Amid its improvisational foundations, mainstream jazz means different things to different people “” but those who call it America’s classical music come closest to its true definition. Like the classical genres, jazz evolved from dank and volatile surroundings to gain immense popularity as a musical barometer of this country’s evolution.
“Looking At: Jazz, America’s Art Form,” launched March 18 at the San Diego Public Library, is a six-installment initiative slated to run through May 20 as a forum for jazz’s history and growth. Discussion programs and documentary films will complement features on scholarly essays and resource guides for additional reading, Web sites, videos and DVDs. All programs will be held in the library’s third-floor auditorium and will begin at 2 p.m. on the dates indicated below.
“We are thrilled to be one of the first libraries in the country to participate in this “¦ program,” said city library Director Anna Tatar. “Jazz has a rich history and is an important part of American culture. The San Diego Public Library has long been a leading source of information about history and music.”
So has New Orleans, where jazz is said to have begun in the late 1800s. At that time, it was home to an astounding variety of cultures, which made it fertile ground for the birth of an art form. Jerry Fenwick, a professor of music at San Diego City College, led a discussion earlier this month on New Orleans’ pivotal role in the growth of jazz.
In the first two decades of the 20th century, African-Americans took part in a wholesale migration northward. The migration’s effect on jazz in America’s larger cities includes discussions of names like Louis Armstrong, whose contemporaries transformed early jazz. SDSU music professor Richard Thompson will discuss the phenomenon on April 1.
The height of jazz’s popularity came with the so-called Swing Era, which lasted through the Great Depression and World War II. Americans embraced the form as a respite from worry “” and it eventually became the popular music of wartime America, with the likes of Duke Ellington Count Basie and Benny Goodman leading the era’s iconic dance bands. On April 22, SDSU music professor Rick Helzer will spearhead a talk accordingly.
Helzer will also lead an April 29 talk on the women of jazz and their collaboration with their male counterparts. Figures like vocalists Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and trumpeter Clora Bryant brought an intelligence and wit to the genre, and their presence contributed new approaches to the sound.
Thompson will return May 6 to talk on mid-century jazz and its rapid innovations. The music colored a time of social and cultural shifts, staking a claim for greater social and political opportunity in the United States of the 1960s.
Latin jazz would evolve in the late 1930s, with Dizzy Gillespie, Mario Bauza and others creating a blend of Latin rhythms, jazz harmony and improvisation that accommodated the demands of the dance floor. Fenwick will speak on the genre on May 20.
The library is one of 43 selected to participate nationwide. It was chosen for the program by New York’s National Video Resources in partnership with the American Library Association. Its partnering institutions include San Diego State University’s School of Music and Dance, which administers the largest jazz studies program in California, and KSDS-FM, San Diego’s premiere jazz radio station.
The San Diego Public Library is located at 820 E St.
More information on the program is available at (619) 236-5848 or www.nvr.org/lookingatjazz.