JAZZ, BIG BAND & SWING

What is Jazz?

great jazz playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPfFhfSuUZ4&list=PL8F6B0753B2CCA128

https://americanhistory.si.edu/smithsonian-jazz/education/what-jazz

check out Big Band & Swing Playlist on youtube

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Featured snippet from the web

The term “Big Band”, referring to Jazz, is vague but popular. The term generally refers to the swing era starting around 1935 but there was no one event that kicked off a new form of music in 1935. It had evolved naturally from the blues and jazz of New Orleans, Chicago and Kansas City.

                The Andrews Sisters - Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B

                                                         Jitterbug Dance-Off

Scatting was also a feature of early Jazz

                                           Cab Calloway - Minnie the Moocher

https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/swing-swing-swing-the-best-jazz-bandleaders-of-all-time/

Jazz is a kind of music in which improvisation is typically an important part. In most jazz performances, players play solos which they make up on the spot, which requires considerable skill. There is tremendous variety in jazz, but most jazz is very rhythmic, has a forward momentum called "swing,"

                       Sing Sing Sing - Benny Goodman

 and uses "bent" or "blue" notes.

 You can often hear "call--and--response" patterns in jazz, in which one instrument, voice, or part of the band answers another. (You can hear Ella Fitzgerald and Roy Eldridge do "call and response" in Ella's Singing Class.) 

Ray Charles - What I'd Say

Ray Charles - Mess Around

Jazz can express many different emotions, from pain...

 to sheer joy. 

                                     Glenn Miller and his Orchestra - In the Mood

In jazz, you may hear the sounds of freedom-for the music has been a powerful voice for people suffering unfair treatment because of the color of the skin, or because they lived in a country run by a cruel dictator.

THE NATURE OF JAZZ

Jazz musicians place a high value on finding their own sound and style, and that means, for example, that trumpeter Miles Davis sounds very different than trumpeter Louis Armstrong (whose sound you can hear in Louis's Music Class.) 

                                 Louie Armstrong - When the Saints Go Marching in

Miles Davis - So What

Jazz musicians like to play their songs in their own distinct styles, and so you might listen to a dozen different jazz recordings of the same song, but each will sound different. The musicians' playing styles make each version different, and so do the improvised solos. Jazz is about making something familiar--a familiar song--into something fresh. And about making something shared--a tune that everyone knows--into something personal. Those are just some of the reasons that jazz is a great art form, and why some people consider it "America's classical music."

So where does Jazz come from? In my estimation it's from Classical Music...

                       Freddy Martin and his orchestra - Piano Concerto In B Flat - 1941

Traditional African Music....

And Folk...

                                             The Bill Smith Quartet - Folk Jazz

THE GROWTH OF JAZZ

Jazz developed in the United States in the very early part of the 20th century. New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, played a key role in this development. The city's population was more diverse than anywhere else in the South, and people of African, French, Caribbean, Italian, German, Mexican, and American Indian,

 As well as English, descent interacted with one another. African-American musical traditions mixed with others and gradually jazz emerged from a blend of ragtime,

 marches,

 blues, 

Tin Pan Alley,

and other kinds of music. At first jazz was mostly for dancing. (In later years, people would sit and listen to it.) After the first recordings of jazz were made in 1917,

Their 1918 hit 'Tiger Rag'

The competition: Creole Jazz Band

 the music spread widely and developed rapidly. The evolution of jazz was led by a series of brilliant musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington (listen to Ellington in Duke's Music Class),

 Charlie Parker, 

and Miles Davis. Jazz developed a series of different styles including traditional jazz, swing (listen, for example, to Benny Carter, who got his start in swing music, in Benny's Music Class) bebop,

Charlie Parker - Bebop

                            Dizzy Gillespie - Bebop

 cool jazz,

 and jazz rock, or in this case, Psychedelic Jazz Rock Fusion...

The list goes on and on. At the same time, jazz spread from the United States to many parts of the world, and today jazz musicians--and jazz festivals--can be found in dozens of nations. Jazz is one of the United States's greatest exports to the world.

http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/bhistory/history_of_jazz.htm

Other notables...

Chaotic/Discordant Jazz

Dave Brubeck' Take 5 (biggest selling jazz single of all time)

Nicholas Brothers

Time to make our own Jazz band:

https://www.learningliftoff.com/make-homemade-music-with-these-6-diy-instruments/

Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel by American novelist John Kennedy Toole which reached publication in 1980, eleven years after Toole's suicide. Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who also contributed a foreword) and Toole's mother, Thelma, the book became first a cult classic, then a mainstream success; it earned Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, and is now considered a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States.

The book's title refers to an epigram from Jonathan Swift's essay, Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Its central character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is an educated but slothful 30-year-old man living with his mother in the Uptown neighborhood of early-1960s New Orleans who, in his quest for employment, has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters. Toole wrote the novel in 1963 during his last few months in Puerto Rico.

Major characters

Ignatius J. Reilly

Ignatius Jacques Reilly is something of a modern Don Quixote—eccentric, idealistic, and creative, sometimes to the point of delusion. In his foreword to the book, Walker Percy describes Ignatius as a "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one". He disdains modernity, particularly pop culture. The disdain becomes his obsession: he goes to movies in order to mock their perversity and express his outrage with the contemporary world's lack of "theology and geometry". He prefers the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, and the Early Medieval philosopher Boethius in particular. However, he also enjoys many modern comforts and conveniences and is given to claiming that the rednecks of rural Louisiana hate all modern technology, which they associate with unwanted change. The workings of his pyloric valve play an important role in his life, reacting strongly to incidents in a fashion that he likens to Cassandra in terms of prophetic significance.

Ignatius is of the mindset that he does not belong in the world and that his numerous failings are the work of some higher power. He continually refers to the goddess Fortuna as having spun him downwards on her wheel of fortune. Ignatius loves to eat, and his masturbatory fantasies lead in strange directions. His mockery of obscene images is portrayed as a defensive posture to hide their titillating effect on him. Although considering himself to have an expansive and learned worldview, Ignatius has an aversion to ever leaving the town of his birth, and frequently bores friends and strangers with the story of his sole, abortive journey out of New Orleans, a trip to Baton Rouge on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bus, which Ignatius recounts as a traumatic ordeal of extreme horror.

Myrna Minkoff

Myrna Minkoff, referred to by Ignatius as "that minx", is a Jewish beatnik from New York City, whom

Ignatius met while she was in college in New Orleans. Though their political, social, religious, and personal orientations could hardly be more different, Myrna and Ignatius fascinate one another. The novel repeatedly refers to Myrna and Ignatius having engaged in tag-team attacks on the teachings of their college professors. For most of the novel, she is seen only in the regular correspondence which the two sustain since her return to New York, a correspondence heavily weighted with sexual analysis on the part of Myrna and contempt for her apparent sacrilegious activity by Ignatius. Officially, they both deplore everything the other stands for. Though neither of them will admit it, their correspondence indicates that, separated though they are by half a continent, many of their actions are meant to impress one another.

Irene Reilly

Mrs. Irene Reilly is the mother of Ignatius. She has been widowed for 21 years. At first, she allows Ignatius his space and drives him where he needs to go, but throughout the course of the novel she learns to stand up for herself. She also has a drinking problem, most frequently indulging in muscatel, although Ignatius exaggerates that she is a raving, abusive drunk.

She falls for Claude Robichaux, a fairly well-off man with a railroad pension and rental properties. At the end of the novel, she decides she will marry Claude. But first, she agrees with Santa Battaglia (who has not only recently become Mrs. Reilly's new best friend, but also harbors an intense dislike for Ignatius) that Ignatius is insane and arranges to have him sent to a mental hospital.

Others

• Santa Battaglia, a "grammaw" who is friends with Mrs. Reilly, and has a marked disdain for Ignatius
• Claude Robichaux, an old man constantly on the lookout for any "communiss" who might infiltrate America; he takes an interest in protecting Irene
• Angelo Mancuso, an inept police officer, the nephew of Santa Battaglia, who, after an abortive attempt to arrest Ignatius as a “suspicious character,” features prominently in the novel as Ignatius's self-perceived nemesis
• Lana Lee, a pornographic model who runs the "Night Of Joy," a downscale French Quarter strip club
• George, Lana's distributor who sells photographs of her to high-school children of his age
• Darlene, a goodhearted but none-too-bright girl, who aspires to be a "Night Of Joy" stripper, with a pet cockatoo
• Burma Jones, a black janitor for the "Night Of Joy" who holds on to his below-minimum wage job only to avoid being arrested for vagrancy
• Mr. Clyde, the frustrated owner of Paradise Vendors, a hot dog vendor business, who inadvisably employs Ignatius as a vendor
• Gus Levy, the reluctant, mostly absentee owner of Levy Pants, an inherited family business in the Bywater neighborhood where Ignatius briefly works
• Mrs. Levy, Gus's wife, who attempts to psychoanalyze her husband and Miss Trixie despite being completely unqualified to do so
• Miss Trixie, an aged clerk at Levy Pants who suffers from dementia and compulsive hoarding
• Mr. Gonzalez, the meek office manager at Levy Pants
• Dorian Greene, a flamboyant French Quarter homosexual who puts on elaborate parties
• Frieda Club, Betty Bumper, and Liz Steele, a trio of aggressive lesbians who run afoul of Ignatius
• Dr. Talc, a mediocre professor at Tulane who had the misfortune of teaching Myrna and Ignatius
• Miss Annie, the disgruntled neighbor of the Reillys who professes an addiction to headache medicine

Confederacy of Dunces and New Orleans

The book is famous for its rich depiction of New Orleans and the city's dialects, including Yat. Many locals and writers think that it is the best and most accurate depiction of the city in a work of fiction.

A bronze statue of Ignatius J. Reilly can be found under the clock on the down-river side of the 800 block of Canal Street, New Orleans, the former site of the D. H. Holmes Department Store, now the Hyatt French Quarter Hotel. The statue mimics the opening scene: Ignatius waits for his mother under the D.H. Holmes clock, clutching a Werlein's shopping bag, dressed in a hunting cap, flannel shirt, baggy pants and scarf, 'studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste.' The statue is modeled on New Orleans actor John "Spud" McConnell, who portrayed Ignatius in a stage version of the novel.

Various local businesses are mentioned in addition to D. H. Holmes, including Werlein's Music Store and local cinemas such as the Prytania Theater. Some readers from elsewhere assume Ignatius's favorite soft drink, Dr. Nut, to be fictitious, but it was an actual local soft drink brand of the era. The "Paradise Hot Dogs" vending carts are an easily recognized satire of those actually branded "Lucky Dogs".

Structure

The structure of A Confederacy of Dunces reflects the structure of Ignatius's favorite book, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Like Boethius' book, A Confederacy of Dunces is divided into chapters that are further divided into a varying number of subchapters. Key parts of some chapters are outside of the main narrative. In Consolation, sections of narrative prose alternate with metrical verse. In Confederacy, such narrative interludes vary more widely in form and include light verse, journal entries by Ignatius, and also letters between himself and Myrna. A copy of the Consolation of Philosophy within the narrative itself also becomes an explicit plot device in several ways.

The difficult path to publication

As outlined in the introduction to a later revised edition, the book would never have been published if Toole's mother had not found a smeared carbon copy of the manuscript left in the house following Toole's 1969 suicide, at 31. She was persistent and tried several different publishers, to no avail.

Thelma repeatedly called Walker Percy, an author and college instructor at Loyola University New Orleans, to demand for him to read it. He initially resisted; however, as he recounts in the book's foreword:

...the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained—that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading. In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.

The book was published by LSU Press in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. In 2005, Blackstone Audio released an unabridged audiobook of the novel, read by Barrett Whitener.

While Tulane University in New Orleans retains a collection of Toole's papers, and some early drafts have been found, the location of the original manuscript is unknown.

Quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3049.John_Kennedy_Toole

Full Book: https://0ducks.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/john-kennedy-toole-a-confederacy-of-dunces.pdf

Together we'll read chapter four

I like the character of Ignatius J. Reilly so much that I have often written letters to the editors of local newspapers as this character...

text from Wikipedia

Gospel Music to Calm Mr. Nike

Gospel music is a genre of Christian music. Gospel music is composed and performed for many purposes, including aesthetic pleasure, religious or ceremonial purposes, and as an entertainment product for the marketplace. Gospel music usually has dominant vocals (often with strong use of harmony) with Christian lyrics. Gospel music can be traced to the early 17th century, with roots in the black oral tradition. Hymns and sacred songs were often repeated in a call and response fashion. Most of the churches relied on hand clapping and foot stomping as rhythmic accompaniment. Most of the singing was done a cappella. The first published use of the term "gospel song" probably appeared in 1874. 

The original gospel songs were similar to the song 'Nearer thy God to Thee' which was supposedly played by Titanic musicians as it sank.

Early Gospel was written and composed by authors such as... 

                                    George F. Root

                                                                    Philip Bliss

      

                                                   Charles H. Gabriel

William Howard Doane

Fanny Crosby

The advent of radio in the 1920s greatly increased the audience for gospel music. Following World War II, gospel music moved into major auditoriums, and gospel music concerts became quite elaborate.

Gospel blues is a blues-based form of gospel music (a combination of blues guitar and evangelistic lyrics).

In 1977 the Voyager 1 rocket was launched

into deep space, far away from our Solar System. The Voyager 1

is the furthest man-made object from earth, ever. Aboard NASA

included a gold plated record that contained information about

humanity. They put lots and lots of audio on the disk, but one

song, one song in particular, a song by Blind Willie Johnson,

called ‘Dark was the Night and Cold was on the Ground’ was

chosen to represent to whoever or whatever found it what the

human emotion of loneliness is. Blind Willie Johnson wasn’t blind

his whole life, he was blinded when his step-mother threw lye

in his face and he died of Malarial fever when his home burned

down and he had nowhere else to live but on wet newspaper…

And now his song is out there in interstellar space representing sadness.

                              (Blind Willie Johnson)

Southern gospel used all male, tenor-lead-baritone-bass quartet make-up.

 Progressive Southern gospel is an American music genre that has grown out of Southern gospel over the past couple of decades.

(The Nelons)

 Christian country music, sometimes referred to as country gospel music, is a subgenre of gospel music with a country flair. It peaked in popularity in the mid-1990s.

Bluegrass gospel music is rooted in American mountain music. Celtic gospel music infuses gospel music with a Celtic flair, and is quite popular in countries such as Ireland. British black gospel refers to Gospel music of the African diaspora, which has been produced in the UK. Some proponents of "standard" hymns generally dislike gospel music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, with historical distance, there is a greater acceptance of such gospel songs into official denominational hymnals.

Some notable Gospel I've run across:

I watched Plague Dogs when 12 years old and it still makes me cry today. Here's the intro

for this song

text from Wikipedia

New Wave Music

'We gotta prove we're adults now. We're not a Punk Rock band, we're a New Wave Band!'     - Jello Biafra

From Britannica

New wave, category of popular music spanning the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Taking its name from the French New Wave cinema of the late 1950s, this catchall classification was defined in opposition to punk (which was generally more raw, rough edged, and political) and to mainstream “corporate” rock (which many new wave upstarts considered complacent and creatively stagnant). The basic principle behind new wave was the same as that of punk—anyone can start a band—but new wave artists, influenced by the lighter side of 1960s pop music and 1950s fashion, were more commercially viable than their abrasive counterparts.

New wave music encompassed a wide variety of styles, which often shared a quirky insouciance and sense of humour. In the United States this broad spectrum included the B-52s, leading lights of an emerging music scene in Athens, Georgia, whose hybrid dance music mixed girl group harmonies with vocal experimentation such as that of Yoko Ono; Blondie, with its sex-symbol vocalist Deborah Harry; the disingenuous tunefulness of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers; the Go-Go’s, whose debut album, Beauty and the Beat, reached number one in 1982; the Cars, who found immediate Top 40 success with “Just What I Needed”; and an artier avant-garde that included Devo and Talking Heads.

In Britain new wave was led by clever singer-songwriters such as pub rock veterans Nick Lowe, Graham Parker, and Elvis Costello; Squeeze and XTC, whose songs were sophisticated and infectious; ska revivalists such as Madness and the Specials; genre-hopping Joe Jackson; synthesizer bands such as Human League, Heaven 17, and A Flock of Seagulls; and the so-called New Romantics, including the cosmetics-wearing Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants, and Culture Club. As the mid-1980s approached, the line separating new wave from the corporate mainstream blurred, especially for bands such as the Pretenders (fronted by former rock journalist Chrissie Hynde), the Police, and U2, who became hugely popular. Although punk was pronounced dead (though it later would inspire grunge and alternative), the music and fashion sensibilities of new wave continued to influence pop music through the 1990s.

Top 50 New Wave Songs Of All Time (as decided on by WFDU listeners):

1. Joy Division - Love Will tear Us Apart

2. Siouxsie & The Banshees - Christine

3. The Smiths - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

4. Ultravox - Vienna

5. Romeo Void - Never Say Never

6. The Smiths - Bigmouth Strikes Again
7. Echo And The Bunnymen - The Killing Moon

8. Gary Numan - Cars
9. New Order - Blue Monday

10. The B-52's - Rock Lobster

11. Talking Heads - Psycho Killer

12. Peter Godwin - Images Of Heaven

13. New Order - Temptation

14. Icicle Works - Birds Fly (Whisper To A Scream)

15. Gang Of Four - To Hell With Poverty

16. The Stranglers - Skin Deep

17. John Foxx - Underpass

18. Martha And The Muffins - Echo Beach

19. The Only Ones - Another Girl, Another Planet

20. Yaz - Don't Go

21. The Specials - Ghost Town

22. The Psychedelic Furs - Heaven

23. Split Enz - I Got You

24. The Chameleons U.K. - Swamp Thing

25. Tom Tom Club - Wordy Rappinghood

26. Depeche Mode - Shake The Disease

27. Visage - Fade To Grey

28. Berlin - The Metro

29. Alphaville - Forever Young

30. Blondie - Heart Of Glass

31. The English Beat - Mirror In The Bathroom

32. Duran Duran - Rio

33. The Flying Lizards - Money

34. XTC - Dear God

35. ABC - The Look Of Love (Part 1)
36. Q Feel - Dancing In Heaven (Orbital Bebop)
37. Altered Images - I Could Be Happy
38. The Boomtown Rats - Rat Trap
39. B-Movie - Nowhere Girl
40. Squeeze - Cool For Cats
41. The Cure - In Between Days

42. Depeche Mode - Just Can't Get Enough

43. Devo - Whip It

44. Public Image Ltd. - Public Image
45. Erasure - Oh Lamour

46. Fruer - Doot Doot
47. Lene Lovich - Lucky Number
48. Bow Wow Wow - Do You Wanna Hold Me?
49. Heaven 17 - Let Me Go
50. China Crisis - Working With Fire And Steel