How does music reflect the American Jewish experience? What does Jewish music tell us about our identities and history? Join us to explore these questions and more through Stories of Music, an adult education project of the Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music at UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, where you will have the opportunity to learn with top faculty from UCLA and the Cantors Assembly.

This Unit: Jewish Jazz Pt.2 [Unit 8]

Since the emergence of jazz in the late 19th century, Jews have helped shape the art form as musicians, bandleaders, songwriters, promoters, record label managers and more. Working alongside African Americans but often with fewer barriers to success, Jews helped jazz gain recognition as a uniquely American art form, symbolic of the melting pot’s potential.

Learners will consider how jazz has been an important platform through which Jews have helped shape the pluralistic nature of American society. While Jews have been involved in jazz through virtually all phases of its development, they have used it to express Jewishness in a relatively small number of outward ways.

Learners will be asked to think about questions such as:

• Why have Jews been drawn to jazz?
• In what ways is Jews’ involvement in jazz similar to or different from Jews’ involvement in other genres of music?
• How has jazz facilitated the interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures?
• How have Jews’ relationships to jazz changed (or not changed) over time?

The Stories of Music curriculum is developed in partnership with the Cantors Assembly, the American Conference of Cantors, and our colleagues at the Milken Archive of Jewish Music. Our goal is to provide prepared lesson materials on a broad range of musically related topics to engage participants in adult education programs to think about the American Jewish experience through stories of the evolving nature of Jewish music.

This program is made possible by the Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.