara Pelligrinelli, Separated at 'Birth: Singing and the History of Jazz, Big Ears, 31-47. Jeffrey Taylor, With Lovie and Lil: Rediscovering Two Chicago Pianists of the 1920s, Big Ears, 48-63
PAPER #1 DUE AT BEGINNING OF CLASS
UNIT II: EMBODIMENT AND PERFORMANCE
Oct 8: Gender, Race, and Jazz in the "Jazz Age"A shift into theories of embodiment and performance need not coincide with the Jazz Age unit, but it is certainly an apt place for such incorporation. This week, we will explore the proliferation of meanings jazz in the 1920s held for African American and white musicians, audiences, and writers. How did conflicting ideas about proper bodies, exciting bodies, modern bodies, and artistic bodies get worked out through "jazz" controversy? How did jazz factor into new ideas about embodiment and performance associated with New Women and New Negroes? What struggles took place over gender, race, and modernity among fans and detractors of jazz across lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class? Jazz & American Culture, Fall 2014
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Lecture: What do theories of embodiment and performance bring into view. Film excerpts: Swing (1938) Oscar Micheaux
Required Reading (on Blackboard): Amber Clifford, Female Impersonation in Kansas Citys Jazz Scene, Queering the Inferno: Space, Identity, and Kansas Citys Jazz Scene (Ph.D. dissertion, American Studies, KU, 2007), 194-201 Kathy Ogren, From Devils Music to Jooking: Jazz Performance and the Black Community and Prudes and Primitives: White Americans Debate Jazz, The Jazz Revolution, 111-161.
Required Reading (Big Ears) Jayna Brown, From the Point of View of the Pavement: A Geopolitics of Black Dance, 157-179
Oct. 15 Popularity, Populism, and Pop Culture: Jazz in the 1930s
Required Reading (Big Ears) Monica Hairston, Gender, Jazz, and the Popular Front, 64-89 McDonald, J. Frederick. Hot Jazz: the Jitterbug, and Misunderstanding: The Generation Gap in Swing. In American Popular Music: Readings from the Popular Press, Volume 1, the Nineteenth Century and Tin Pan Alley, edited by Timothy E. Scheurer. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989, 151-60. Nichole T. Rustin, Mary Lou Williams Plays Like a Man! Gender, Genius, and Difference in Black Music Discourse, South Atlantic Quarterly, 104(3), 445-462.
Film: Broken Strings
Paper #2 assignment distributed (due Nov. 5)
UNIT III: REPRESENTATION
Oct 22 Jazz and World War II: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Nation 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
Film: The International Sweethearts of Rhythm (30 minutes)
Required Reading (on Blackboard): Jazz & American Culture, Fall 2014
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Megan E. Williams, "Lena Not the Only One": Representations of Lena Horne and Etta Moten in the Kansas City "Call", 1941-1945, American Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010), 49-67
Required Reading (Big Ears) Christina Baade, The Battle of the Saxes: Gender, Dance Bands, and British Nationalism in the Second World War, Big Ears, 90-128 Kristen McGee, The Gendered Jazz Aesthetics of That Man of Mine: The International Sweethearts of Rhythm and Independent Black Sound Film, 393- 421
Oct. 29 Gendering the Jazz Wars
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?
Film: New Orleans (1947)
Required Readings (Blackboard): Bernard Gendron, "Moldy Figs and Modernists: Jazz at War (1942-1946),from Krin Gabbard, ed., Jazz Among the Discourses (Durham: Duke, 1995). Required Reading (Big Ears) Tucker, But This Music is Mine Already: White Woman as Jazz Collector in the Film New Orleans (1947), 235-266
Nov.5 No class meeting, but there is an assignment due at 8 pm
Post-War Jazz:What is hipness? What is its gender and race? Why are we studying it in this class? Did postwar women have access to "hipness"? Which ones? Required Readings (Blackboard): 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), excerpts James Baldwin, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy," from Nobody Knows My Name (1961) Jazz & American Culture, Fall 2014
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Required Reading (Big Ears) Nichole T. Rustin, Blow, Man, Blow!: Representing Gender, White Primitives, and Jazz Melodrama through A Young Man with a Horn, 361-392
Recommended: (Big Ears) Ursel Schlicht, Better a Jazz Album than Lipstick: (Lieber Jazz Platte als Lippinschtift): the 1956 Jazz Podium Series Reveals Images of Jazz and Gender in Postwar Germany, 291-319 Due: Paper #2 (8 pm on Blackboard)
Nov.12 Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement
Required Reading (Blackboard) Lisa Barg, Taking Care of Music: Gender, Arranging, and Collaboration in the Weston-Liston Partnership, Black Music Research Journal Ingrid Monson, Introduction, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa, 3-28 Eric Porter, Straight Ahead: Abbey Lincoln and the Challenge of Jazz Singing, What is this Thing Called Jazz?, 149-190
Film: Cry of Jazz
Nov. 19 Free Jazz in an Unfree World: The Avant-Garde, Black Freedom Struggles, Third World Liberation, and the Womens Movement Jazz discourse of the 1960s-1970s is a place where we can explore a multiplicity of radically changing meanings of race and gender in within social movements for liberation. How did jazz performance connect with mass movements? How did jazz reflect and contribute to ideological and material struggles about racial justice and decolonization, and how were these gendered? What is the place of jazz in the cultural arm of the second wave womens movement?
Required Readings (on Blackboard): Nanette de Jong, Women of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians: Four Narratives, in ed. Eileen M. Hayes and Linda F. Williams, Black Women and Music: More than the Blues (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007),134-152 Tammy Kernodle, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Alice Coltrane and the Redefining of the Jazz Avant-Garde, John Coltrane and Black Americas Quest for Freedom (ed. Leonard Brown, Oxford 2010), 73-98 Valerie Wilmer, Chapter 7, The AACM--Chicago's Alternative Society, and Chapter 12, You Sound Good--for a Woman, As Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz (112-126, 204-210) Paper #3 assignment distributed (due December 17) Jazz & American Culture, Fall 2014
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THANKSGIVING NO CLASS Nov. 26
Dec. 3 Jazz and Feminism (any overlap?)
Required Readings (on Blackboard) hattie gossett with carolyn johnson, jazzwomen: theyre mostly singers and piano players, only a horn player or two, hardly any drummers, Heresies no. 10 (1980), 65-60 Janet Lawson, Blowing on the Changes: Reflections of a Jazz Woman, Heresies, no.10 (1980), 70-73. Linda F. Williams, Black Women, Jazz, and Feminism, Eileen M. Hayes and Williams, ed., Black Women and Music: More than the Blues (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 119-133
Required Reading (Big Ears) Farah Jasmine Griffin, It Takes Two People to Confirm the Truth: the Jazz Fiction of Sherley Ann Williams and Tony Cade Bambara, 348-360
Recommended Reading (Big Ears) Julie Dawn Smith, Perverse Hysterics: The Noisy Cri of Les Diaboliques, 180- 209
Dec. 10 Wrap-Up: Reflections on Jazz History, Embodiment, and Representation in the Present
Required Reading (Big Ears) Tracy McMullen, Identity for Sale: Glenn Miller, Wynton Marsalis, and Cultural Replay in Music, 129-154 Ingrid Monson, Fitting the Part, 267-287 Eric Porter, Born Out of Jazz, Yet Embracing All Music: Race, Gender, and Technology in George Russells Lydian Chromatic Concept, 210-234
Presentation of Website Entries We will view your entries as a class. Each person should be prepared to talk about the entry you chose, research process, and decisions in representation.