Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Table of Content
Introduction......................................................................................................... 4
1. What is culture?.............................................................................................. 4
2. Jazz ................................................................................................................ 6
4. ...................................................................................................................... 12
Conclusions ...................................................................................................... 12
References ....................................................................................................... 13
Introduction
This papers purpose is to approach and explain the cultural aspects and the
Although jazz covers a wide variety of branches this review is focused into five
major themes, which are: cultural aspects, jazz itself, jazz styles and the jazz in
1. What is culture?
As Van Maanen & Laurent (1993, 31) states culture provides members with
images of their basic concerns, principles, ethics, and bodies of manners, rituals,
deeds and bad, various forms of folklore and legends. The way we give logic to
the world begins at birth with the gestures, words, tone of voice, noises, colours,
The main point is to recall of what is culture to us and for others, culture as a
simple way is a set of practices, codes and values that mark a particular person,
and small c culture of attitudes, values, beliefs, and everyday lifestyles. Culture
and Language combine to form what is sometimes called Discourses, i.e. ways
of talking, thinking, and behaving that reflect ones social identity. The cultural
integral part of the curriculum Richards, J., & Schmidt, R. (2010, 151).
The idea of the cultural relevance is not new there has always been there, its this
relationship that makes it unique. Thats why we say that art speaks to us. Its
one of the few ways we have to view, react or interact with the world through the
eyes of someone else, as if they are telling us how they view things. While this is
not a new idea, it is one that jazz music and musicians are struggling with. In fact,
cultural relevance might be the central issue for jazz in the 21st century. Adapted
from: http://oneworkingmusician.com/
Where words fail, music speaks, says the poet Hans Christian Andersen. This
message is profoundly expressed in jazz music. There are many ways to use jazz
also to have fun, with the sweet and catchy tune of jazz.
2. Jazz
who are performing it. While performing (or practicing), jazz musicians utilize the
and, especially, all the music (particularly jazz and blues) they have ever heard
that has influenced them. Jazz is a music of the present moment, anchored
lovingly and respectfully in the past. Also jazz is a rich artistic heritage, a product
They were transported mostly to the Caribbean Islands and Spanish colonies in
slavery were traded in British North America. Far from homogeneous, their
diverse linguistic, ethnic, and religious origins were all reflected in their musical
traditions.
blacks did exist. Because England's industrial revolution was funded by profits
from the British slave trade and from colonial America's slave-produced sugar
and tobacco crops, British slave ships were bringing as great a number as 50,000
enslaved Africans to the New World each year by the 1790's. Slavery took a
Orleans, founded in 1718. Here free coloured people called Creoles co-existed
with whites and slaves. Creoles were the racially mixed offspring of French slave
masters and became free when, according to custom, French slave owners would
free their slaves immediately prior to their own death. With freedom, Creoles were
able to achieve a level of education, opportunity and wealth that approximated
However, when the Spanish took over New Orleans in 1764, Creoles lost their
social and economic status, a change that forced them to look for work. Many
became traveling musicians, a phenomenon that would evolve into the Southern
minstrel show. These Creole musicians and their descendants became the
At the same time, Connecticut and Rhode Island were the first northern colonies
to initiate the idea of gradual emancipation and in 1774, the first laws prohibiting
The swing also known as jazz, dance and popular music, that era ended in 1945
changing in the culture of this country. What went before was never to be again -
the society that created the music from New Orleans Dixieland through this era
had changed for good. The World War II created such an accelerated pace of
change - technologically and socially - that the post war years do not relate to
that immediate past. That past time had been destroyed by the immense social
disruption which accompanied the War itself - but, it was the foundation (good or
bad) for who we are today. As such, in this period is both the culmination of fifty
viewing the world and a new way of viewing Jazz. Swing Music made big money
- the trend toward larger groups was stimulated by this ability. I looked through
the Keepnews Pictorial History of Jazz and came across an amazing photo. It
was a picture of the marquee of the Strand theatre in New York City and Artie
Shaws band was to play at this venue. His name is displayed in lights - a
dominating presence in size and wattage. On the marquee itself, his band is given
equal billing with the movie - Wings of the Navy. It was so strange for me to see
this - only rock stars got that kind of exposure! But then realized there was no
difference between the Shaw date and any high profile popular music of today -
they were immensely popular and immensely lucrative. The bottom line was this
similarity. But then, slipping back into my present day orientation the strangeness
returned - it did not fit my view of what Jazz is. That Artie Shaw picture indicated
to me that the very functionality of the music itself - and the percentage of Art
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edwsf-
11hwjMNs 8F3sI
Listen to the same song but in different times, compare old and new!, what do you prefer?
deference, bordering on awe, of his musical roots, and with especial devotion of
his mentor Joe Oliver. Yet the evidence of the grooves does not lie: the superiority
improvised lines, could serve only to make Oliver, Morton, and Bolden.
Armstrong on trumpet enters stage right heralding the new Age of the Soloist.
Gioia T (1998).
3. Jazz styles
3.2 Harlem
The piano was often the battleground between these two visions of black artistic
achievement. It is not going too far to suggest that the piano was to Harlem what
brass bands had been to New Orleans. The instrument represented conflicting
card of low- brow nightlife, a symbol of middle-class prosperity, or, quite simply,
a means of making a living. But, with the benefit of hindsight, we tend to view the
piano in Harlem of the late 1920s and early 1930s as the centre of a new type of
between the ragtime idiom of the turn of the century and the new jazz piano styles
that were in the process of evolution. In the history of ragtime. Stride piano
attempted to bridge this same gulf between highbrow and lowbrow, which Joplin
retrospect, this could be viewed as part of Joplin's genius: with the tension
preferably a large one, they mastered a wide range of novelty devices and
popular effects. At times the superficial glitter could outshine the jazz content
"When I began my work, jazz was a stunt," was Duke Ellington's later critique of
some of this music 10 but the slick professionalism of the Harlem stride style
also served to expand the audience for African-American music in the face of
discrimination from the cultural elite, both within and without the black community,
and despite a severe economic downturn. For better or worse, the stride players
did not shy away from being entertainers. Indeed, the most famous of the stride
by any jazz musician, past or present, with the possible exception of Louis
Armstrong. But stride piano was more than mass entertainment. In the years
following the decline of ragtime, the New York players kept true to the basic ethos
broad range of other devices, borrowed both from jazz players such as Jelly Roll
modernism had been implicitly embraced by the music's practitioners. From its
earliest days, jazz had been a forward-looking art, continually incorporating new
recordings of the 1920s. But whether they expostulated about the future of
music or merely announced its arrival through the bell of their horns, the leading
musicians of early jazz were modernists in the truest sense of the term.
4.
Conclusions
What this paper tied to show was a bit of what jazz represents, the huge impact
Gioia T (1998). The History of Jazz. USA; Oxford University Press New York
Oxford
Richards, J., & Schmidt, R. (2010). Richards, J.C. and Schmidt, R. (2010)
Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (Fourth
edition). Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited.