Bebop and Black Modernism: an Introduction to Modern Jazz (In-Person)

Modern jazz was birthed, so the legend goes, during after-hours jam sessions in 1941 at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, where Black touring musicians sought to forge a music beyond the appropriation of white bandleaders and music publishers. The signature styles and techniques of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, among others, charted an innovative course that transformed the music of the Swing Era big bands into the new form of Black modernism known as bebop. In the postwar decades, bebop and its stylistic offspring came to define vanguard aesthetics and urban cool not only for other musicians but also for poets, painters, and writers. During its heyday, lasting into the 1970s, the “revolutionary rumpus” of modern jazz, as Ralph Ellison termed it, expressed the energies and resistance of the Great Migration and the political and social transformation it affected in American society. What exactly defined this new form of jazz as modern, and indeed modernist, and how can we explain its pervasive appeal at the heart of an emergent postwar counterculture? What can the music itself and the distinctive voices who defined it teach us about the momentous history of the postwar decades and their continuing influence on Black cultural expression and American culture more broadly?

In this course, we will chart the musicological paths of modern jazz through critical listening to seminal recordings alongside reading literary works and cultural criticism inspired by the musical artists. We’ll examine bebop’s origins at Minton’s and the prior jazz sources that this talented milieu galvanized into an exciting new form. We’ll also look at the economics of the 1940s music industry, which savvy icons like Bird and Dizzy Gillespie were able to redirect into a thriving independent economy of record labels and magazines. Modern jazz also became a crucial means of protest during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, starting with Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” through the cantankerous satire of Charles Mingus and searing honesty of Nina Simone. We’ll also trace the new forms of spiritual music and Afrofuturism in the work of John and Alice Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra, as well as the global influence of jazz, facilitated by State Department diplomatic tours that inspired the emergence of thriving scenes in Ethiopia, Brazil, and South Africa. Finally, we’ll consider how jazz shaped the political and aesthetic consciousness of writers ranging from Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka to Jack Kerouac, the Nuyorican Poets, and Fred Moten. In addition to original recordings and literary texts, the course will draw on scholarship and criticism by Ted Gioia, Scott DeVeaux, Penny Von Eschen, A.B. Spellman, Greg Tate, Brent Edwards, and Harmony Holiday.

Course Schedule

Monday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
February 03 — February 24, 2025
4 weeks

$335.00

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