But here I am to solicit your feedback for a presentation I'm preparing.
The context: my company (something like 1400 employees) has a "Cultural Association", partially funded by management, organized by employees. Last year they organized a series of presentations by a classical musician and educator on the history of classical music. About twenty people showed up to the six or seven 90-minute presentations that this guy put together himself. They took place in a biggish meeting room, with people seated around a table. He projected images and documents from his laptop and played MP3 excerpts that he had prepared. It was a pretty good success.
We decided to do the same next year for jazz. We considered finding a professional to do this, but in the end I decided I could do a better job myself--not that I'm any more knowledgeable or insightful than the pros (jazz educators and journalists), but I know the audience better and will be able to be more flexible. Also, I'll do it for free.
One thing I'm trying to address is the mixed audience. I'm expecting a significant percentage of people with very slight knowledge of jazz. Pianists and singers are usually the biggest draws for concerts and media coverage, I find, so I put in a couple of sessions to cover them specifically in depth.
Another thing is that I'm not a musician. The guy who did the classical music sessions was a pro, and he often showed the scores and had us follow along. This was good for those in the audience who could read music; among the others, I heard comments like "damn, you have to have a degree in solfège to follow this." So I'm thinking my layman's viewpoint will be as much an advantage as a hindrance; but I might have to bring in someone to explain certain technical issues (kept to a minimum) with confidence.
I've put together a first draft and will be working with another person to fine-tune it. But the more input, the better!
To start with, here is the top-level outline I dreamed up:
Session 0: Overview
Session 1: Roots, jazz through the 20's
Session 2: Swing: big bands and small
Session 3: Early pianists and singers
Session 4: Bebop, cool, hard bop
Session 5: Mid-century pianists and singers
Session 6: The avant-gardes
Session 7: Jazz today
In my notes for the Overview session, I wrote:
Discuss elements and issues of jazz in accessible way:
o Musical: Swing, blues, improvisation, collective improvisation, role of popular song, evolution from simple melodic variation through harmonic development to abstraction, from shared practice to increasing atomization … Other?
o Sociological/cultural: local to global, authenticity vs. innovation, cultural diffusion and competition, … other? to be worked out.
o Find ways to touch on certain of these themes in all the sessions, to show both continuity and change
To start, I'd be grateful for constructive feedback concerning the overall session plan and session 1, detailed below. If the thread goes anywhere, I'll continue with the other sessions. Thanks in advance!
Session 1:
Session 1: Roots => 20's
- - Roots of jazz (African elements; Creole formal training in European music + plantation rural practices migrating to cities; role of military bands; ragtime; blues; minstrelsy; James Reese Europe, Vernon Castle)
- - New Orleans & Chicago (pre-recording-era early models, e.g. Buddy Bolden; brass bands; King Oliver; Louis Armstrong; beginnings of crossover to white musicians; recording craze)
- - 1920's (territory bands; Sidney Bechet; Jelly Roll Morton; Fletcher Henderson; Ellington; Moten/Basie)
(I'm also going to start putting together a list of YouTube links to illustrate these... again, suggestions welcome!)
