Yesterday I sat for the final exam for the “Jazz History” course I’ve been taking this term, a course taught by Steve Kelly, who is about to retire after a long, distinguished career at Carleton. I took the course because I wanted to learn more about the history of jazz, a musical style that I love but know very little about. I wasn’t disappointed. Kelly was a great teacher, both as a conveyor of technical knowledge about jazz and as a teller of stories about his own experience playing and hearing jazz. By the end of the term, I had a far better sense of the history of jazz, of the key players and periods in that history, and of the rudiments of the technical aspects of the music.
Though this was pleasing, I was well prepared to realize this goal. Having studied an awful lot of history in my life, I was equipped to understand the periodization of jazz, and to start to map the connections and disconnections between periods – say, the swing era that ended during World War II and the bebop era that started then. Putting particular musicians and pieces into those periods was no harder.
Where I did falter, and had to work pretty hard, was in trying first to understand some of the technical dimensions of jazz music (or, really, any music) and then to apply that understanding in an analysis of particular tunes. 32-bar AABA form? 12-bar blues? I barely remembered (from junior high band) the definition of a “measure,” much less how to keep 4/4 time or, worst of all, how to read music.
I’ll be darned, though, if knowing how to study and learn didn’t pay off. Though I probably had the worst tune-analysis skills of anyone in the class, I did acquire a rough facility for analyzing a song, and – what’s more – found that process remarkably interesting and fun. For my final project, I analyzed a little-known Duke Ellington tune, one which I’ve loved for a long time and which gradually revealed its inner structure as I listened over and over to it. I probably replayed the song about a hundred times to get it down for my paper – and even then I missed two key features of its structure.
What helped me even more than a facility for learning new things – even things as inconsequential as how to hear and diagram a 12-bar blues form – was being able to write clearly about what I was hearing. I found it was pretty easy to describe songs, artists, styles, et cetera, both objectively (“What are three main characteristics of bebop?”) and subjectively (“Explain why you like this song.”) Before I could get too high on myself, though, I did the math and realized that I’ve been writing fairly intensively for more than half my life – longer than most of my classmates have been alive. I’d better be halfway decent at it: I’m old.
Old is a relative term. I got you beat on that score. But your observation that several years of experience writing might give you a leg up on your classmates resonates with me. However, what makes the most sense to me is that you thought that further study on the particular elements of jazz practioners as presented by one Pr. Steven Kelly was worth your time. Priceless!! And thanks for keeping us informed as the term progressed.