The Culture of Jazz Aesthetics (Instructors: Profs. Kenny Burrell & Alessandro Duranti) ASSIGNMENT on JAZZ PERFORMANCE (for your first MID-TERM): [Revised Oct. 13, 2002] READ CAREFULLY
BEFORE STARTING YOUR ASSIGNMENT: 2. GROUP. You will need to form a group with others in the class (for the purpose of this assignment, a group is any combination of 3 or more people). 3. JAZZ PERFORMANCE. Your group will have to select and attend a jazz performance. “Jazz performance” means any situation in which a group of jazz musicians play in front of an audience (with the exclusion of performances done in our class). (What constitute a jazz performance should be established on the basis of our class discussions and general criteria in the wider jazz community, e.g. a performance listed in the magazine “L.A. Jazz Scene” should quality as well a performance by students in the UCLA Jazz Program, or a performance announced as “Jazz” at a local Museum or Café). (N.B. you don’t have to spend a lot of money for this task. There are free concerts around the L.A. area and there are places that offer substantial discounts to students during the week, e.g. the Jazz Bakery). 4. AN INSTRUMENT/PLAYER. Each person in your group should concentrate on one particular player in the band and his/her instrument (voice for singers counts as an instrument). Do some preliminary work to prepare yourself on that particular instrument relying on the readings, esp. Monson’s book but also the essays in Gottlieb’s collection. Then, during the performance, concentrate on what that particular player does. Depending on your musical knowledge, you’ll be able to see and hear different things, but even a minimal knowledge should allow you to pick up on something. Work on that “something.” 5. WRITTEN REPORT. After the performance
Total word count: No more than 750 words. 6. METHODS: To write up your report (see 5 above) you will use a combination of the following methods: (i) participation and observation, (ii) interview/discussion with one or more expert(s) (e.g. musicians or others), (iii) various forms of documentation, including (a) notes scribbled down during the performance and while talking to musicians, members of the audience, hosts, etc. (b), [optional] tape recording (of interviews or other interactions -- make sure to let people know you are recording and ask for permission), (c) [optional] video recording (get permission), (d) collection of material distributed at the performance. 7. WRITING STYLE/CONTENT. Think of this assignment as a research report. Write as clearly as possible but don't worry about producing super polished, elegant writing with fancy metaphors and beautiful opening and closing paragraphs. You will be rewarded for having been concise and to the point while showing that you worked hard at finding out something you didn't know before. What matters is how you go about making some interesting observations and perhaps even some hypotheses about the culture of jazz aesthetics. We want you to enter the logic of jazz culture and aesthetics, as we try to do in class, when we interview musicians and other experts. We are not interested in an involved and involving narrative of your experience (that might be fun to do and read but it's not part of this assignment). We are interested in your analytical skills and more precisely in your ability to interpret what was happening before, during and right after the performance mostly through the analytical lenses of the concepts that were introduced in the readings and in class. Don't give us fillers, don't try to be cute, and don't try to fake it. Don't write a lot to fill the page. Remember that for jazz musicians “less is (generally) more.” But don't be so brief that a reader won't know what to get out of what you wrote or why you made a particular generalization. 8. PREPARATION. There are some things you need to do to prepare for this assignment. * 8.1 Get a hold of a daily or weekly publication that has information on live music in town (e.g. L.A. Weekly, L.A. Jazz Scene) and find the section on jazz clubs and concerts. Or ask some of the students in the UCLA Jazz Program. * 8.2 On the basis of the information you gathered, select and go to a jazz performance (go with one or more people from the class; it helps to have someone to discuss things with). * 8.3. Get there early and leave late. Be aware of how the presence of the performers, their music affects the context. Be aware of the differents forms of communication that go on before, during, and after the performance. * 8.4. You need to bring some tools to document what's going on so that you can review it later. Minimally, bring a little notebook to write some notes on. Maximally, bring a camera or a camcorder (note: check with the people in the club before you start taking photos or recording with a camcorder). * 8.5 Get into a learner's mindset. The idea is that jazz for you will not be the final goal of your research but a window on the universe of culture and communication. (Remember the quote from Hawking about theory). * INFORMED CONSENT. Anthropologists, like all social scientists working in a university, need to comply with state and federal regulations on research on human and animal subjects. At UCLA, this is done through the Office for Protection of Research Subjects (OPRS). Any UCLA researcher (whether faculty or student) needs to (i) get a certificate that shows that he or she has learned the basic principles of doing research on human subjects (this is done through the web now) and (ii) accurately describe the project and how human subjects will be selected and treated (or how one might interact with them) and (iii) submit the proposal for the project and the protocol to OPRS, which reviews it for approval. It is a fairly elaborate procedure and takes time. For this project you will NOT need to go through the approval of OPRS for a number of reasons including the fact that this is a class project and you will be observing a form of public behavior (music performance) that presumably does not put you or your subjects at risk and does not violate their privacy. This means, however, that you will not be able to publish or use the material you collected for this project outside of class. If you wish at a later point to use some of the material and information you collected, you will need to comply with OPRS regulations. * BEHAVIOR AS A RESEARCHER. As a researcher and fieldworker, you need to be on your best behavior, respect the culture of the community you are studying, even when you are there for a very short time. Be very polite, ask permission if you are doing something that is different from everyone else, and make sure to explain what you are doing before asking questions to participants. It's a good idea to talk to members of the audience, organizers, and also to the musicians if they are hanging around before or after the show. Don't be afraid to ask them dumb questions -- that's how you learn -- but don't harass them if they don't want to be bothered! Identify yourself when appropriate (i.e. you don't need to tell everyone you meet that you are a UCLA student doing a class project, but you should definitely let the musicians know if you are going to interview them). * FIELDNOTES. As soon as you get back from the performance, write down everything you can remember from it including questions you might have, speculations about what happened and why things were done in a certain way. Fieldnotes are not written for an English class or a Pulitzer Prize, but they might be read by others (who knows? if you become a famous anthropologist or ethnomusicologist, your first fieldnotes might end up in the Smithsonian Institution!). Use the style that you are most comfortable with. Short phrases with no verbs are ok if that's the best way for you to write quickly and efficiently. You don't need to use a computer for this, but you need to keep these notes to include them with your assignment. * NOVICE vs. EXPERT. It is possible that some of you already know a great deal about jazz whereas others might know very little or nothing. This might give you the impression that some students have an "advantage" (e.g. by being experts). However, this is not necessarily the case, the basic assumption of this assignment (and of ethnography in general) is that there are ways of turning your ignorance as an observer into an advantage. When you are an ethnographer, you are a "professional stranger" (and also, I like to say, a “professional beginner”). It is your lack of knowledge that must guide you, especially in the first stages of fieldwork, together with some theoretical concepts and methods. An ideal research group is a group with people whose expertise is differentiated and partly overlapping. * EVALUATION. Your report will be evaluated on the basis of your ability to show that you were working at making sense of what you, on the basis of your knowledge/experience, were able to pick up on during the performance and after. In order words, if you start thinking “Mh, I notice he/she does that a lot” or "I wonder why he/she do (or doesn’t do) that?" or "why do he/she/they do it that way?", that's a good start to get to “something”. Getting towards an answer to your question is the next step. Thinking about the implications of that answer is one more step, and so on. If you keep going, eventually you will come up with something interesting not only to you but to others as well). By the way, this assignment is not about how you saw the light in evaluating or appreciating jazz, hence narratives like "I used to hate jazz but now after this assignment I see that it is a wonderful music" are not accepted for this particular assignment (but you can tell us on another occasion). * TURNING IN YOUR ASSIGNMENT. Put together a folder with:
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