MUSIC 7332

Jazz and the Long Sixties

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2019-2020.

The "long" Sixties decade saw major shifts in jazz: challenges to its musical identity as cohesive, changes in production and public presentation, and concern over its place in culture nationally and internationally. For many historians the period from the mid-Fifties through the early Seventies brought an explosion of sub-genre trends – cool jazz, hard bop, Latin jazz, bossa nova, free jazz, modalism, and fusion among them – that tended to factionalize jazz style, hastening its commercial decline even as its cultural capital rose under the ambivalent banner of "America's classical music." This seminar will focus on contemporaneous and retrospective attempts to explain Jazz in the Sixties, and the musical and historiographical challenges they present.

When Offered Spring.

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