 Hey, I'm Joel Dinterstein, I'm a professor of English at Tulane University. I've been teaching here since 2003. I work on American literature and culture and popular culture and music, and I'm a jazz scholar and my new book is just called Jazz. It's for a series called Quick Immersion because it's a short narrative history accessible to any reader and to students, for example. Even if you have no knowledge of music or any technical knowledge or any knowledge of jazz, it is an introduction that I wrote for that kind of general audience. The book is a story of jazz as about art and race and freedom, and it's a fascinating story that I tell through the five major cities of the music's development. New Orleans, of course, Chicago, Kansas City, New York, and Los Angeles. And I'm going to talk a little bit about New Orleans because it's the place we share and a little bit about what I emphasize in the book. And so the short introduction is about how to listen to jazz and I just say there are two things to focus on. There's the solo and there's the groove. And so pick one, whichever one that most appeals to you, and follow it. And sooner or later, you will realize that the actual performances will open up to you. So you follow the groove, so you have something to sort of give you traction and then you follow each of the soloists as they work, play the changes as jazz musicians call up, which is solo on the chords of the composition. Jazz is known as the art of improvisation. It's also known as America's classical music. But in terms of improvisation, it is the form in which you are constantly paying attention and responding to other musicians in the band. So you are always improvising. You are almost never working from a written score, except when you play the theme or the beginning that is written down like a classical piece. In any case, jazz hides in plain sight in American culture. It's one of the things that upsets me is that it is actually the genre that sells the least music, even less than classical or opera. And I think people don't understand the level at which jazz was kind of the original music revolution that leads to rock and soul and funk and hip-hop. And none of that happens without jazz happening first in New Orleans. What's also interesting for those of us in New Orleans is that actually the music that starts in New Orleans is not that different from the brass band funk that we hear now of the rebirth brass band and the hot aid and the soul rebels. A hundred years ago, a little more than a hundred years ago, in the early 1900s, there was a combination of sort of the brass band and of this new improvisational music where there was a soloist who was playing call and response with the brass music. And this is really what became jazz. And of course, jazz in the 20s, people danced to it. It was the popular music, not only the 1920s at colleges, for example, but it was America's popular music from the 30 years from 1917 to 1945. So it is therefore in a sense the hip-hop or the rock of today or of the 70s, 80s, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what I mean by jazz hides in plain sight. It's actually part of all the music. Most American musicians have studied it and loved it and bring it into their work. And so the other thing I want to bring up is that the book has five major chapters about the cities and then five short playlist chapters in which there are 12 tunes that I do one or two sentences about. They're actually playlists you can listen to on Spotify because I wrote this book in part because Spotify changes everything. Books like mine used to come with a CD and you would say, well, put this on and here's the example from track three. And that's kind of a pain and nobody really did that. And now you don't have to do that. Like, you can literally read a chapter and have my playlist up and I'm liable if you think I'm a good somebody who analyzes the tune in a way you find useful. And if I don't, well, I'm not the writer for you. But that's sort of how the book works. Now, what I want to say about New Orleans again is I also wrote this book in part because I'm a scholar of New Orleans music and culture. I have written four or five academic articles about second line culture. I'm a member of the second line crew, the original Prince of Wales. So I know a lot about New Orleans culture and one of the things about jazz writing and jazz scholarship is that almost everyone gets New Orleans wrong unless you have lived here for a while. Because you don't understand the way in which the music is integral to everyday life in a way that is not true of any other city in America unless you live here. So if you're just doing your research or you're listening to the records or you're reading the oral histories, you don't get that. And if you're here during Mardi Gras and you go to second lines and you understand that music appears everywhere, then you understand and go, oh, well, that must be why the music started there. And that's one reason. The other reason is that in the 1800s, New Orleans was the second most important musical city in America next to New York. New Orleans had two opera houses. It had many, many theaters. It had a lot of French culture. And all of this is actually sort of jumbles up into jazz. Jazz musicians talk about whistling arias from opera when they were kids. And I mean all of them, people who were disadvantaged or poor, you know, didn't take music lessons like everybody's whistling opera arias. Right? That's how much music was on the streets. The other reason was that bands used to actually drive around the streets in trucks and play music just going by. And every now and then they'd pass another truck with another band and they would pull over and have a battle with the bands on the street. So New Orleans has always been a very exciting musical culture. And again, if you don't live here, you do not get that that actually still happens. The other reason is that most jazz writing and scholarship has been focused on its complexity, right? Music scholars like to talk about how harmonically complex or how complex the melodies are or what's innovative of avant-garde. And that's all great. Except first of all, it's not something all listeners want. And second of all, it's why they get New Orleans wrong, right? In New Orleans, this is where it all starts. The rhythm, the ensemble, the revolution, the improvisation. But once it leaves New Orleans, everyone in jazz focuses on the solo and how it gets more complex musically. Whereas here in New Orleans, we still have that party street music, that public celebration musical streets. A hundred years later, it's not that different. So, you know, if you only want to write about how complex the music is, well, then you care more about the solos. And New Orleans seems like the place it started. But now it's over. But if you live here, you know, actually, it's the place it started. And it's always still here. And it's completely circulating into American culture all the time. And so that is my introduction to the book with an obvious kind of emphasis on New Orleans, because that's where we live. I encourage everyone to go out and see as much live music as you can once COVID time is over. And that's it. I hope you enjoyed my book. If you get to read it or take a look at it.