JAZZ: Episodes 1 & 2

JAZZ is a wonderful series by Ken Burns that was broadcast on PBS several years ago.  It is a wonderful chronicle of the history of jazz through interviews, music, photos and historical film footage. We will be watching clips from the series throughout the first quarter of the school year.  Summaries of the first two episodes, adapted from the PBS website (http://www.pbs.org/) follow.



Jelly Roll Morton

Episode 1: "Gumbo"
Beginnings to 1917

JAZZ begins in New Orleans, nineteenth century America's most cosmopolitan city, where the sound of marching bands, Italian opera, Caribbean rhythms, and minstrel shows filled the streets with a richly diverse musical culture. Here, in the 1890s, African-American musicians created a new music out of these ingredients by mixing in ragtime syncopations and the soulful feeling of the blues. Soon after the start of the new century, people were calling it jazz.



The pioneers of this revolutionary art form include the half-mad cornetist Buddy Bolden, who may have been the first man to play jazz; pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who claimed to have invented jazz but really was the first to write the new music down; Sidney Bechet, a clarinet prodigy whose fiery sound matched his explosive personality; and Freddie Keppard, a trumpet virtuoso who turned down a chance to win national fame for fear that others would steal the secrets of his art.

Louis Armstrong

The early jazz players traveled the country in the years before World War I, but few people had a chance to hear this new music until 1917, when a group of white musicians from New Orleans arrived in New York to make the first jazz recording. They called themselves the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and within weeks their record became an unexpected smash hit. Americans were suddenly jazz crazy, and the Jazz Age was about to begin.

Episode 2: "The Gift"
1917 - 1924

Speakeasies, flappers, and easy money - it's the Jazz Age, when the story of jazz becomes a tale of two great cities, Chicago and New York, and of two extraordinary artists whose lives and music will span almost three-quarters of a century - Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

Armstrong, a fatherless waif who grew up on the mean streets of New Orleans, develops his great "gift" - his unparalleled musical genius - with the help of King Oliver, the city's top cornetist, and in 1922, follows him to Chicago, where Armstrong's transcendent sound and exhilarating rhythms inspire a new generation of musicians, white and black, to join the world of jazz.

 

Meanwhile, Ellington, raised in middle-class comfort by parents who told him he was "blessed," outgrows the society music he learned to play in Washington, D.C., and heads for Harlem. There he absorbs the stride piano rhythms of Willie "The Lion" Smith and forms a band to create a music all his own - hot, blues-drenched, and infused with the gutbucket growls of his new trumpet player, Bubber Miley.

 

As the Roaring Twenties accelerate, Paul Whiteman, a white bandleader, sells millions of records playing a sweet, symphonic jazz, while Fletcher Henderson, a black bandleader, packs the dance floor at the whites-only Roseland Ballroom with his innovative big band arrangements. Then, in 1924, the year Whiteman introduces George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Henderson brings Louis Armstrong to New York, adding his improvisational brilliance to the band's new sound - and soon Armstrong is showing the whole world how to swing.

Students, in 2-3 complete sentences, post a comment about what you learned from watching videos clips from the above episodes.