Entering the Conversation

1. Choose one of the poems, excerpts from fiction, or works of art in this Conversation and analyze its style using the three elements Robert O’Meally considers essential to jazz. Make an argument for or against the piece as a work of jazz.

   Question

   ALMF/kS1zzW73MouRsoXk1h0lKY=

   Entering the Conversation: - Choose one of the poems, excerpts from fiction, or works of art in this Conversation and analyze its style using the three elements Robert O’Meally considers essential to jazz. Make an argument for or against the piece as a work of jazz.
2. Winthrop Sargeant was the New Yorker’s critic for both jazz and classical music for many years. He was notoriously crotchety and very hard on jazz. In the conclusion of his 1946 book, Jazz, Hot and Hybrid, he concludes, “Meanwhile jazz, as a rip-snorting stimulant to the social life of a restless, energetic people, need offer no apologies. It is rapidly becoming the world’s most universally welcomed popular art form. And there can be no doubt that the world is the richer for it.” Analyze this statement, looking carefully for a subtext or second layer of meaning, and then write an essay in which you support, challenge, or qualify Sargeant’s conclusion about jazz. Use the sources here, as well as your own listening experiences, as evidence.

   Question

   ALMF/kS1zzW73MouRsoXk1h0lKY=

   Entering the Conversation: - Winthrop Sargeant was the New Yorker’s critic for both jazz and classical music for many years. He was notoriously crotchety and very hard on jazz. In the conclusion of his 1946 book, Jazz, Hot and Hybrid, he concludes, “Meanwhile jazz, as a rip-snorting stimulant to the social life of a restless, energetic people, need offer no apologies. It is rapidly becoming the world’s most universally welcomed popular art form. And there can be no doubt that the world is the richer for it.” Analyze this statement, looking carefully for a subtext or second layer of meaning, and then write an essay in which you support, challenge, or qualify Sargeant’s conclusion about jazz. Use the sources here, as well as your own listening experiences, as evidence.
3. The poet and essayist Kevin Young writes in The Grey Album, a collection of his essays, that modernism often

   masked a form of anxiety. Rather than a comfort with progress—that American ideal—modernism itself may represent an apprehension about precisely that progress. Part of the blues’ brood, jazz was and remains for many a site of this anxiety. While the music was seen as hectic, jumpy, and symptomatic, jazz is actually the diagnosis: we’ve all come down with a serious case of modernism. In its self-consciousness jazz mirrors modernism; in its willingness to refer to itself (especially later, in bebop), jazz foreshadows the growing self-reflexivity found in the postmodern era and art over the course of the last century.

   Using the sources here, as well as your knowledge of music and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, write an essay about how anxiety is both depicted in art and music and, perhaps, how anxiety drives the creation of art and music.

   Question

   ALMF/kS1zzW73MouRsoXk1h0lKY=

   Entering the Conversation: - The poet and essayist Kevin Young writes in The Grey Album, a collection of his essays, that modernism oftenmasked a form of anxiety. Rather than a comfort with progress—that American ideal—modernism itself may represent an apprehension about precisely that progress. Part of the blues’ brood, jazz was and remains for many a site of this anxiety. While the music was seen as hectic, jumpy, and symptomatic, jazz is actually the diagnosis: we’ve all come down with a serious case of modernism. In its self-consciousness jazz mirrors modernism; in its willingness to refer to itself (especially later, in bebop), jazz foreshadows the growing self-reflexivity found in the postmodern era and art over the course of the last century.Using the sources here, as well as your knowledge of music and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, write an essay about how anxiety is both depicted in art and music and, perhaps, how anxiety drives the creation of art and music.
4. In The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia notes the influence of the mythology of jazz, one that he says “romanticized the jazz life and celebrated its leading practitioners as defiant, rebellious youths determined to go their own way in music, as in other pursuits.” What evidence do you see of that sense of rebellion in the works in this Conversation? Consider that several of the artists and musicians discussed here had problems with drug or alcohol abuse or lived on the margins of society, some even dying unknown and impoverished. Write an essay in which you argue for or against the idea that an artist’s difficult personal life adds credence or value to his or her art.

   Question

   ALMF/kS1zzW73MouRsoXk1h0lKY=

   Entering the Conversation: - In The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia notes the influence of the mythology of jazz, one that he says “romanticized the jazz life and celebrated its leading practitioners as defiant, rebellious youths determined to go their own way in music, as in other pursuits.” What evidence do you see of that sense of rebellion in the works in this Conversation? Consider that several of the artists and musicians discussed here had problems with drug or alcohol abuse or lived on the margins of society, some even dying unknown and impoverished. Write an essay in which you argue for or against the idea that an artist’s difficult personal life adds credence or value to his or her art.
5. Most fans of jazz agree that the most universally appealing quality of the music is its sense of swing, which is hard to define but might be that quality that makes you tap your feet or nod your head. Write an essay about how the works in this Conversation, and other jazz-inspired works you know, “swing.”

   Question

   ALMF/kS1zzW73MouRsoXk1h0lKY=

   Entering the Conversation: - Most fans of jazz agree that the most universally appealing quality of the music is its sense of swing, which is hard to define but might be that quality that makes you tap your feet or nod your head. Write an essay about how the works in this Conversation, and other jazz-inspired works you know, “swing.”