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Instructor: Sherrie Tucker, American Studies, University of Kansas

Office Hours: Tuesdays, 11 am 2 pm (sign-up sheet linked to Blackboard)
Bailey 213-G, or by appointment. SherrieTu@aol.com



For up-to-date syllabus, please refer to Blackboard site for this class
throughout the semester.

Course Description

No music is as widely associated with the United States than jazz. It often associated
with American democracy, either as epitomizing a culture of individual expression and
social equality, or as a critical struggle against an undemocratic government and
society. While usually acknowledged as African American in origin, jazz has been
subject to debates about cultural ownership and meanings of race throughout its 100
year history. Interdisciplinary scholars in American Studies and African American
Studies and other fields have found the cultural history of jazz and its meanings to be a
rich source for exploring race, class, democracy, commerce, and social struggle in the
US and its international travels. Until recently, most jazz scholarship overlooked women
instrumentalists (especially those who played instruments other than piano), masculinist
language of jazz criticism, and constructions of racialized masculinity within jazz
discourse. Increasingly, scholars have incorporated analyses of gender as intersected
with race and other categories, yielding new insights into jazz and American culture.

The purpose of this course is to explore jazz and American culture through lenses of
gender and race. This interdisciplinary course is intended for upper division
undergraduate and graduate students interested in developing theories and methods for
studying gender, race, and music in historically, culturally, politically, and socially
specific ways. No previous study of jazz is required, but if you do have a background in
jazz, your expertise is welcome. Through readings, listening, writing, film viewing,
discussions, and collaborative research on women, gender, race, and jazz in a Kansas
City and vicinity, we will explore social meanings that creators, fans, and detractors
have associated with jazz in particular historical moments, sites, and scenes of musical
interaction. There are many ways to study jazz; the approach this class takes is through
exploration of struggles over social, cultural, and political meanings of race and gender.

Jazz & American Culture, Fall 2014

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Assignments

1) Weekly Listening Blogs: Post two paragraph-length blog entries on ten different
weeks. In these, describe your experience of listening attentively to two musical
examplesone selected from weekly listening examples on Blackboard, and one
of your choice. For your selection, you may choose any music in any setting, but
it must either be marketed as jazz, or it must sound like jazz to you. If the latter,
be sure to explain what about it strikes you as jazz or jazz-like. People perceive
and describe music in many different ways. You satisfy this requirement (1 point)
by listening to music, and writing about your perceptions in your own way, using
language available to you. You receive top credit for this assignment (2 points)
by linking your perceptions to the readings in a meaningful way. 20%
2) Three short papers (3-4 pages each) to be assigned throughout the class.
These papers are assigned one week in advance, and are based on questions
that I will provide. There will be four opportunities to do these, and you may
choose which three you want to do. If you do more than three, the three best
grades will count for the total. 30%
3) Attend three performances (virtual and/or live). There will be several
opportunities throughout the semester to attend virtual and live jazz
performances. You receive credit for this attendance after you blog about it. On a
week that you attend a performance, please devote both paragraphs of your
listening blog to writing about it in lieu of other listening examples. 15%
4) Collaborative Research Project: Each member of this class will contribute to
the creation of a website pertaining to gender, race, and jazz in the state of
Kansas. Using the tools we have learned throughout the course, students will
conduct primary source research, and author or co-author at least one
substantive entry. 25%
5) Participation: Includes regular attendance, preparation, listening, and
contributing to in-class discussion. In regard to class discussion, I realize that
most of us are more comfortable in either the speaking or listening mode. Both
are required in this class. Please see me if either presents a challenge and we
will strategize together. 10%

PLUS (Graduate Students Only): lead one discussion of a reading (negotiated
with me) and submit one 7-10 page paper (instead of a third short paper) that
extends a theoretical move from this class that may be useful for your larger work.
Please meet with me early in the semester to strategize an assignment that optimizes
your ability to fulfill the course goals in a way that is meaningful to your graduate work
(grade will be averaged into 30% with the three short papers).

Course Readings:

Required Text:
Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz
Studies (Duke University Press, 2008)
All other readings will be available on Blackboard.
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Brief Weekly Outline (What follows is a sketch. Always check Blackboard for
listening examples, assignments, adjustments, and readings.)

Aug. 27: What is this thing called Jazz? Introduction to key concepts

Not all of the music called jazz today was called jazz at the time it was
created. Not all of the music that has been called jazz by musicians and
audiences in the past is included in published accounts of Jazz History today.
What is Jazz and for whom is it important? Our first session is an introduction to
some of the key concepts used within Jazz Studies when researching jazz
histories, scenes, and sounds as sites of social and political practices and ideas
that mattered to people.

Readings/Listening/Assignments: None for this first class session.

Sept. 3: No class meeting, but there are readings, listening, and a short
written assignment is due to me via email at 8 pm

Required Readings (on Blackboard):
Lawrence Levine, Jazz and American Culture, The Journal of American
Folklore, Vol. 102, No. 403 (Jan.-Mar. 1989), 6-22.
Eric Porter, Introduction, and A Marvel of Paradox, What is this thing called
Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (UC Press,
2002), xiii-xxi, 1-53
Kevin Whitehead, Why Jazz? 1-18

See Blackboard for film clip and short written assignment

UNIT I: HISTORY, MEMORY, & HISTORIOGRAPHY

Sept. 10: Enduring Love & Theft: Raced and Gendered Legacies of Minstrelsy

How do jazz musicians, fans, historians, critics, producers, and scholars grapple
with the closely intertwined histories of jazz and minstrelsy? How does this
historical relationship inform ongoing struggles over gender, race, and jazz?
Film: Marlon Riggs, Ethnic Notions (58 min)

Required Reading (on Blackboard):
Jayna Jennifer Brown, Little Black Me: the Touring Picaninny Choruses, from
Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke
University Press, 2008), 19-55
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy,
Representations 39, (Summer 1992), 23-50.
Deborah Gray White, "Jezebel and Mammy: the Mythology of Female Slavery,"
from Arn't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, 28-61
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Suggested Reading (on Blackboard)
Michelle Wallace, Uncle Tom's Cabin: Before and After the Jim Crow Era, TDR
vol. 44, no. 1, Spring 2000, 136-156
Laurie Stras, "White Face, Black Voice: Race, Gender, and Region in the Music
of the Boswell Sisters," Journal of the Society for American Music vol. 1, issue 2,
(2007), 207-255.

See Blackboard for readings, listening, and short written assignment

Sept. 17: Jazz in the ArchiveMEET AT MAIN ENTRANCE (ABOVE THE CAR
PARKING AREA) SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY (NOT SPENCER
MUSEUM OF ART) 1450 Poplar Lane (behind Strong Hall)

6-7 pm: Sherry Williams, Curator of Collections, will show us some of the archival
materials on jazz that are housed at KU. Spencer is one of several archives
where you may conduct research for the collaborative assignment.

7:-8:30: Discussion: How is an archive different than history, memory, and
historiography? What are the relationships? What did you see (or not see) in
Spencer that surprised you? If you were to go back tomorrow, what would you
want to see again or search for and why? We will brain-storm on possible
research to pursue for the collaborative research assignment.

Required Readings (on Blackboard):
Susan Cavin, Missing Women on the Voodoo Trail to Jazz, Journal of Jazz
Studies vol. 3 (1975) no. 1, 4-27
Nadine George Graves, Preface: Surviving the Silence, Beginnings,
Influences, and a Performance Reconstruction, The Royalty of Negro
Vaudeville: the Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class
in African American Theatre: 1900-1940, xi-50

Paper #1 assignment posted (Due Oct 1)

Sept. 24: Jazz History as Site of Struggle

Jazz historians often note the contexts of struggle from which the music
emerged. Yet, even the ways in which jazz historians have battled one another
over how to tell the story have often been sites of struggle. What is at stake?
How do we understand underrepresented histories? How do we learn to tell new
stories in relation to histories that have been told so many times they have
become common sense? Can there even be such a thing as Jazz History if the
ways in which people have told jazz history in writing and film have been sites of
struggle over meanings about gender and race (and other social categories)?

Lecture: Scratching the Historical Record: Gender, Race and Jazz
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Required Reading (Big Ears)
Rustin and Tucker, Introduction, Big Ears 1-28

Required Readings (on Blackboard):
Elsa Barkeley Brown, Polyrhythms and Improvisation: Lessons for Women's
History, History Workshop Journal (1991), 85-90
Scott Deveaux, Constructing the Jazz Tradition, Black American Literature
Forum, Vol. 25, No. 3, (Autumn, 1991), 525-56

Suggested Reading (on Blackboard):
Joan Scott, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis

Oct. 1: Revisiting the Cradle: Gender, Race, and Early Jazz: Research Strategies
How might we use an intersectional analysis of gender, race, class, sexuality,
and nation to re-examine the birthplace of jazz and the style that continues to
travel by the place name New Orleans jazz? We will xploration of attempts to
account for hidden histories and history as many voices talking at once.

Sign-ups for research topics for collaborative web-site on gender, race, and
jazz in Kansas.

Required Reading (on Blackboard)
Sherrie Tucker, Introduction, A Feminist Perspective on New Orleans
Jazzwomen, New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, 2004, 1-20

Required Reading (Big Ears)
Lara Pelligrinelli, Separated at 'Birth: Singing and the History of Jazz, Big Ears,
31-47.
Jeffrey Taylor, With Lovie and Lil: Rediscovering Two Chicago Pianists of the
1920s, Big Ears, 48-63

PAPER #1 DUE AT BEGINNING OF CLASS

UNIT II: EMBODIMENT AND PERFORMANCE

Oct 8: Gender, Race, and Jazz in the "Jazz Age"A shift into theories of
embodiment and performance need not coincide with the Jazz Age unit, but it is
certainly an apt place for such incorporation. This week, we will explore the
proliferation of meanings jazz in the 1920s held for African American and white
musicians, audiences, and writers. How did conflicting ideas about proper
bodies, exciting bodies, modern bodies, and artistic bodies get worked out
through "jazz" controversy? How did jazz factor into new ideas about
embodiment and performance associated with New Women and New Negroes?
What struggles took place over gender, race, and modernity among fans and
detractors of jazz across lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class?
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Lecture: What do theories of embodiment and performance bring into view.
Film excerpts: Swing (1938) Oscar Micheaux

Required Reading (on Blackboard):
Amber Clifford, Female Impersonation in Kansas Citys Jazz Scene, Queering
the Inferno: Space, Identity, and Kansas Citys Jazz Scene (Ph.D. dissertion,
American Studies, KU, 2007), 194-201
Kathy Ogren, From Devils Music to Jooking: Jazz Performance and the Black
Community and Prudes and Primitives: White Americans Debate Jazz, The
Jazz Revolution, 111-161.

Required Reading (Big Ears)
Jayna Brown, From the Point of View of the Pavement: A Geopolitics of Black
Dance, 157-179

Oct. 15 Popularity, Populism, and Pop Culture: Jazz in the 1930s

Required Reading (Big Ears)
Monica Hairston, Gender, Jazz, and the Popular Front, 64-89
McDonald, J. Frederick. Hot Jazz: the Jitterbug, and Misunderstanding: The
Generation Gap in Swing. In American Popular Music: Readings from the
Popular Press, Volume 1, the Nineteenth Century and Tin Pan Alley, edited by
Timothy E. Scheurer. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular
Press, 1989, 151-60.
Nichole T. Rustin, Mary Lou Williams Plays Like a Man! Gender, Genius, and
Difference in Black Music Discourse, South Atlantic Quarterly, 104(3), 445-462.

Film: Broken Strings

Paper #2 assignment distributed (due Nov. 5)

UNIT III: REPRESENTATION

Oct 22 Jazz and World War II: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Nation
Unlike the patriotic tunes of World War I, the music that represented America
during World War II was the big band swing that had become the dominant
popular music form in the U.S. during the previous decade. We will take a look at
some of the articulations of swing and nationalism, and the struggles that took
place in late swing era contexts in both mainstream and marginalized swing big
bands during World War II

Film: The International Sweethearts of Rhythm (30 minutes)

Required Reading (on Blackboard):
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Megan E. Williams, "Lena Not the Only One": Representations of Lena Horne
and Etta Moten in the Kansas City "Call", 1941-1945, American Studies, Vol. 51,
No. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010), 49-67

Required Reading (Big Ears)
Christina Baade, The Battle of the Saxes: Gender, Dance Bands, and British
Nationalism in the Second World War, Big Ears, 90-128
Kristen McGee, The Gendered Jazz Aesthetics of That Man of Mine: The
International Sweethearts of Rhythm and Independent Black Sound Film, 393-
421

Oct. 29 Gendering the Jazz Wars

The rise of the new style "bebop" in the 1940s generated new controversies in
jazz discourse. Developed during the American Federation of Musicians
recording ban, and while many musicians' careers were on hold "for the duration"
of the war, bebop struck many ears as radically disconnected from previous
styles and meanings: as variously militant, "hip," modern, urbane, pretentious,
chaotic. How did bebop's innovators, fans, and detractors perceive and
contribute the music's meanings? How are these related to the war, to 1940s civil
rights struggles of African Americans, of black soldiers' war experiences, of labor
booms, mass rural to urban relocations of thousands of Americans, and
uprisings, based on racism and rebellions against racism, in U.S. cities?

Film: New Orleans (1947)

Required Readings (Blackboard):
Bernard Gendron, "Moldy Figs and Modernists: Jazz at War (1942-1946),from
Krin Gabbard, ed., Jazz Among the Discourses (Durham: Duke, 1995).
Required Reading (Big Ears)
Tucker, But This Music is Mine Already: White Woman as Jazz Collector in the
Film New Orleans (1947), 235-266

Nov.5 No class meeting, but there is an assignment due at 8 pm

Post-War Jazz:What is hipness? What is its gender and race? Why are we
studying it in this class? Did postwar women have access to "hipness"? Which
ones?
Required Readings (Blackboard):
Ingrid Monson, The Problem With White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural
Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse, Journal of the American Musicological
Society XLVIII(3) (Fall 1995), 396-422
Norman Mailer, The White Negro, (originally published 1957), excerpts
James Baldwin, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy," from Nobody Knows
My Name (1961)
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Required Reading (Big Ears)
Nichole T. Rustin, Blow, Man, Blow!: Representing Gender, White Primitives,
and Jazz Melodrama through A Young Man with a Horn, 361-392

Recommended: (Big Ears)
Ursel Schlicht, Better a Jazz Album than Lipstick: (Lieber Jazz Platte als
Lippinschtift): the 1956 Jazz Podium Series Reveals Images of Jazz and Gender
in Postwar Germany, 291-319
Due: Paper #2 (8 pm on Blackboard)

Nov.12 Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement

Required Reading (Blackboard)
Lisa Barg, Taking Care of Music: Gender, Arranging, and Collaboration in the
Weston-Liston Partnership, Black Music Research Journal
Ingrid Monson, Introduction, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and
Africa, 3-28
Eric Porter, Straight Ahead: Abbey Lincoln and the Challenge of Jazz Singing,
What is this Thing Called Jazz?, 149-190

Film: Cry of Jazz

Nov. 19 Free Jazz in an Unfree World: The Avant-Garde, Black Freedom
Struggles, Third World Liberation, and the Womens Movement
Jazz discourse of the 1960s-1970s is a place where we can explore a multiplicity
of radically changing meanings of race and gender in within social movements
for liberation. How did jazz performance connect with mass movements? How
did jazz reflect and contribute to ideological and material struggles about racial
justice and decolonization, and how were these gendered? What is the place of
jazz in the cultural arm of the second wave womens movement?

Required Readings (on Blackboard):
Nanette de Jong, Women of the Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians: Four Narratives, in ed. Eileen M. Hayes and Linda F. Williams, Black
Women and Music: More than the Blues (Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 2007),134-152
Tammy Kernodle, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Alice Coltrane and the
Redefining of the Jazz Avant-Garde, John Coltrane and Black Americas Quest
for Freedom (ed. Leonard Brown, Oxford 2010), 73-98
Valerie Wilmer, Chapter 7, The AACM--Chicago's Alternative Society, and
Chapter 12, You Sound Good--for a Woman, As Serious As Your Life: The
Story of the New Jazz (112-126, 204-210)
Paper #3 assignment distributed (due December 17)
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THANKSGIVING NO CLASS Nov. 26

Dec. 3 Jazz and Feminism (any overlap?)

Required Readings (on Blackboard)
hattie gossett with carolyn johnson, jazzwomen: theyre mostly singers and
piano players, only a horn player or two, hardly any drummers, Heresies no. 10
(1980), 65-60
Janet Lawson, Blowing on the Changes: Reflections of a Jazz Woman,
Heresies, no.10 (1980), 70-73.
Linda F. Williams, Black Women, Jazz, and Feminism, Eileen M. Hayes and
Williams, ed., Black Women and Music: More than the Blues (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 119-133

Required Reading (Big Ears)
Farah Jasmine Griffin, It Takes Two People to Confirm the Truth: the Jazz
Fiction of Sherley Ann Williams and Tony Cade Bambara, 348-360

Recommended Reading (Big Ears)
Julie Dawn Smith, Perverse Hysterics: The Noisy Cri of Les Diaboliques, 180-
209

Dec. 10 Wrap-Up: Reflections on Jazz History, Embodiment, and
Representation in the Present

Required Reading (Big Ears)
Tracy McMullen, Identity for Sale: Glenn Miller, Wynton Marsalis, and Cultural
Replay in Music, 129-154
Ingrid Monson, Fitting the Part, 267-287
Eric Porter, Born Out of Jazz, Yet Embracing All Music: Race, Gender, and
Technology in George Russells Lydian Chromatic Concept, 210-234

Presentation of Website Entries
We will view your entries as a class. Each person should be prepared to talk
about the entry you chose, research process, and decisions in representation.





Paper #3 and Revised Website Entries due Dec. 17