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Jazz

Table of Content
Introduction......................................................................................................... 4

1. What is culture?.............................................................................................. 4

1.2 Jazz as a cultural movement ..................................................................... 5

2. Jazz ................................................................................................................ 6

2.1 Time and Place ......................................................................................... 6

2.2 The Old and the New ................................................................................ 8

2.3 The Jazz Age ............................................................................................ 9

3. Jazz styles .................................................................................................... 10

3.1 New Orleans Jazz ................................................................................... 10

3.2 Harlem .................................................................................................... 10

3.3 Modern Jazz............................................................................................ 11

4. ...................................................................................................................... 12

4.1 The influence in language learning speaking .......................................... 12

4.2 Global level ............................................................................................. 12

4.3 How to use it in ELT ................................................................................ 12

Conclusions ...................................................................................................... 12

References ....................................................................................................... 13
Introduction

This papers purpose is to approach and explain the cultural aspects and the

social effects of jazz music. It focuses on exploitability of jazz as way to promote

awareness and to pay tribute to this music style.

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

in teaching which can be an inclusion in classrooms, with a beneficial and

cultural awareness purpose.

In addition this paper will try to

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,

ideologies, strategies, and tactics of self-survival including certain notions of good

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,

smells, and body contact we experience. Our culture is what is familiar,

recognizable, and habitual. It is what goes without saying.

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,

group or even a nation (thought of works of literature, art, music, etc.).


A difference is sometimes made between High culture of literature and the arts,

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

dimension of language learning is an important dimension of second language

studies. Education is seen as a process of socialization with the dominant culture.

In foreign language teaching the culture of the language may be taught as an

integral part of the curriculum Richards, J., & Schmidt, R. (2010, 151).

1.2 Jazz as a cultural movement

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

a cultural purpose, to teach, to relax, to be identified, to promote awareness and

also to have fun, with the sweet and catchy tune of jazz.
2. Jazz

A music style characterized by the use of collective

improvisation (also called polyphony) and the use of

instruments such as front line of trumpet (or cornet),

clarinet, trombone. In words of the Thelonious monk

institute of jazz explains that Jazz is a musical

conversation: a partly planned and partly

spontaneous musical dialogue among the musicians

who are performing it. While performing (or practicing), jazz musicians utilize the

inspiration of the moment, their knowledge of music theory, life experience,

social, political, and economic surroundings, technical savvy on their instruments,

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

of cultural collaboration and a universal language of tolerance and freedom.

2.1 Time and Place

The Jazz history story begins

some four hundred years ago

when the English, French,

Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch

competed for control of the Atlantic

slave trade. It's estimated that by

1860, more than 10 million

Africans had been captured and


transported to the Americas. This human atrocity ravaged populations primarily

in regions we now call Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria.

They were transported mostly to the Caribbean Islands and Spanish colonies in

Central and South America. Only an estimated 6 percent of these victims of

slavery were traded in British North America. Far from homogeneous, their

diverse linguistic, ethnic, and religious origins were all reflected in their musical

traditions.

Everything started by 1750, when

enslaved Africans constituted 20

percent of the population in British

North America, almost 240,000

people. The majority lived in the

Southern colonies though slavery

also existed in Northern colonies. At

the same time, particularly in

Maryland, a small population of free

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

slightly different cultural turn in the French-dominated city of New

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

the status and rights of white people.

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

primary inventors of early jazz.

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

slavery were passed. Adapted from Jazz Timeline (2002)

2.2 The Old and the New

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

years of musical evolution and as a transition to the modern - a new way of

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

perception associated with it is radically different in our times.

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?

2.3 The Jazz Age

Louis Armstrong, one of the best jazz

prodigious who represented the dynastic

tradition in New Orleans jazz, represented

the age of the jazz putting an end to its

colourful lineage of Kings Bolden, Keppard,

and Oliver stands out as an unlikely

regicide. Armstrong always spoke with

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

of Armstrong's musicianship, the unsurpassed linear momentum of his

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

3.1 New Orleans Jazz

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

possibilities a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling

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

music. Harlem stride piano, as it has come to be known, stood as a bridge

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

-perhaps stubbornly, perhaps wisely had so often refused to recognize. In

retrospect, this could be viewed as part of Joplin's genius: with the tension

between these two extremes unresolved, his music eventually succeeded on


both planes, as serious art and as populist entertainment. In contrast, the stride

players were more comfortable in making compromises between the two, in

finding a fertile middle ground. Understanding that music required an audience,

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

players, Fats Waller, displayed a knack for captivating audiences unsurpassed

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

of that music, especially its rhythms and syncopations, while incorporating a

broad range of other devices, borrowed both from jazz players such as Jelly Roll

Morton and Earl Hines. Gioia T (1998).

3.3 Modern Jazz


Long before modern jazz emerged as a distinctive style, an ideology of

modernism had been implicitly embraced by the music's practitioners. From its

earliest days, jazz had been a forward-looking art, continually incorporating new

techniques, more expansive harmonies, more complex rhythms, more intricate

melodies. Sometimes this ideology of progress was stated explicitly, as in

Beiderbecke and the Chicagoans' spoken praise of Stravinsky and other

contemporary classical composers; in other instances, no words were

necessary, as with the implicit modernism of Armstrong's breakthrough

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.

4.1 The influence in language learning speaking

4.2 Global level

4.3 How to use it in ELT

Conclusions

What this paper tied to show was a bit of what jazz represents, the huge impact

that has, in our world


References

Gioia T (1998). The History of Jazz. USA; Oxford University Press New York
Oxford

Jazz Timeline (2002) Vincent York's Jazzistry.

One Working Musician http://oneworkingmusician.com/

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.

Thelonious monk institute of jazz, The National Jazz Curriculum


(www.jazzinamerica.org)
Van Maanen & Laurent, The flow of cultures in Organizaition, Theory, and The
multinational croproation, NY, 1993 by Ghoshal and Westney.

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