help me with my class?

McCoy tyner plays it (and harpsichord) on some of the tracks on Trident

Also I think monk plays one on brilliant corners???

If you're getting to it when you cover modern music, my students enjoyed this video of Stephen Drury breaking down and demonstrating how he prepares the piano for Cage's Sonatas and Interludes/

thanks -- these look good. i was trying to avoid sugar plum fairies because we talked about that last night but it's a logical choice
they said it sounded like fairy tale music
one student said it reminded her of a song from final fantasy (iirc)

oh! also i told them about 4'33" and told them they were free to use it as a joke in the future :) it was when we were talking about performance spaces and the different sounds they make.

Btw I also love celesta, definitely top 5 orchestral seats for me

(Viola, horn, flute, oboe, celesta for those keeping score)

i just realized the i saw the bulgarian women's choir upthread perform last year. or whatever incarnation of them exists these days. on the way there some lady plowed her car into my car and if their music hadn't been so beautiful i might have freaked out about that but instead i just drove my jacked up car to the show and tried to relax. lol

tonight's class is intro to folk/traditional music: folk ballads
i am going to define them contextually/historically, musically, and thematically (for emotional impact) and then we are going to examine some examples
after that, they will explore the lomax archives and our youtube playlist for a song to research themselves, and the presentations will be next week (short, structured, practicing research skills)
kind of can't believe i am going to have a captive audience for this + it is my job
http://www.culturalequity.org/lomaxgeo/ <-- look at this map!

since it's my first time teaching this course, i know i will only improve the course with time and trial/error. i am hoping they are not bored to tears by this, but i have encountered that reaction before when trying to share my enthusiasm for folk ballads...we'll see! i feel realistic about my expectations. even if they don't like it, they will learn something :)

also homework for this week was to listen to and write about the songs on last week's playlist with attention to the elements of music, which we discussed (and demonstrated) in class. (i didn't blow anyone's mind with my drumming, but people don't appreciate how much work goes into being able to play a particular pattern in the same way they appreciate a soaring melody or whatever. it's ok) i am looking forward to reading their descriptions a lot!

mention silences/pauses as an element of music IMO

it's interesting that corridos are too related to crime for comfort but olde folk ballads are not. Long time ago criminal acts vs right now criminal acts.

Loving where u are going with this LL

we talked about corridos last night and how they are essentially modern crime ballads! i think they had a new appreciation for them after we discussed the nature/purpose of folk ballads.
they were super interested in the connection between the Lomax archive and Shirley Collins
i brought in my Sounds of the South box set and showed them the tiny little spot at the very end of the booklet where she was thanked/acknowledged.

i have a new favorite student though -- their homework was to write about songs on the week 2 playlist using vocabulary, but one of my students went back to the Is this music? playlist and chose a Steve Lacy track that is pretty far out and 1) she did not say she hated it 2) she did not say it sounded crazy 3) the thing she noticed most about it is how some instruments came through one ear and others came through the other. observant! tolerant! i let her borrow one of my CDs from the box set for her project next week :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vvW8ZdLjGs&list=PLdfn7UDTewpCtuEx3FhjZ1-lU5T4Z2lTF&index=3

wish i could take this class!

yeah, it looks fun!

it is so much fun. i described it yesterday as "every week it is [part of] my job to talk about music for 3 hours with a group of people who listens to me"
i made some progress securing a performance space for an end-of-semester performance of some kind -- idk what exactly it's going to be, but we would have a room and a piano. surely we can make something happen. i just have to persuade the administration that it's not going to bring in hordes of people who will need parking spots.

if there's one thing i can assure them, it's that in Chicago there are unlikely to be hordes of people who show up for a musical performance at a random location on a Tuesday night. even with significant promotion, you'd be lucky to get 10 people to show up. and those 10 people are not going to be arriving in separate cars.

I learned something last night about the one and only Richard Clayderman -- his song "Ballade pour Adeline" is a ubiquitous tune used at quinceañeras & graduations in Mexico (acc to my students, who were all certain about its ubiquity in their experience)

https://streamd.hitparade.ch/cdimages/richard_clayderman-ballade_pour_adeline_s_6.jpg
https://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_500/MI0002/466/MI0002466371.jpg?partner=allrovi.com

lest you think for a millisecond i was trying to encourage them to appreciate the music of richard clayderman, i was not
if you did think this for a millisecond, please go back in time and give me some credit :)

That is an extremely frilly shirt.

I did not know Richard Clayderman was listened to outside of impulse purchases driven by infomercials! His wikipedia discography has a length and a repetitiveness that would impress Mark E Smith, especially the title Null Piano Moods. Zodiacal Symphony and Love the Aboriginal's also intrigue.

i actually kinda dig the look in the first pic! i enjoy the audacity of a frilly shirt
his music...not as much, in spite of its shocking abundance

Shaun Cassidy ‘73 meets Ray Davies ‘66. He’s got it going on.

He looks wicked baked in the first pic

otm

i want to take this class!

my next task is to talk about 1) the roots of jazz and 2) the evolution and influence of jazz (idk how far i will make it before the midterm) in preparation for a class outing in 3 weeks to the legendary green mill!

currently accepting recommendations for the early roots of jazz lesson :) :) :)

recommendations in the form of:
links, readings available for free online and youtubes of examples

(which is to say that i can't read or buy any entire books for this purpose, i have to make do with what i have available for free to share with students)

lots of great things happened in class this week -- one student gave her presentation about almeda riddle and said that her preschool class especially enjoyed "i love my little rooster" and they hollered out the cocka DOODLE DOO doodle DOO doodle doo part

i had it stuck in my head for the entire next day :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtbPk5NsEQA

The Original Dixieland Jass Band's "Livery Stable Blues" is commonly cited as the first jazz recording. It's from 1917. It's on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um4xhfwYnvg

From there, jump to Louis Armstrong's "Wild Man Blues," from 1927.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO3k-S_pqK4

Interesting note from that Armstrong YouTube clip, which could spark a discussion in class about the record business:

The tune is credited to Louis and Jelly Roll Morton, though Louis said he never could figure out how they could have written it together: "I never had a conversation with him until 1936; guess he was working for the publisher at the time."

thank you! i am really excited about this part and also SUUUUUPER nervous because i don't want to screw it up

one slightly negative thing that happened is a new student arrived in week 3 and started giving me a little bit of a hard time. this week he scoffed because i didn't know how yodeling was invented. i told him he was free to do his presentation on the origins of yodeling since he was not prepared when it was due in class this week.

funny you should mention the youtube comments -- they have been quite helpful in giving added contextual information (both factual and subjective emotional reactions) to support my recommendation of that particular song. you can imagine the comments for joni mitchell's "both sides now" -- one of my students read them and asked if she could do her project about joni because she seems very important <3

King Oliver's "Deep Henderson" is the early jazz track that gets me every time, something about the heave-ho of the rhythm and the cornet arpeggios in the second half

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2zER0jmrps

Crystal clear transfer of Armstrong's "Ain't Misbehavin'" from the original metal mother disc: https://kottke.org/16/04/unbelievably-clear-recording-of-louis-armstrong-from-1929

with the influences of jazz it could be fun to show just how far it went. "country" outfits like Bob Wills whose main job was to get people to dance would regularly play popular jazz tunes. jazz being essentially functional dance music in many of its incarnations. here he is with the Texas Playboys doing "take the A Train"

https://youtu.be/ZMyXOv3ttCE

musically, the hard-driving "swing" beat in take the a-train and many other classic jazz tunes was the crucial ingredient grafted onto folk/country to create Bob Wills' genre of "western swing"

(which in turn influenced rock and roll, rockabilly, etc)

Glad it's going so well, wish I could enroll! Seems like you're covering use of folk in some other musics, are you considering maybe that re Joni, Dylan, Richard Thompson, John Fahey? Plenty of Fahey on youtube, duh, and as something of a backstory gateway, here's the 2001 Fahey section at Perfect Sound Forever, incl. the Byron Coley overview and 90s update is often credited with relaunching Fahey's career: some Warners-Rhino people read it and got stoked, put out the comp Return of the Repressed, followed hella reissues and new releases, shows etc.
http://www.furious.com/Perfect/fahey/index.html

xp - yes, that is going to be info i share with them when we transition away from jazz
i love bob wills & western swing. one time i was in an interview for a music related job and mentioned my affection for spade cooley. did not get the job :-/

Bob wills is a heavy influence on the way my mom and her sisters (all in their late 80s, raised in rural SD) sing at family singalongs. There’s a whole lot of spontaneous “AWWWW-haww” ing.

Aunt Clarice who just passed last year was an accomplished yodeler, the only one in the family.

xxxpost Yeah, Spade Cooley is not somebody I'd rec. mentioning on a job interview---read a good history and *description* of Western Swing in its original glory days, and h0w many participants fared later---most hitting a wall re the commercial headlock of The Nashville Sound and Countrypolitan, not hanging on 'til the WS revival of the 70s, though some did, and--well, read it yerselves in Southwest Shuffle, by Rich Kienzle. He could use an editor, but he knows a lot about the music and the people, and that certainly comes through---real good discography too. It's kind of like Four Lives In The Bebop Business in reverse, because we know how well most of those scufflin' outsiders ended up (all of 'em really, if you consider that even Herbie Nichols got posthumous studies and a kickass box set on Mosaic, among other reissues).
More on Fahey, by me, not as rah-rah as Coley, but no trolling; search on here for the term "Faheytronica" and you'll see it, and one of our good Fahey threads anyway:
Search and Destroy: John Fahey

the great nat hentoff on louis armstrong:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/born-on-the-fourth-of-july-how-louis-armstrong-taught-us-to-swing

a good piece that trace's armstrong's career in the context of civil rights:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-louis-armstrong-really-thinks

a really cool vintage video, from 1937, on how to make records, starring duke ellington:
http://www.openculture.com/2016/01/how-vinyl-records-were-made-from-start-to-finish.html

i'm prejudiced because i never much liked cooley's work, but yeah it strikes me as kind of like saying "you know who does some really great clown paintings?"

way to pick on me y'all! the person interviewing me didn't even know who spade cooley was. i deserved that job and would have been good at it. fortunately, i did not get it, went on to grad school and now i am a teacher.

thanks sincerely for the reading material fcc

i am not trying to argue with y'all
i just wanted to clarify that the reason it was stupid to bring up spade cooley in an interview was not because spade cooley sucks; it was because the person interviewing me didn't know what i was talking about.
spade cooley being a clown painter is incidental

This course sounds so damn good. Any scope for putting it online?

I'm always wanting to bring things back to text but could you introduce some of the sections from Coming Through Slaughter- the descriptions of Buddy Bolden? Obviously he never recorded but goddamn those descriptions are extraordinary.

ooh i have been looking for good examples of descriptions of music
is this something that can be found online? i don't have time or energy to chase down a book, too much work :(

Can c+p here? Or can email if that's more convenient. James Baldwin in Another Country would be another one.

please email if it's not too much trouble -- my ilxmail works, just send me your address and we can take it from there
thank you!

Re: Richard Thompson and jazz, there's a track from a couple of years ago where he pays tribute to several of his jazz heroes, let me find it. ...

Ha, it's called "Guitar Heroes:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abFBhMdbjIo

OK, maybe not much jazz.

my next task is to talk about 1) the roots of jazz and 2) the evolution and influence of jazz (idk how far i will make it before the midterm) in preparation for a class outing in 3 weeks to the legendary green mill!

currently accepting recommendations for the early roots of jazz lesson :) :) :)

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, February 15, 2018 4:24 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If it's not too late -

* The first episode of Ken Burns Jazz is a pretty good primer on the orthodox view of the roots of jazz
* The 'Stomp & Swerve' book & CD I mentioned upthread are a good attempt at an alternative theory - Jazz having roots in band music (like Sousa) as well as the oft-cited unrecorded early blues music of the deep south - the use of solos and improvisation through the selections is really an eye-opener
* My pet theory is that a lot of this can also be linked to latin music, for example Son Cubano (which also has African roots of course) - here is an example of something from a full decade before the "first jazz record"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bstBjWn1ge0

* Also should be remembered that in the late 1910s and early 1920s jazz was taken into the mainsteam by the professional (white) musicians who were already around - so could be argued that the biggest name in early jazz is Paul Whiteman. The real revolution happened much more slowly and many of the classic records of the 1920s were not that successful at the time - the history of the jazz we know is very much a selective one.

not too late! thanks!