That Jazz - Monkey Max Music and File Download

206
Part III: The Beat Goes On: Jazz Appreciation 101
Seeing jazz musicians in cartoons
When it came to jazz, some of the hippest films
weren’t animated cartoons starring Mickey
Mouse and other cartoon heroes. By hip, I mean
in the sense that they used jazz in artful ways,
but not in the ways in which they depicted black
musicians such as Louis Armstrong (see
“Casting Louis Armstrong in the beginning” earlier
in this chapter). In the 1937 Clean Pastures,
This and other films by the Hubleys, with music by Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy
Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, and Quincy Jones, are available on the collection
The Cosmic Eye. The images in these films were inspired by the art of Klee,
Matisse, Miro, Modigliani, and Picasso, and they mark one of the few times
that jazz has been paired with the modern art that seems so similar in its
adventuresome spirit.
I Like Your Style: Jazz and Fashion
Jazz emerged as a colorful, exciting, spontaneous alternative to the staid
Victorian era. Along with it came fresh fashions that helped the music find its
new niche in American culture: as the colorful, flamboyant music of young
people. Women who loved swing dancing (known as “flappers” for their flapping
arms) wore short dresses and short hair. Men turned up in brightly colored,
carefully tailored, baggy zoot suits. Eventually, clothes also helped
elevate jazz’s status. Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and others were seen in
crisp, modern suits, and jazz began to earn respect; highbrow venues such
as Carnegie Hall started presenting jazz concerts.
Focusing on flappers
he appears as a cartoon caricature with oversize
lips, a round body, and a dumbfounded look
on his face. Other jazz heroes recreated as cartoon
characters include Benny Goodman, Fats
Waller, and Paul Whiteman as well as Duke
Ellington in Date with Duke (1947) and Woody
Herman in Rhapsody in Wood (1947).
In the 1920s, women known as flappers brought a feminist streak to jazz.
Big band swing was the soundtrack for their social lives. Wearing thenoutrageous
sleeveless jerseys, short skirts, and bobbed hair, they were
a sexy, flamboyant reaction to stiff Victorianism. These women of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age danced The Black Bottom, The Charleston, and the Fox
Trot to syncopated jazz played by the big bands of Duke Ellington, Fletcher
Henderson, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, and Paul Whiteman. Articles at the
time warned against the evils of jazz, syncopated music that sounded wild
compared to classical music and John Philip Souza marches. As they do