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The Culture of Jazz Aesthetics Anthropology M142R Instructors: Profs. Kenny Burrell and Alessandro Duranti Spring 2006 / Tuesday 11-2PM / SMB 1343 [Last updated April 12, 2006] First Assignment Part One Organize your fieldnotes from our first two classes and write a text that provides preliminary answers to the two questions below (keep in mind that you are not asked to say everything you know about jazz or that you knew BEFORE you started this class - you are being asked to talk about the culture of jazz aesthetics THROUGH what you heard, saw, and read in this class. You are an ethnographer who has access to a community of experts, practitioners, and fans. You need to document what people know, think, say, and feel about this tradition.) (A) What have you learned so far about jazz as a music that is identified with particular musicians? Who are they? How have they been talked about by our guests? (You have by now heard the names of a number of musicians, some of them more than one time; keep track of them, learn more about them; analyze how they are being talked about, in what contexts, in what terms?) (B) What have you learned about how practitioners, critics, fans and the general public distinguish among different "types" of jazz. This is the question of jazz as a "label" and also the question of the subdivisions of "jazz" in subtypes (have you noted some of these subtypes as mentioned in class?); have we heard about how musicians feel about labels, distinctions, etc.? Are there differences among the musicians? Do they use labels themselves? Which ones? This is a general question about categorization, a key concept in the study of culture. Part Two Examine the extent to which what you have been able to document so far about these topics matches what you found in the readings so far. To do this, you will need to either refer to or quote from the readings, in which case you must provide the name of the author, the year of the publication, and the relevant page number(s). For example, if you were to talk about the photos in the Blue Note covers and want to quote from or refer to Krin Gabbard's chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Jazz , where he talks about the photographer Francis Wolff (who worked with Alfred Lion, the owner and founder of Blue Note Records) you would write; (Gabbard 2002: 337-8) Further Directions/Suggestions In doing this assignment, you might find out that you have already a great deal of information to draw from (which is a good feeling) OR you might find that you know very little or that your fieldnotes are too vague and there is a great deal of information that you were not able to absorb or write down perhaps because you don't know how to take fieldnotes or because you do not have enough background in music or jazz to even know what people are talking about. This is a common experience among ethnographers. You are not expected to be able to be a professional ethnographer on your first week of class, but you ARE expected to improve over the quarter, becoming a better observer, collector of information, and analyzer. This assignment is due (double spaced) at the beginning of class next week. There is no minimum or maximum number of words (but 200 are probably not enough and 2000 are probably too many). But remember that what you write has to be (i) based on what happened in class, (ii) relevant to the questions you were asked to address, (iii) concise rather than verbose (avoid fancy introductions, go straight to the point), (iv) analytical (i.e. you should strive for insights, hidden connections, similarities, consistencies, inconsistencies, and paradoxes). Make sure to include YOUR NAME and MAJOR at the top of each typed page. |