Dialogue: My Thoughts on the Class and Bahktin

Coming into this class, I had only a vague idea about the history of jazz. I subscribed to the simplistic view mirrored in the early jazz documentary New Orleans that great musicians like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday single-handedly created jazz in New Orleans and brought it to Chicago and New York, where it automatically became America's music and came to define the 1920s (King Oliver, 37). From the start, this class challenged my original assumptions about jazz and gave me a new concept, dialogue, with which to interpret art.

One main assumption I held before taking this class was that jazz was immediately heralded as America's newest and greatest art form from its conception. I have since learned that it originated in the seedier districts of New Orleans at the turn of the 20^th century (Gioia, 34) and spread to Chicago and New York around the late 1910s and 1920s and remained a music played mainly for poorer black audiences. With the rise of radio, a few artists like Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington became part of a “nationwide mass medium” (Gioia, 136) that created the flashy image of jazz as America's music that most people hold today. And jazz did not stop developing there; as I learned later, musicians like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis continued to push jazz in new directions with styles like bebop and cool jazz (Gioia, 201). Through this class, I have gained a much fuller understanding of the evolution and history of jazz.

Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogue as a catalyst for art is one of the biggest ideas that I have taken away from this class. As an example, jazz was a product of New Orleans' “commingling of Spanish, French and African influences” (Gioia, 6) with a splash of American individualism. It was not the product of a few gifted individuals, but rather was created in the context of the city's community. Players of early jazz in New Orleans and New York in the bordellos and rent parties were especially sensitive to the tastes of their listeners because if they failed to engage their audience, they would be tossed out on the street. As the communities who listened to jazz changed from poor Southern blacks to middle-class whites and finally to more artistically-bent Bohemian types, the sound of the music changed as well. Songs like “Carolina Shout” were “solid and groovy” (James P. Johnson, 29) enough to get the country people bouncing on the dance floor while Duke Ellington's pieces were more focused on creating moods and intricate melodic and harmonic structures (Gioia, 121). Bebop rebelled against both of these audiences in favor of a brasher, dissonant, hipper sound that caught the ears of coffeehouse patrons and starving artists. Each of these music styles were created by the dialogue between artist and community – jazz musicians would innovate and improvise and stuck with whatever meshed most with their peers and audience.

Beyond the bounds of this class, the dialogic theory can put any art into historical perspective. The simple religious imagery of many Medieval paintings reflected the desires of the main patrons of such art, churches and nobles. Then, when merchants in Italy began to get richer off of new trade routes, tastes changed and more sophisticated and less overtly religious art flourished. Michelangelo's masterpieces were both a product of his genius and the desires of his patrons, the Medicis. A more modern example is a show like How I Met Your Mother, which flourishes because it is easily relatable to the average American. Most people know a playboy Barney Stinson, or a hopelessly lovestruck Ted Mosby. Through the lens of dialogue, any form of art can be seen as a constant discussion between artist and consumer in order to create the ideal final product.