•MUSIC 240, “Intro Jazz”
•CGR 1208
•Thursday, 6:00-8:50pm
•Dr. Brian Lefresne
Agenda
• Intro
• Course Texts & Details
• Students: Who are you?
• Jazz: What is it?
• Listening and Keeping Time
• Musical Form: 12-bar blues
• Roots of Jazz
Jazz: What is it?
Answer: Many things!
“Whence Come Jass?”
“The word is African in origin” (KT, 4)
“meaning to speed things up, to make excitement”
“Jazz music is the delirium tremens of syncopation”
“A Negro Explains ‘Jazz’”
“‘jazz’ arises from his rhythmic fervid, combined with a peculiar
liking for strange sounds” (KT, 10)
“we accent strongly in this manner the notes which originally be
without accent” (KT, 11)
“Jazz and African Music”
“‘Jazz’” music makes use of syncopation to a marked
degree more than African music pretends to do” (KT, 31)
“And ‘jazz’ music having once been so deduced takes its
own course and at the present time has nothing more or
less in common with African music” (KT, 32)
Rob Walser: “to deny the existence of African retentions is
absurd, but to overemphasize them is to slight the agency of
African Americans and mistake their creative fusions for
passive survivals” (KT, 30-1
Jazz (DeVeaux & Giddins)
Jazz as:
• Artform
• Popular
• Folk Music
Listening: Scales & Chords
• Scales: major & minor; one happy, one sad
• Chords: two or more notes sounded at once
• Take every other note of a scale to build a chord
• For example: C E G or C E G B
Listening: Keeping Time
• Beat: basic unit of time that can be heard or implied
• Rhythm: regular pattern of beats, that may be stressed or unstressed at certain moments
• Meter: the organization of beats into speci c patterns
• Most of the examples we will listen to at the beginning are in what is called duple
meter
• Duple meter: beats are in patterns of two or four (most often four)
• Measure: in duple meter, a pattern of four beats forms a measure
• Often notated as m.; mm.; or mess.; in our textbooks
• Backbeat: beats 2 & 4
• Syncopation: whenever a strong accent contradicts the basic meter; central to jazz
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Listening: Keeping Time
Miles Davis, “So What”
Form: 12-Bar Blues
Classic Form
• Three lines of four measures each in duple meter (4/4)
• Each line has a speci c harmonic progression:
I I I I
IV IV I I
VV I I
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Example: “West End Blues”
Form: 12-Bar Blues
Variation of
• Each line has a speci c harmonic progression:
I7 IV7 I7 I7
IV7 IV7 I7 I7
V7 IV7 {I I}7 Usually what we call a turnaround here.
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Jazz: Ethnicity & Race
Race: physical characteristics such as skin colour or hair
Ethnicity: the culture that shapes us
Race
• Original de nitions were based upon
biological di erences (which is bad).
• It is a social construct!
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Race: another de nition
Race “is produced by
social arrangements and
political decision making”
and that “race is something
that happens, rather than
something that is. It is
dynamic, but it holds no
objective truth.”
Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible, pp. 23,24.
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Ethnicity
Culture + Language + Place of origin
+ Ancestry + Religion + History + Nation
Plus More!
Culture: An Example
“genetically, i'm pure
greek. Psychologically,
environmentally,
culturally, by choice,
I'm a member of the
black community.”
Johnny Otis, 1921-2012
Get Out (2017)
NB: In the lm Get Out, we discover that this particular character is a jazz musician.
What Jordan Peele is suggesting is that his ability as a jazz musician rests in his DNA or
blood and that a white person could occupy a Black body and gain those same skills.
This is false.
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Jazz is African American Music
•Polyrhythm
•Call and response
•Blue notes
•Timbre variations
Genres
• Ballads • Vaudeville Blues
• Work Song • Dance Music
• Field Holler • Brass Bands
• Spiritual • Marches
• Country Blues • Ragtime
“The Buzzard Lope”
“Throw Me Anywhere, Lord”
https://youtu.be/3dGamWaYcLg
Marches/Ragtime
• March form: organized in strains
• Each strain is 16 bars
• Form
• AA BB CC DD
• Section C is in a new key/harmony (IV)
“Down Home Rag”
• Early example of instrumental
ragtime
• March/ragtime form: but each
strain is 8-bars long
