Women Of Jazz: 1895 To Present In Text, Photos & Video

CONTENTS By CHAPTER:


About The USA - The History Of Music


What Is Music?


Jazz--An American Elixir


The Painful Birth of Blues and Jazz


A Feminist Perspective On New Orleans Jazz Women - Part One: Historical And Social Context


A New Orleans Jazz History, 1895-1927


New orleans Jazz National Historic Park


Jazz Origins in New Orleans


When Jazz Moved to Chicago


How the National Jazz Museum in Harlem is Bringing Music to the Masses


A Current Era Story of Appreciation


American Life Histories (Jazz): Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1940


Photographs: Jazz Performers


Jazz History Bibliography


Video: Women and Jazz - International Sweethearts of Rhythm


Video: Border Crossings - Carolyn Malachi


Video: Hamilton Live -  Helen Sung


Video: Beyond Category: Karrin Allyson


Video: Beyond Category - Jane Monheit


Video: New Exhibit Highlights Outstanding Jazz Singers


Using Primary Sources


Introduction


Two thousand years from now, writer Gerald Early has said, America will be remembered for three things: the Constitution, baseball, and jazz. "They are the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced." Early's remark resonated with film director Ken Burns, who was busy at the time with a film series on baseball. Now, five years in the making, his ten-part Jazz premieres in January on public television. It runs nineteen hours and includes five hundred pieces of music and interviews with musicians, critics, and historians. Burns sees Jazz as the third part of a trilogy in which cultural landmarks reflect the larger evolution of a distinct American identity. "I have been looking in all of my work for those aspects of our national narrative that reveal us to ourselves better than anything else," says Burns. 


Early, who appears as a commentator in the film series and has written an essay for a companion book, picks up the thread. "A certain kind of paradox is built into jazz music," says Early. "You had people who created a music that's really celebrating democratic possibilities: liberation, freedom of the spirit, a soaring above adversities--who really hadn't experienced everything that democratic society had to offer, but you could look around and see the promise embedded in the society. Jazz is a kind of lyricism about the great American promise and our inability to live up to it." 


The first episode of Jazz deals with the music's early days in New Orleans. The series moves from there to the rise of big bands, swing, bebop, rock, and soul, to the present. 

Producer Lynn Novick says that Jazz tries to establish continuity between the lives and careers of the giants of jazz, from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday to Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and Ray Charles. "We hope it is a definitive film history of jazz," says Novick. "We have interwoven all these different stories. These are not isolated people working on their own, but they're overlapping and connected with each other. You begin to understand how they've influenced each other. That's never been tried before. 


A "definitive film history of jazz" may strike some as an oxymoron, the music arising as it did from a ferment of styles--blues, ragtime, gospel, country--and geographies--Creole, African, Latin American.