Journeys in Jazz:
Scene, Sound, and Story
Jazz music is the shout of human feeling and freedom. It is the sound of people listening to one another and building community. It is talking music, “a street-corner conversation with everyone trying to get a word in edgewise,” Tulane University’s Dr. Bruce Boyd Raeburn has written.
Now on jazz’s centennial, as a divided world witnesses a rebirth of New Orleans and swing music, JazzTalks
Presentations™ reacquaints us with this emergent piece of American history.
Jazz music grew from American soil and helped unite our peoples. It came from worksong, backwoods ring shouts, brass band parades down New Orleans streets, juke joint blues, and storefront church spirituals bringing, as Frederick Law Olmsted observed, “indescribable expressions of ecstasy.”
It came from the temperaments and modulations of Bach, the structure of symphonies, the Great Black Migration, dance rhythms of Chicago, and from a new century bringing, as Henry Adams observed, an “air of movement and hysteria…. prosperity never before imagined, speed never reached by anything but a meteor.”
If America is about independence, then jazz is about America. It is about standing under the sun—"every tub on its own bottom"--as did four million emancipated African-Americans —and meeting a new day.
“The blues, the spirituals, the jazz, the dance, was what we had in place of freedom."--Ralph Ellison
Add swing to your day! Call us at JazzTalks Presentations™. 617-467-4146.
