Jazz in American Culture

3 units

This course will address the role of jazz within the context of twentieth-century African American and American cultural history, with particular emphasis on the ways in which jazz has shaped, and has been shaped by, ideas about race, gender, economics, and politics. We will make use of recordings and primary sources from the 1910s to the present in order to address the relationship between jazz performances and critical and historical thinking about jazz. This course in not a survey, and students should already be familiar with basic jazz history.