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End week 3 Playlist

Comments by Mary Jo Papich

3. Let’s Get Jazzed. Cultural reflections

Jazz in America Handout- -Bebop Lesson Plan -American History Essay

A Reaction to Racism in American Literature, Art, and Music

In the latter part of the 19th century, "Realism" became the dominant feature in American literature and influenced the Progressive Era writers of the early 20th century. In the years immediately following World War I, a number of American authors of the realist school began to explore race relations. Dramatists such as Eugene O'Neill and Paul Green wrote plays based on African American themes. O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1920) and All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924) were immensely popular. Green won the Pulitzer Prize for In Abraham's Bosom, a play performed by a predominately African American cast in a period when few African American artists were able to find work outside vaudeville or minstrel shows. At the same time, a number of African American writers came to prominence writing novels and poetry based on their experiences as African Americans. This literary movement, originally centered in Harlem, New York, became known as the "Harlem Renaissance" (1920s-1930s). It was the outgrowth of a number of factors including the Great Migration to northern cities and the growing anger over both overt and covert racism.

Authors, musicians, and painters gathered in Harlem and in other large urban areas throughout the North and developed a distinctly African American cultural movement cognizant of the political, economic, and social issues of prejudice and discrimination that were part of the Black experience in America. Historians have described the Harlem Renaissance as a period in which the African American writer ". . . had achieved a degree and kind of articulation that make it possible for him to transform his feelings into a variety of literary forms. Despite his intense feelings of hate and hurt, he possessed sufficient restraint and objectivity to use his materials artistically, but no less effectively." (John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 7th edition [New York: McGraw Hill, 1994]). Another historian depicts the period in literature as one in which writers sought to be writers, not African American writers. Although the themes of their works reflected a pride in their race, they would "be fashioned with high technical skill and designed for an audience not exclusively Negro. There would, however, be no catering to whites." (Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Making of America [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996]).

The wave of lynching in America was one of the issues that galvanized the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. The poet Claude McKay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_McKay), one of the angriest voices of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote of the need for African Americans to resist oppression. In his poem "If We Must Die" (www.historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5130"), McKay was reacting to race riots of "Red Summer" (1919). In his poem, "The Lynching," McKay equates a lynching with the crucifixion and, in the last few lines of this short poem, describes onlookers who came to gape at the hanging figure of a man.

...The women thronged to look, but never a one

Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue.

And little lads, lynchers that were to be,

Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.

In 1939, Billie Holiday, one of the most famous of all jazz singers, recorded the song "Strange Fruit" which expressed her feelings regarding lynching in America and made a powerful statement against racism that was ever-present in her style. Holiday used jazz as an instrument to marshal public opinion to support anti-lynching legislation that languished in congress.

Lynching was also the subject of works by African American visual artists. Lynch Mob Victim, painted by William Johnson, depicts a lynched man with women weeping at his feet resembling often-depicted scenes of the crucifixion of Christ. Johnson also included lynched figures in the background of a painting of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas entitled Let My People Free (ca. 1945).

Racism, in no small way, contributed to the demise of Swing and inception of Bebop in the late 1930s and early 40s. This new, complex, combo-oriented African American innovation was, in part, an outgrowth of the young black players' rejection of the awkward integration and discriminatory pay scales of big band swing (African Americans were almost always paid less than their white counterparts). More often than not, they had watched their music capitalized on by white America; the attendant financial rewards likewise eluded them. African Americans had to contend with the most oppressive manifestations of racial prejudice and segregation. Even those jazz stars featured with the name white bands were subject to the most demeaning indignities. Of his experiences with the Artie Shaw band, African American jazz trumpet superstar Roy Eldridge said "Man, when you're on the stage, you're great, but as soon as you come off, you're nothing. It's not the worth the glory, not worth the money, not worth anything." (James Lincoln Collier, The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History [New York: Dell Publishing, 1979]).

Bebop was a dramatic and self-conscious revision of swing, an attempt by its originators in the early 1940s to reclaim the music that was so successfully commercialized and marketed by the white bands. The bebop pioneers were intensely serious which was reflected in the complexity of their music; they effectively and consciously created a new musical elite that excluded from their ranks all who did not meet predetermined artistic standards. With its fiery spirit, bebop was to represent, in some measure, a new black militancy which would continue to grow over the next two decades.

For further research on lynching in American history examine the Crime Library's website "Lynchings in America: Carnival of Death" (http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/mass/lynching/index_1.html). The five short readings entitled, "Lynchings in America," "The History of Lynching," "Lynchings in the Press," "The Ku Klux Klan," and "The Beginning of the End" provide a good overview of this macabre episode in American history and the failed efforts to secure an anti-lynching law in the United States.

The Library of Congress' American Memory Collection "African American Perspectives" also contains an essay entitled "Mob-violence and Anarchy, North and South" (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aapmob.html) and a short biographical sketch of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aap/idawells.html), a crusader in the campaign to pass anti-lynching legislation. The website links to both an audio and text excerpt of Ida Wells-Barnett's pamphlet "Lynch Law in Georgia." Also examine the "Time Line of African American History" for the years 1881-1900 (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aap/timelin2.html) and 1901-1925 (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aap/timelin3.html) that give statistics on the number of lynchings reported during given years.

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Jazz in America Glossary for Lesson - Cool, Hard Bop, and Modal Jazz

contrafact: A jazz tune based on an extant set of chord changes, usually from a standard; the result when composers use the chord structure of a given, established composition to write an entirely new composition (e.g., "Donna Lee" is a contrafact of "Back Home Again in Indiana;" "Moose the Mooch" is a contrafact of "I Got Rhythm").

dynamic range: The expanse between the softest and loudest passages of music.

homophony: Distinguished by a single melodic line with accompaniment (e.g., One musician improvising a solo with rhythm section accompaniment is an example of homophony.).

modal jazz: Jazz tunes that stay on each mode (and thus each chord) for a long time, usually at least four bars per mode (in contrast with standard jazz repertoire which changes chords far more frequently - usually at least once per measure).

mode: A type of scale defined by its particular sequence of melodic intervals (e.g., C dorian mode: C D Eb F G A Bb C)

nonet: A band, ensemble, combo, or unit consisting of nine musicians.

polyphony: The simultaneous sounding of two or more melodies of equal importance (e.g., Polyphony is a device often employed in Cool jazz).

scat singing: A vocalist's improvisatory device whereby he/she sings in nonsense syllables rather than lyrics as a means of approximating an instrumental solo; vocal improvisation (note: listen to Ella Fitzgerald singing "How High the Moon" on The Complete Ella in Berlin).

standards: Familiar, well-established popular or jazz tunes; those songs which through widely repeated performance have become part of the standard jazz repertoire.

Jazz in America Student Handout--Lesson Plan --American History Essay

The 1950s: A Decade of Change

The 1950s was a time of economic growth. Since the mid-1940s Americans were eager to spend money on cars, appliances, and virtually any commodity that had been rationed during the war years. The 1950s heightened a consumer-spending spree despite a rise in the price of goods that had previously been held in check by wartime price controls. The gross national product, a measure of the total value of the nation's goods and services, nearly doubled, rising from approximately $300 billion in 1950 to $500 billion in 1960. Defense spending, fueled by the Cold War and military expenditures during the Korean conflict, represented an important stimulant to the economy.

As the annual earnings of most American workers grew, so did the desire to purchase goods and services. The construction of new homes boomed in the late 1940s and throughout most of the 1950s. Planned suburban communities drew the middle class from large crowded cities, leaving the inner cities to low income and minority groups. Levittown, a planned community on Long Island begun in 1946, was typical of the new suburbia. The prosperity of the 1950s produced thousands of new "Levittowns" across the nation. Homes had the latest conveniences, including a garage for the family car, that had spurred the growth of suburban communities. Shopping centers dependent on the family automobile grew from a mere eight in the nation in 1945 to 3,840 in 1960. During the '50s, shopping became, what one historian called, "a major recreational activity."

Social critics, however, lamented the new landscape created by the consumer economy. Malvina Reynolds, a California folksinger, ridiculed the sameness of "Levittowns" calling them "Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky tacky..." Some writers criticized what they viewed as changes in traditional American values while others rebelled against the materialistic society of the 1950s. Among these were a new group known as beatniks.

Although the annual earnings of most American workers grew, all did not share the prosperity-another American existed hidden by the opulence of the 1950s. Michael Harrington's The Other America and James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son are two important "muckraking" works that exposed the extent of poverty in the midst of affluence in postwar America.

The prejudice and discrimination of Jim Crow America came under a vigorous attack following World War II. The war had been fought, in part, against the racial ideology of Nazi Germany, and African American soldiers wanted nothing less than an end to racism at home. Two-thirds of the 15 million African Americans in 1950 lived in a rigidly segregated South. In 1944, Swedish writer Gunnar Myrdal published a massive report, The American Dilemma, on the contradiction between America's ideal of equal justice and its history of depriving African Americans of civil and equal rights.

Since the end of World War II, African Americans in increasing numbers refused to adhere to segregation enforced by Jim Crow legislation. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had for years fought legal battles in the courts to end segregation. In 1950, NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall (later to be appointed to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson) successfully argued that his African American client had the right to attend a previously all-white law school at the University of Texas. This case, Sweatt v. Paintermade it clear that statutory segregation was doomed.

In 1954 the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/early-civilrights/brown.html) which ruled that "separate but equal" school systems were unconstitutional. Throughout the South, white citizens councils formed to stop integration. Despite the Supreme Court's momentous ruling in the Brown case, less than two percent of African Americans in the South were attending integrated schools ten years later.

President Dwight Eisenhower had criticized the unanimous decision in the Brown Case in 1954 as upsetting "the customs and convictions" of most Americans and remarked "that prejudices, even palpably unjustifiable prejudices, will not succumb to compulsion." However, in 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state's National Guard to prevent court-ordered integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Eisenhower sent federal troops to escort students to their classes (www.centralhigh57.org/).

The boycott was one of the most successful tools African Americans employed. In 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American seamstress, aroused the conscience of the nation when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a white passenger (www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/montbus.html). This act of civil disobedience began a year-long boycott and served notice that African Americans would no longer tolerate segregation.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in downtown Montgomery, to prominence. In 1957, Dr. King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and mobilized the power and influence of Black churches in an all-out thrust against segregation. The civil rights movement of the 1950s continued through the 1960s, breaking down entrenched legal barriers that had segregated the races.

Jazz in the 1950s, like the society it reflected and culture to which it contributed, also went through considerable change. Cool, Hard Bop, and Modal Jazz were manifestations of the diversity of the times, reflecting, in part, both "have" (affluence, prosperity) and "have not" (civil rights, equal opportunity) America. The national pride during and immediately following World War II was gradually replaced by questions, doubts, and, eventually, hostility and opposition, leading to the 1960s - one of America's most tumultuous decades.

For further research examine the unique popular culture that developed in the 1950s (http://www.chiff.com/pop-culture/1950s.htm).

ALL INFO, used with permission from: http://jazzinamerica.org

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