Aims

The module is intended:

• To give the students the possibility to explore the diversity and complexity of world jazz scenes and
practices through case studies from different world countries and cultural areas;

• To consider and examine key works in contemporary jazz studies;
     
• t=To analyse musical processes, genres, and repertoires in world jazz.

Outline Of Syllabus

Lectures in World Jazz will consider case studies from Iran, Portugal, Spain, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, Italy, Bulgaria, and Scandinavia, among others.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

World Jazz will consider the substantial remodelling of jazz scholarship through the necessary cultural critique of the jazz traditional canon, the opening towards the “jazz of the others” and the establishment of the New Jazz Studies, paying specific attention to the global presence of jazz and to the distinctiveness of each jazz world.

World Jazz has been devised to offer to students a direct access to scenes, works and performers that have been mostly not much or at all considered in the current literature, and at the same time to provide a better understanding of the different approaches in the field of contemporary jazz studies.

Lectures will introduce issues, approaches and concepts, and give the opportunity to discuss and explore these further. Lectures will focus partly on the detailed study of music from a selected world jazz scene, partly on key issues that arise in the course of such study, and partly on the various approaches that musicologists may take. During their private study time students are expected to work on a variety of activities between classes such as reading and listening. Among other things, these form essential preparation for lectures.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The essay must show
(i) how well students have assimilated aspects of the course material
(ii) their ability to formulate a critical position on the material, and
(iii) their ability to communicate all the above.