help me with my class?

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!

Was thinking about Levon Helm describing the local music scenes of his Arkansas area, and how it all died down when TVs took over, which reminded me of another thing Byrne said in xpost How Music Works, about the difference records made: now you could listen alone (without playing the song yourself), and quotes an early description of the mutual embarrassment of intruding on such a listener's very private experience---also thinking of how it became even more private w headphones, the term "headphones music" among collectors, also before headphones when you might have to listen under covers or with ear up to the transistor radio (itself quite a change, re portability, as I dimly recall).
Also in a Hemingway story, an invalid gets fascinated with the stations coming in so clearly at night, from so far away (something to do with the Kellogg-Heaviside layer, I think, and its facilitation of AM broadcasts when the sun can't interfere). He pictures those calling in requests to a dance music show live from a Seattle club (also pictured in his mind), a series---several more like this in his nightly rounds, and then we learn that he listens with the volume turned almost to silence, that kind of focus--reminding me of Eno saying that he had his revelation leading to Discreet Music etc. when he was sick, and a friend brought him an LP of harp music, and when he managed to put it on and got back to his bed, one of the speakers went out, but he was too weak to see about it, so he just lay there and listened...

Also in Arakansas, could imagine that live music for most?) became, at least for a while, more significantly part of a different kind of scene: sing "Happy Birthday," "Aud Lang Syne," sing a hymn at church, sing National Anthem at ball game etc. (or fake it in most such situations, no prob). And then later on maybe back to the clubs, on to the festivals etc., when media promoted those.

whoo boy
right now i am wading through "what is jazz"
pick me up from the floor when today is over please

Does it swing y/n

Y: it is jazz
N: it is not jazz

(Just kidding)

Ha, I just finished a jazz intro lecture an hour ago.

i have a slide entitled "why is jazz so confusing?"
lol

post-swing jazz is like wine in that it requires some level of being inculcated into the conversation around it before one can really talk about it at its level, and this is a conversation with decades of history, one that is contentious and speaks to both internal politics but is still connected at its root to outside ideological divides around i.e. race, class, etc

unlike pop but like wine, post-swing jazz has an internal conversation that is not exactly democratic, although of course anyone can enjoy wine and anyone can enjoy jazz being able to speak knowledgeably about it is def one of those secret society things w/ concentric circles ringing a core group of artists whose stylistic choices drive it. It's not exactly auteur-driven, though, because it's more about (especially in small combo jazz) the interplay between different auteurs, its a community-auteur kind of thing

the styles of individual players, the artists who are seen as Greats, tend to be performers whose stylistic choices were so distinctly their own that it creates a center of gravity around them, where they are frequently imitated ... jazz aficianados can hear the difference between one trumpet player & another not just through surface level characteristics like the tone or context but through melodic choices & tendencies, stylistic tics that give it away even as that artist is pushing (as they do improvisationally every time) to create something that resists their own cliche

this is generally my pov on jazz post-swing

its also my issue w a lot of the way the 'alternative press' would write about jazz is it would ignore this discourse & prefer to take novel surface aesthetics from the music first and foremost, so you'd get cult fanbases for like a random miles or coltrane or mingus record that doesnt take his catalog into context / reflects overvaluing of alt tastemakers like lester bangs / generally overvalues novelty of form vs. novelty of performance

idk i hope that's somewhat helpful

this is intended as an explainer for my pov not 'this is how jazz is' fwiw, dont mean to pretend mine is The Word here

thanks -- maybe i will use the wine comparison. i was thinking of trying to explain how jazz is like druids but wine seems uh more accessible and less crazy
that is stuff i am reserving for next week
this week we are discussing basics, multicultural roots, elements, stuff like that
i want them to be able to identify/discuss improvisation, syncopation, instrumentation, use some vocab (most are not native English speakers) and hear some samples and hopefully enjoy them!!

my textbook is pretty weak on jazz and i have made an executive decision to not mention smooth jazz in class; it's in the book, that's enough.

more than enough!

"Okay, here's how it works -- if it puts me to sleep, it's folk; if it's played by black guys, it's funk; and if I don't understand it, it's jazz."

https://www.discogs.com/The-Frosted-Flaykes-Waste-Your-Time-Rockin-Rhythm/release/1858055#images/15877774

I love the (possibly apocryphal/overly romantic?) notion that the development of jazz was hastened after the civil war, where so many discarded brass instruments were retrieved from battlefields.

i think of smooth jazz tbh as being more in the R&B lineage

omg Lechera play them that scene from Matewan where the Italian, black and white miners start improvising over each others' riffs - it's like the ultimate idealised version of American roots music compressed into about 20 seconds of screen time