BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE

The City University of New York

TALKING AND... “Talking and Testifying, Speaking and Speechifying” The Sound of Jazz Donna Thompson (ASHP) & Bret Eyon

AGENDA | PARTICIPANTS | LINKS | FRIDAYS

OVERVIEW:  

Jazz music emerged from urban African American culture to express the human capacity to do more than merely survive under challenging circumstances.  In voices imitating instruments, jazz represents such themes as work life, leisure/entertainment, passion, food, death, and spirituals recorded in African American native voice.  It captures the flare of rural and urban storytelling, “loud-talk,” “whispery romance,” “spare dry poetry,” “pool-hall boast” or the “jump-rope rhyme.”  Jazz melds elements from ragtime, marching band music, European classical music, spirituals, work songs, the blues, and other forms of expression.  This activity asks students to examine jazz recordings and related art and literature to better understand African American culture and life in the 1920s. 

GOAL:  

Drawing on web-based audio, text and visual materials to derive an understanding of how jazz reflected and shaped aspects of African American life and culture in the early 20th century. 

SKILLS:  

Listening, reading, writing.  

MATERIALS:

Red Hot Jazz    http://www.technoir.net/jazz

Culture in the Jazz Age  http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~nick/e309k/jazzage.html

Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro (Survey Graphic, 1925)  http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/harlem/

Art and Literature of the Harlem Renaissance http://www.nku.edu/~diesmanj/harlem_intro.html

Harlem Renaissance Art http://www.cc.colorado.edu/Dept/EN/Courses/EN370/EN3707117Garcia/VisualArt/VisualArt.html

ACTIVITY: (50 minutes total) 

Your teacher has assigned you and a partner the task of preparing a multimedia presentation on 1920s jazz and its cultural significance. Use the web sites identified above to gather resources and begin structuring your presentation. 

Step 1 - Thinking About 1920s Jazz: (5 minutes)  With your partner, read and briefly discuss Jazzonia by Langston Hughes (http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~nick/e309k/texts/hughes/hughes.html )  What is Hughes is saying about jazz?  What feelings does the poem evoke?  What words, images and poetic structures does Hughes use?  Given what you know about Hughes, what does the poem suggest about jazz in 1920s African American culture? 

Step 2 - Listening to Jazz: (25 minutes)  Working with your partner, explore the music, images, and commentary available on the Red Hot Jazz site. You may start with the Red Hot Jazz home page http://www.technoir.net/jazz or choose one or two of the following recording artists to explore: 

• Louis Armstrong (with the Red Hot Onions) http://www.redhotjazz.com/redonion.html
• Red Hot Fives http://www.redhotjazz.com/hot5.html
• Bessie Smith http://www.redhotjazz.com/bessie.html
• Jelly Roll Morton (instrumental only)  http://www.redhotjazz.com/jellyroll.html
• Sidney Bechet  http://www.redhotjazz.com/Bechet.html (see King Bechet Trio)
• Mamie Smith (a blues singer)  http://www.redhotjazz.com/mamie.html

What themes and feelings do you hear in the music?  What insights can you gather from the music, the images and the text about the nature of 1920s jazz and its place in the African-American community? What resources could you use for your presentation? 

Step 3. Artistic and Literary Perspectives: (Optional --10 minutes)  If you have time, explore and gather resources from one or more of these sites, which present visual arts from the Harlem Renaissance and texts drawn from the Survey Graphic and the Culture in the Jazz Age web sites.

Art and Literature of the Harlem Renaissance http://www.nku.edu/~diesmanj/harlem_intro.html

Harlem Renaissance Art http://www.cc.colorado.edu/Dept/EN/Courses/EN370/EN3707117Garcia/VisualArt/VisualArt.html

"Jazz at Home" by J.A. Rogers in the Survey Graphic site http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/harlem/RogJazzF.html

"Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?" http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~nick/e309k/texts/faulkner/faulkner.html

Step 4: (10 minutes):  With your partner, brainstorm the main points of a multimedia presentation to your class on the significance of jazz in urban African American life in the 1920s.  (Note: unless you’re really ambitious, don’t try to actually create the presentation—just craft an outline.)  Be prepared to share your ideas about the following with your small group. 

• What would be the main points of your presentation?  What would you focus on?
• Of the resources you explored today, which ones would help you present your ideas clearly and dramatically?  Which music?  Which images?  Which reading?  What other kinds of resources might you want to utilize?
• How would you best mix different forms of media to convey your ideas and help your fellow students understand the issues involved?  

SMALL GROUP DISCUSSION: (40 minutes)

Meet with others who used these resources to share insights, ideas, and reflections on your experience.  Start by briefly sharing your ideas for presentations, and then discuss the activity, using the following questions as prompts:

• What could students learn from this activity about jazz and African-American culture in the 1920s?  What kinds of background information would they need?
• Would this activity, or a variation of it, play in your classroom?  How would you reshape it for your students?  How would you combine it with other lessons or resources?

•   What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of the activity? Is it a good vehicle for developing student skills in inquiry, the exploration of primary sources, and the construction of historical and cultural meaning?

• How would you describe the pedagogy that informs this activity? What aspects of the activity help to make it effective?  What skills and modes of thinking does this activity support?  Do the electronic materials being engaged suit the assignment’s pedagogy and methodological goals? What can we learn from this activity about the kinds of inquiry assignments that work best when using new media resources?

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