"You ain't got a thing, if you don't have that swing . . ." Jazz culture 1900- 1950
Illustrated presentation by Sambudha Sen
 
This lecture will embed jazz (and its progenitor, the blues) in black communities settled in the great American cities especially in New Orleans, New York and Chicago. It will focus on that unique combination of the blue note and swing that is central to both jazz and the blues and show how the radically ambiguous experience of deprivation and joyousness determined a great many characteristics of jazz culture: for example the tension between the self-destructive lifestyles of individual musicians and the incessant collaborations between them and their instruments that drove the evolution of this great musical tradition.
  
Sambudha Sen is professor at Shiv Nadar University where he taught a course called Understanding Jazz