Teaching American Music in the K-12 Classroom Workshop

 What’s So “Free” About Free Jazz?

Join the American Musicological Society for a special workshop led by Kwami Coleman and held in conjunction with the AMS’s Teaching Music History Conference in New York City. This workshop will focus on what made free jazz such a unique and provocative sound, and discuss ways in which some of these “freer” methods of improvisation can serve as basic tools for students to use towards creative and spontaneous music creation.

If jazz, as the United States’ indigenous improvised music tradition, can at times evade definition, then free jazz, a more experimentalist approach that emerged in the 1960s, can be more confounding still. What does it mean to create and play improvised music? What does it mean, then, to pursue a method of improvisation that’s even ‘freer’ than that? This talk focuses on what made what we now call free jazz (which was, in the 1960s, called the jazz’s ‘new thing’) such a unique and provocative sound, and we’ll discuss ways in which some of these ‘freer’ methods of improvisation can serve as basic tools for students to use towards creative and spontaneous music creation.

Full details about the conference can be found on the AMS website.