It’s Jazz Appreciation Month and whether you teach music or love music, this is a great time to share this American art form with your students.

As you may know about me already, I am a huge proponent of actively listening to music in the classroom (ALL classrooms).  Sharing listening experiences with your students builds community, listening skills and gives students a chance to broaden their horizons.  And if at first they do not love it, play and play some more!  Follow my recipe for introducing a song to your class and play it for an entire week.  As the week progresses, they will listen more and appreciate it more.

Here are some JAZZ online resources for you to have at your fingertips:

http://www.pbs.org/theblues/ Introduce your students to the blues on this site.  There are lot of info and interactive material here.

http://pbskids.org/jazz/ This site has wonderful activities and a wealth of information as well.

Introduce your students to some Jazz Greats using this site:

http://www.soundjunction.org/jazzgreats.aspa

And here are some sites specific to Jazz artists I never forget to share with my class:

Louis Armstrong (complete with sound bites of him speaking and playing!) http://www.louisarmstronghouse.org/louie_armstrong/multimedia.htm

Ella Fitzgerald -  http://www.ellafitzgerald.com/about/

And the Duke himself! http://www.dukeellington.com/

There are numerous picture and chapter (and informational) books on Jazz including artists, info on the art form and jazz appreciation and history.  Here’s a link to one book on Amazon that has many wonderful suggestions if you scroll down to “Customer Who Bought This Item Also Bought.”  You can get lost in a web of great material.  (I have many of these, but want them all!!!)  Jazz Books on Amazon

Finally, here’s a short playlist for you to use today of some of my favorite standbys!  Use these at the beginning of class as the students enter your room or in the last 5 minutes before they leave.  Take the time to talk about the song, discuss why you chose it and get their reactions.  Listen to the lyrics and play that one song for an entire week.  Your students may just start singing the song before you know it!

Jazz Songs for the Classroom

Enjoy!

~EMP

Image from pyrmontvillage.com.au

Related posts:

1. When You Can Make it Jazz
2. Jazzy DADA
3. The Beauty of Improv

With April here, I can’t help but reflect on the ideas of improvisation!  It’s Jazz Appreciation Month and National Poetry Month.  Jazz and poetry: two art forms that emulate improv!

“Improvisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one’s immediate environment and inner feelings”, according to Wikipedia.  But it’s not just a get-up-and-do-anything type of creation.  The beauty is the freedom you have in a structure.  (Last year’s April series was on Freedom in Structure.)

With jazz you have a cadence of chords, a string of lyrics and a tempo to ground you, but the rest comes from your guts.  You have to be in the moment, react to the others around you and let yourself go all the while sticking with the skeletal plan.  Jazz is a great metaphor for many things, including good teaching.  When you can make what you do jazz, you are surely heading in the right direction.

Poetry is similar.  There are forms that are more free than others and in their creation you can go more with the flow than with the rigidity of rhythm and rhyme.  The reciting of poetry, though is where great improvisation can happen.  You can’t truly recite a poem the same way twice.  You adapt and react to the present each time you recite the poem, whether it be one that sounds like a song in spoken words (like a limerick) or one that is free of form.

I remember last April, I organized a Teacher Field trip to attend a “Beat Night” in Portsmouth, NH put on by Jazzmouth.  There, poets recited poetry, some original, while a jazz ensemble played with them.  It was the ultimate example of poetry, jazz and improv.  The poets and musicians all melded together as they listened and reacted to each other producing performances that cannot be replicated.

During the open mic section of time, I gravitated to the stage to try my hand at this exciting combination of art and improv and recited my poem “Ode to a Drum”.  You can see it here.  (Forgive the video, the audio is ok.)

Those intimate moments among performers are magical.  Everyone should have the opportunity to collaborate in such a creative and raw manner and then have the opportunity to reflect on how the beauty of improvisation can play a part in our daily lives; both personal and professional.  Imagine if we could all learn to improvise alone and in collaboration with others.
~EMP

Image: Wassily Kandinsky. Improvisation 26 (Oars). 1912. Oil on canvas. From www.abcgallery.com

Related posts:

1. Jazzy DADA
2. April: Jazz and Poems
3. Poetry in Balance – Part 1: Appreciation

Daffodils start sprouting,

Rain comes showering down,

A joke, a stroke of laughter

And then there’s snow, a frown.

A jazzy rhythm’s happen’n

And poems fill the air

April’s now upon us

There’s so much to do, to share!

I’ve come to realize how much I really love April.  Not just because it sends us the first signs of spring or teases us on April Fool’s Day with snow (actually, I really didn’t think that was funny), but because of all the great things you can share with your students through April.

Two themes I carry throughout the month of April in my classroom are Jazz and Poetry.  April is both National Poetry Month and Jazz Appreciation Month.  YAY!  What fun!

It is in April that I start my unit on American music during my Active Listening time.  We begin with the blues and start making our way through Ragtime, Big Band, Jazz Standards and end up in Rock and Roll sometime in May and moving through June.  Last week, we started the Blues and in honor of our Science unit on “Land and Water” I had my students listen to “Back Water Blues” sung by Irma Thomas.  The original is sung by Bessie Smith about the flooding of New Orleans in 1927.  We listened to a song for an entire week and I was reminded of why we do that by my own students.  On the first day, I played the song and their reaction was less than favorable.  I could see their scrunched up faces and their distaste for the song and its singer.  But day after day we listened, dissecting it: first in the lyrics, then in the form, figuring out the story being told and listening for the instrumentation.  By the time Friday rolled around, they were all singing along, rocking their heads, snapping their fingers and tapping their toes.  The blues was speaking to them and in some cases, through them!

This is why I listen to music with my students and trust the process of having them listen to music repetitively for a week.  I can’t wait to share more music with them through the month and see what insights come out of it.

Poetry is another source of work and fun for April.  My eyes were opened wide to the world of poetry after taking a class in it for my Master’s degree.  I learned many ways to write poetry which took the intimidation factor out of it for me.  This year I am doing something I have always wanted to try with my class: have each student write a poem a day.  It is going to fit will with the reflection time I am giving them at the end of each day.  Instead of writing a reflection of the day in prose, they will do so in poetry.  Dada poetry, found poems, list poems (all of which I will describe in a later post): these and other forms of poetry will provide the students with a variety of options to try throughout the month and challenge them to write, write, write!

Needless to say, April brings about many opportunities for fun and learning.  I’m looking forward to sharing some of the things I will be trying with my class.  Please comment and share your stories as well!

~EMP

P.S.  If you’re from Massachusetts, you may take advantage of celebrating “Patriot’s Day” the annual commemoration of the start of the Revolutionary War.  If not from Mass, you still might want to talk about this important April date in some way. 

Related posts:

1. Jazzy DADA
2. When You Can Make it Jazz – Creativity through Rigor
3. Teacher Field Trip-Beat Night-Jazz and Poetry

Judy DeFilippo supervises student teachers getting their MATESL degree at Simmons College and is an ESL (English as a Second Language) specialist.  She has authored and co-authored numerous textbooks for ESL students including So to Speak 1 and 2, Grammar Plus, and Great Dictations.  All her books are available on Amazon.

Over the years, Judy and I have been in contact for various events.  Her knowledge of ESL fascinates me, and her interest and desire to integrate her practices with music is wonderful.  Today, I bring to you some correspondence I have had with Judy on some of the ways music and literacy is connected to English language learners.

Developing listening skills with ESL students

I’d like to share a comment one of my Japanese students recently made on her evaluation of my class:  “(I) think dictation is most helpful. To do dictation, I could notice where I couldn’t listen to.” The Asian women in this class had excellent grammar and writing skills but I discovered that they were quite weak in listening. I had them do different kinds of dictations: Pair, cloze, prediction, dictogloss (listening to a sentence only once, writing down what they remember, and reconstructing the sentence with a partner).

In ESL the research tells us that listening is the first skill that is acquired, followed by speaking, reading and writing.  We know how listening to language regularly helps build fluency and those of us in the field have integrated music into our listening/speaking courses on a regular basis.  Thirty years ago a jazz pianist, Carolyn Graham, introduced her book  JAZZ CHANTS at a TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) convention and became an instant hit.  This is especially significant for our Asian students who need practice in intonation and stress.

Related posts:

1. Active Listening Time – A Vehicle for the Music-Literacy Connection
2. The Music-Literacy Connection
3. Lyrics and Literacy

A few days back I saw this tweet from @educatoral:

December 31, 1969 7:00 pm viaReplyRetweetFavorite

@

I followed the link to find this video by Sir Ken Robinson.

I found his reply to be very complete. You truly need discipline and skill in order to release your creative potential.

It also reminded me of a post from the “Freedom in Structure” series in April 2010, in particular a post titled, “When You Can Make it Jazz.”

So, today I offer to you the reposting of

When You Can Make it Jazz“

Related posts:

1. When You Can Make it Jazz
2. Teacher Field Trip-Beat Night-Jazz and Poetry
3. Balancing Testing with Creativity

What is jazz? It is the ultimate freedom in structure. The goal for me in teaching is to teach as if I were playing jazz. But how? First by finding the structure, and allowing myself to be creative and free. Here is what I mean.

Growing up, my piano teacher trained me classically and she always stressed the importance of learning my scales, cadences and arpeggios. It was a chore, but I did it. It built strength in my fingers and made me more agile. It wasn’t until I was turning pages for my high school music teacher that I realized the ultimate freedom those drills would give me. As I watched her fingers fly across the keys of the piano, I discovered she wasn’t playing the notes written at all, but the music poured out of her hands flawlessly. “Why?” I wondered. So I asked her.

“I’m reading the chords and melody line,” she said pointing to the score. I looked carefully at the music and saw what she meant.

During the break in the rehearsal, I quietly sat down at the piano, turned in the book to a song I was familiar with and began to play a little bit. To my amazement, I was able to accompany the melody nearly instantaneously. I wasn’t reading every note, instead I was falling back on all I had learned about scales and cadences, and I was able to improvise the harmonies. It was because I had learned so many forms of music that I was able to predict what was coming. Unbelievable!

From there, I was hooked. Hotel California would play on my tape deck and I would improvise on the piano, because I knew they chord progressions. Runs and trills would come from my fingers because I knew, just instinctively knew the scales within the piece. It was freedom, and it was fun. But it only came about after so much time learning how music is put together.

That is jazz: knowing how something is and putting it into play in your own way. That is true teaching. We know what to do, what to teach, how to teach it. And once we have mastered those skills, it becomes our time to play some jazz!

Related posts:

1. Jazzy DADA
2. Teacher Field Trip-Beat Night-Jazz and Poetry