Last night we attend special lecture. Tony Garcia and three other guys gave us an excellent lecture and presentation on Jazz.
I’m not very familiar with jazz music. I know it’s a significant part of American culture but I’ve never heard it before. Last night was my second time to listen to jazz music. The fist time was also happened during this program, when Mitch and Brian brought us to a jazz concert. I can figure out that most of our interns enjoy jazz music very much, they show a lot of interests and knowledge concerning with it. But to me, this kind of music seems a little strange, because I can’t figure out the melody in it, maybe it’s because I seldom listened to it. >_<
However, from that class I get more familiar and learned appreciate more of this kind of music. Professor Garcia showed us lots of aspects of jazz music, the theme, direction, tune, register etc. And after the class I also surf on net and got more information on jazz.
Jazz has roots in the combination of West African and Western music traditions, including spirituals, blues and ragtime, stemming from West Africa, western Sahel, and New England's religious hymns, hillbilly music, and European military band music. Jazz was originated in the beginning of the 20th century and spread in the 1920s. The origins of the word jazz are uncertain. The word is rooted in American slang, and various derivations have been suggested. Jazz was not applied to jazz music until about 1915, when jazz musicians in Chicago began calling their music jazz. Earl Hines, born in 1903 and later to become a celebrated "jazz" musician, used to claim that he was "playing piano before the word "Jazz" was even invented". The instruments used in marching bands and dance band music at the turn of century became the basic instruments of jazz: brass, reeds, and drums, using the Western 12-tone scale, but generally there’s no restriction on what kinds of instruments can in used in playing jazz. Jazz has developed a lot and diversified in different regions, but it is still embed in the root of American culture, especially African- American culture.
In the class I also learned a lot of famous people who are very good at jazz. I can’t remember all of them but I really think that jazz is a kind of musical language, it can be used as a tool to get a better understanding of American culture and society. Maybe what we interested in is a different kind of music, but we can learn some thing about jazz and then we can better communicate with more people ^^