Tuesday's recap

Today was the first session and we covered several things: an introduction to basic music elements--harmony, melody, rhythm, consonance, dissonance, and form.  We discussed 32-bar popular song form (aaba) and listened to several examples of it, including Eric Clapton's Running on Faith, and Dexter Gordon's Dexter's Riff and Dexter Rides Again.  We also discussed 12-bar blues, including Clapton's Before You Accuse Me and Mose Allison's Your Mind is on Vacation.  Additional listening included Chet Baker's My Funny Valentine and Look for the Silver Lining; Mose Allison's Your Molecular Structure; and Diana Krall's It Could Happen to You.  We'll recap some of these tomorrow.  In addition to aaba and 12-bar blues, we also talked about music that has a binary formal structure.

We talked about social and societal forces that give rise to things artistic, and I asked you to take a look at Pablo Picasso's artwork that has come to be called Chicago.  Write in your personal blogs what you see in this amazing work by one of the 20th-century's foremost artists.  You may conclude with whether you like it, or not, but I want you to address the more fundamental question of what it is that you're seeing and what the experience says to you.  In short, what does viewing this art work do to you; what do you think about when you look at it?  What impact does it have upon you?

We talked about prohibition and how that impacted American society, especially in cities like KC, NYC, and Chicago.  If you have time, investigate Ken Burns' recent three-part documentary entitled Prohibition.  It may still be available to you on the PSB website.  In KC, the effects of Prohibition (see 18th Amendment to the US Constitution,  the Volstead Act of 1919, and the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution) were evident in the political regime of Thomas Pendergast.  That, in turn, had a direct effect upon the music of the day, and that, of course, included a good dose of jazz.  The important thing to remember is that during Prohibition, alcohol flowed freely in many clubs that operated with the OK of the Pendergast political machine, led first by Big Jim Pendergast and later by his brother Tom.