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Did you flunk out of Cecil Taylor's jazz history class?


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Y'all talk about "jazz history" classes...

I took one at NTSU back in the day that was taught by Leon Breeden. Now, Breeden's favoring of the white/Kenton axis was never a secret (he wasn't consciously racist, although his actions seemed to suggest that there might be "prejudice" lurking somewherein his decision-making process).

Anyway...

When we got to the 60's, this cat played Dolphy's "You Don't Know What Love Is" from Last Date and after going on and on and on about how it was more "bird calls" than "music" (even though he begrudgingly admitted that it was a "display of technical virtuosity"), he finally played the record. But not before getting in this immortal line -

"This is NOT something that the average housewife is going to listen to while hanging her laundry out to dry!"

I laughed, I cried, I contemplated homicide...

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Y'all talk about "jazz history" classes...

Do talk. I'd LOVE to hear lots of discussion from the ranks here - about how jazz history is and has been taught in schools (particularly at the college level, where there ought to be less of an excuse for it being bad).

I got my first real introduction to jazz from your typical Jazz 101 class, at a liberal arts college in upstate Illinois - around 1988. (That, and I had an uncle who used to play LOTS of sides for me as I was growing up, though he lived 200 miles away from me - so I only got to hear them about once or twice a year.)

I wish I'd kept the listening syllabus for the specific 101 class I took (I still have my listening syllabus for the 20th Century Classical Music class - I should type it up here sometime).

As I remember it, the class focused pretty heavily on jazz, pre-1960 -- with a moderate dose of the 1960's, though mostly with a focus on the Avant Garde (as if that was by far the main or only thing going on then), and in retrospect - very little of the convergence of the Avant Garde and mainstream hardbop (which would have been nice). Then a smattering of fusion, and some New Lion stuff to cap things off.

Come to think of it, the listening (and thus, the history) was largely "not dissimilar" from what you'd get out of just listening to the old 5-album Smithsonian set (plus a little fusion, to bring things into "the present"). The instructor didn't cop the entire Smithsonian for his listening assignments, but it was as if he picked half of what he liked off the Smithsonian, and picked a bunch of other stuff that could have EASILY fit on the Smithsonian, in place of what he didn't pick. Not atypical, I guess.

Probably no better, or not worse than most Jazz 101 classes. Still, I have this vague recollection that I ended up learning about as much about some players that ultimately didn't and don't really matter as much (in the "real world" – whatever that is, maybe that's HERE!! :g ), as those players that really DID matter.

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If you flunk out of college, rather than just failing one class, you've got other problems than Cecil Taylor.

...and the lottery was in place by then. Not a "get out of jail" card but it limited the chances.

IIRC, Cecil told the class to attend the concert and bring the ticket stubs in. He said something like if they couldn't be bothered to attend Miles in their back yard they failed.

So Taylor tells them that they'll fail if they don't attend the concert and then hardly any of them attend?

That doesn't sound like a very likely story.

--eric

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Y'all talk about "jazz history" classes...

Do talk. I'd LOVE to hear lots of discussion from the ranks here - about how jazz history is and has been taught in schools (particularly at the college level, where there ought to be less of an excuse for it being bad).

The Breeden story is the only one I remember. That and there was a lot of pumping of lab band alumni. The more things change...

Really, though, that class was a joke. I came to NTSU w/a good sense of jazz history already in place after having spent my high school years obsessively reading every book and magazine article I could get my hands on (and w/the Gladewater public library having a complete collection of Saturday Review, I got to read some very interesting writing) as well as an equally obsessive habit of buying everything out of the various cutout bins that looked even remotely "jazz".

The class, I soon found out, was a joke. You got the most basic history, the stuff that had to be there, and everything else was propaganda to lead you into Lab Band World. I mean, Marvin Stamm is a fine player, but giving him w/Kenton as an example of "a modern trumpet great" & Lee Morgan never even being mentioned....

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Richard Davis has taught jazz history at the University of Wisconsin from September 1977 to the present, in a multi-semester approach, emphasizing different instruments each semester. I took the class three times and was very much inspired by his teaching. He was very well informed, accurate and added a lot of his own experiences with the musicians to bring the material alive. It was one of the best experiences I had in my entire educational career.

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I'll bet...

I took Dick Wright's jazz history course at KU and was impressed. It gave me some grounding in the earlier, pre-bop forms of the music which I hadn't had exposure to prior. Also, when he did the 60s unit, he played "Yankee No-How" from Roswell Rudd's Everywhere. Think I was probably the only other one in class familiar with the tune... and there were a lot of confused looks in class that day!

Dick Wright was a traditionalist in some ways, but he loved his Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler... would have loved to get to know him better, but sadly he passed away a month before the end of term.

:(

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I took a Jazz History class while in college at Southern Illinois U., back in the early 80s. The instructor was a clarinet player, classically trained, but he loved jazz. He did indeed follow the Smithsonian box, but brought in lots of other records to play and talk about. This was one of those extra curriculem credit classes, and it was big, maybe 100 people. I have a distinct memory of a younger African American guy and his girlfriend sitting in front of me during the first class. The instructor was talking about pre-recording influences on the music, hollers, call and response, New Orleans, Congo Square, all that, and the guy leaned back, put his hat on his face and told his girlfriend, "Wake me up when we get to Grover Washington." I think he may have woke up when the teacher played "Ascension" three months later. I loved that class, and up until then my knowledge of jazz was Basie, Ellington, Goodman and Lionel Hampton. I walked away with a lifetime love of Monk, Trane, Ornette, Bird, Tatum, and Armstrong. And a desire to know more about this genre.

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I'll bet...

I took Dick Wright's jazz history course at KU and was impressed. It gave me some grounding in the earlier, pre-bop forms of the music which I hadn't had exposure to prior. Also, when he did the 60s unit, he played "Yankee No-How" from Roswell Rudd's Everywhere. Think I was probably the only other one in class familiar with the tune... and there were a lot of confused looks in class that day!

Dick Wright was a traditionalist in some ways, but he loved his Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler... would have loved to get to know him better, but sadly he passed away a month before the end of term.

:(

Dick Wright was great. I heard him speak many times at jazz events in Kansas City and Lawrence. He was open to a lot of different music, beyond the earlier styles that he loved to talk about. His public radio show was very enjoyable, the Swing Club. He was always enthusiastic about the concerts he was MCing, whether it was Don Byron or Mike Stern.

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I sat in on a UCLA introductory jazz history course with Gerald Wilson a while back (concentration was pre-bebop--mainly a primer for some stuff that had been slipping past me). Wilson was congenial, nurturing, and thorough--without coming across as didactic. As far as I'm concerned, it was his personality that put him across--a spirit that had lived/is living with the music, tempered in mind but high in spirits. Unfortunately, the brevity of the course (it was a summer session) prevented one from taking too much away from it--things just whizzed pass, some skipped over. Regardless, it was a joy watching the professor 'phantom' cue his old orchestrations, spinning interesting (if tangential) yarns about some of his old running partners. I talked to him before class on quite a few occasions--real kind, with a regard for the avant cats. My favorite moment: talking to him about Eric Dolphy. On the never-assembled Ayler/Cherry/Dolphy/Peacock/Murray quintet: "That would've been a tough band."

Compare this to Berkeley, where there hasn't been a real jazz history course for years.

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No joke. The undergraduate music deparment presently has only two improvisation-oriented classes (neither is a history class), only one of which is a jazz course. This is due to expand in the coming year (Myra Melford just got approved to teach full time), but I'd be surprised to see a history course in the works. It irritated me to no end back when I was trying to get an interdisciplinary major together. It's been in the course listing for ages, but nothing comes up. The graduate program (ethnomusicology) is also relatively spartan.

Edited by ep1str0phy
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my biggest complaint about academic jazz history courses is that they tend to distill everything down to the SOS - not understanding or representing the fluidity of jazz (actual any music's) history, using over-simplified maps of cultural evolution. Either that or they are socially determinist to the detriment of really understanding the music, making errors as they try to fit history into ideology -

Edited by AllenLowe
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I took a jazz history class as an undergraduate in the mid - late eighties. I don't remember who the professor was, but our curriculum was basically the Smithsonian collection. I do not recall him varying from that set, but I do remember having individual discussions with him where I learned that his knowledge and interest was much broader. he even loaned me Sun Ra's Heliocentric from his private collection to listen to. The class also included a section on music theory. I now regret the fact that I rarely went to the theory section (which was approximately half our grade). If it was not for the fact that i did so well on the history portion of the class I might not have passed. To be honest I think at the time I learned more on my own. This was when my obsession first started. My school had a very good music library, which possessed just about every issue of Down beat published and a very extensive collection of jazz LPs. I used to spend hours reading old issues and listening to music in the library.

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Years ago, while in high school, I took a Jazz History class. During the semester, it was just the teacher and I, nobody else signed up for the class. His curriculum focused primarily on video's and the teacher sitting at the piano to show how certain things involved from the standpoint of the keyboard. After the first month, watching the video's started to get old (even in the 1980's, Wynton Marsalis was the go to guy on these things), but the experience of having the advisor sit down and explain the evolution of piano was priceless.

At the moment, I attend a history of Rock n' Roll class at my college. Like Jim, before I started the class I had spent many years reading books on the material and I also worked at a record store for 10 years. Like Allen's experience, it constantly feels like I should steer the teacher in the right direction. The professor told the class that ELP recorded 21st Century Schizoid Man (this may be true, but why tell the class this when it is famous for being a King Crimson song) and that Stax Studios and Fame Studios were the same place (to show this she played a Sam and Dave song and Wilson Pickett's In the Midnight Hour, both recorded at the Stax Studios). The one positive aspect of the teacher has been sitting done and talking about music. One day, the professor told me that there were certain musicians that she didn't understand why people had interest in. The example's she made were Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, John Coltrane, and Electric Miles Davis, with the professor's primary interest being vocalists, the blues, gospel, jazz vocalists, classical, and big bands.

This professor is the only person teaching a jazz history course at the school I attend, so I will pass on the Jazz History class because I do not need more of this frustaration.

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my biggest complaint about academic jazz history courses is that they tend to distill everything down to the SOS - not understanding or representing the fluidity of jazz (actual any music's) history, using over-simplified maps of cultural evolution. Either that or they are socially determinist to the detriment of really understanding the music, making errors as they try to fit history into ideology -

Richard Davis' jazz history classes do not do any of these things. After reading this thread I feel even more fortunate to have been able to take his class!

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2) Funny about famous musicians teaching jazz history

I never understood how some people seem to think that "so-and-so's a famous jazz musician, therefore he surely must know the history"

I guess it's a good selling point to have a famous name in your faculty.

F

I can see that point in many cases. However, Richard Davis did know the history. He had studied it from the earliest days, and knew the 1920s and 1930s recordings and performers down cold. It was very interesting for him to play "Out To Lunch" and then tell us what the session was like, and what kind of person Eric Dolphy was; or for him to explain how Sun Ra's early recordings evolved from the local strip club jobs on which Sun Ra and Richard Davis performed as a duo in Calumet City in the late 1940s; or to explain how he functioned with Roy Haynes in Sarah Vaughan's trio in the late 1950s.

A famous jazz musician can be a good thing as a jazz history teacher.

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