“Talking and Testifying, Speaking and Speechifying” The Sound of Jazz

Photo from Red Hot Jazz: The History of Jazz in the 1930s http://www.redhotjazz.com/index.htm

OVERVIEW: Jazz music emerged from urban African American culture to express the human capacity to do more than merely survive under challenging circumstances. In voices imitating instruments, jazz represents such themes as work life, leisure/entertainment, passion, food, death, and spirituals recorded in African American native voice. It captures the flare of rural and urban storytelling, “loud-talk,” “whispery romance,” “spare dry poetry,” “pool-hall boast” or the “jump-rope rhyme.” Jazz melds elements from ragtime, marching band music, European classical music, spirituals, work songs, the blues, and other forms of expression. This activity asks students to examine jazz recordings and related art and literature to better understand African American culture and life in the 1920s.

GOAL: Drawing on web-based audio, images and text to derive an understanding of how jazz reflected & shaped aspects of African American life and culture in the early 20th century.

ACTIVITY (55 min. total) Your teacher has assigned your group the task of creating a multimedia web exhibition on 1920s jazz and African-American culture. Use selected web sites to gather resources and select an item or two that you would include in the gallery.

Step 1. Thinking About 1920s Jazz (10 min): With your group, read and briefly discuss Jazzonia by Langston Hughes. What is Hughes is saying about jazz? What feelings does the poem evoke? What words, images and poetic structures does Hughes use? Given what you know about Hughes, what does the poem suggest about jazz in 1920s African American culture?

Step 2. Listening to 1920s Jazz (20-25 min) Working on your own, explore the music, images, and background available on the Red Hot Jazz site. You may start with the Red Hot Jazz home page http://www.redhotjazz.com or choose one of the following recording artists to explore:

• Louis Armstrong (with the Red Hot Onions) http://www.redhotjazz.com/redonion.html
• Red Hot Fives http://www.redhotjazz.com/hot5.html
• Jelly Roll Morton (instrumental only) http://www.redhotjazz.com/jellyroll.html
• Sidney Bechet http://www.redhotjazz.com/Bechet.html (see King Bechet Trio)
• Mamie Smith http://www.redhotjazz.com/mamie.html

What themes and feelings do you hear in the music? What insights can you gather from the music, the images and the text about the nature of 1920s jazz and its place in the African-American community? What item (or items) would you propose to include in the exhibition?

Step 3. Artistic and Literary Perspectives (10 min): Briefly explore resources from one or more of these sites, which present visual arts and texts from the Harlem Renaissance. What images or ideas could you use?

* “Rhapsodies in Black,” exhibition site created by Heywood Gallery & Corcoran Gallery of Art http://www.iniva.org/harlem/intro.html
* "Jazz at Home" by J.A. Rogers in the Survey Graphic site http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/harlem/RogJazzF.html
* PAL: Perspectives in American Literature http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap9/9intro.html
* Harlem Renaissance Art http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/harlem-renaissance.html
* NYPL Schomburg Center exhibition on Harlem, 1900-1940 http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/

Step 4 Select items for the Web Gallery. (10 minutes): Stop your Research and Analyze what you’ve found. Review your research and select one or two items that you would propose should be included in the exhibition. Why would they be particularly important? If you have time, draft a 2-3 sentence curator’s note that explains how this item would help illuminate the significance of jazz in urban African American life in the 1920s. Be prepared to share your ideas with your small group.

SMALL GROUP DISCUSSION (40 min): Meet with other members of your group. Start by briefly sharing your ideas for items to include in the gallery and your draft curator’s notes. Then step back to discuss the activity, using the following questions as prompts. Be sure to save time to consider the pedagogy of this activity. At the end of this time, prepare one member of the group to share some of your thoughts with the larger group.

a) What could students learn from this activity about the Jazz and the Harlem Renaissance? What other kinds of writing or presentation outcomes could this activity support?

b) What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of the activity? Is it a good vehicle for developing student skills in inquiry and the exploration of complex primary sources?

c) How would you describe the pedagogy that informs this activity? What aspects of the activity help to make it effective? What skills and modes of thinking does this activity support? Do the electronic materials being engaged suit the goals of the activity? What can we learn from this activity about the kinds of inquiry assignments that work best when using new media resources?

d) How does the inquiry approach used in this activity compare with inquiry approaches you have used in your classes? What is similar? Different? What are the advantages and disadvantages of inquiry learning, in your experience? Where does it fit in the repertoire of teaching in your field?

Developed by Donna Thompson (ASHP)& Bret Eynon