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Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion  By  cover art

Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion

By: Bill Messenger,The Great Courses
Narrated by: Bill Messenger
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Publisher's summary

Jazz is a uniquely American art form, one of America's great contributions to not only musical culture, but world culture, with each generation of musicians applying new levels of creativity that take the music in unexpected directions that defy definition, category, and stagnation.

Now you can learn the basics and history of this intoxicating genre in an eight-lecture series that is as free-flowing and original as the art form itself. You'll follow the evolution of jazz from its beginnings in the music and dancing of the antebellum plantations to its morphing into many shapes as its greatest innovators gave us ragtime, the blues, the swing music of the big band era, boogie-woogie, and big band blues.

You'll follow the rise of modern jazz in all of its many forms, including bebop, cool, modal, free, and fusion jazz. And you'll learn how the course of jazz was changed by key technological innovations, such as the invention of the microphone, which allowed smaller-voiced singers like Bing Crosby or Mel Torme to share a limelight once reserved for the bigger voices of stars like Bessie Smith or Al Jolson.

Beginning the story on those antebellum plantations, Professor Messenger reveals how the "cakewalks" of slave culture gave birth to a dance craze at the end of the 19th century that was ignorant of its own humble roots. And he explores the irony of the minstrel shows, which derived from Southern beliefs of black cultural inferiority yet eventually spawned a musical industry that African-American musicians would dominate for decades to come.

As a bonus, the lectures are also very entertaining, with Professor Messenger frequently turning to his piano to illustrate his musical points, often with the help of guest artists.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©1995 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)1995 The Great Courses

What listeners say about Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

A Disappointingly Distorted, Myopic View Of Jazz

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

An honest presentation of the subject!The lecturer's fast forwarding through the segment on modern jazz, brushing aside or even ignoring such universally recognized Jazz Giants as: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Lambert, Hendridks & Ross, Cannonball lAdderly, Max Roach, Oliver Nelson, J.J. Johnson, Eric Dolphy, and too many more to mention in this small space, and replacing them with time wasting mediocre and mundane musical samples and seeming shameless self promotion is unconscionable , The lecturer mentions Beat author Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind. But he reminds me of another book popular around that time, titled Advertisements for Myself. Had I not been a life long lover of jazz - and especially modern jazz - and gotten my introduction to the subject through the lecturer's course, I would not have touched the music with a ten foot pole.

What do you think your next listen will be?

Not Bill Messenger

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Professor Bill Messenger?

The subject material, not the narrator was the problem.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Hard to tell. The author so warped the section on modern jazz, that I can not trust any of the rest of the course.

Any additional comments?

Most of the Audible books and The Great Courses material I have purchased have been excellent and well worth the money. I just ordered a DVD: Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World course about an hour ago.

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48 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Get a video course

This course points out charts the professor was displaying on a white board or a projector, which lost me after 3 lectures.

Interesting topic, not so good presentation.

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18 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Good introduction, but serious omissions.

I enjoyed this short course about jazz, and Messenger is a talented piano player as well as teacher. I was disappointed that Thelonius Monk (1917-1982) was omitted. Perhaps less appreciated during his lifetime than now, he was a major innovator. Maybe a "second course" is what is called for, one that includes people such as Monk, Charlie Mingus, George Shearing, Ahmad Jamal, Art Blakey, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Christian McBride, all of whom had or are still having a discernable impact on jazz development and evolution.

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13 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

“Life is a lot like jazz. it's best when ...

“Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise.” George Gershwin


1. Plantation Beginnings
2. The Rise and Fall of Ragtime
3. The Jazz Age
4. Blues
5. The Swing Era
6. Boogie, Big Band Blues and Bop
7. Modern Jazz
8. The ABC’s of Jazz Improvisation

I really enjoyed this class as I have always liked Ragtime and Dixieland Bands and as I grew I, loved going to a place in Portland, Oregon called Jazz de Opus where they would have a trio playing or just some classic records that the owner had. Alas, it is no longer in existence so I have to listen at home. Disneyland introduced me to the Dixieland music because they always had a great band playing at one of their restaurants near Frontierland.

Professor Bill Messenger is a musician who opened for Bill Haley and the Comets, played with Cass Elliott and many other musicians over the years before becoming a professor for The Peabody Institute.

Each class is forty-five minutes in length. Prof. Messenger always includes many musical examples, played by him or guests or sometimes pre-recorded. The class is lively and easy for a non-musical person to follow along.

Every class flows by so fast that I began looking for examples of music he talked about so I could continue my education. The only Jazz variant I wasn’t wild about was fusion, which from some of the examples he played seemed just like a lot of noise. No beat, no rhythm and no blues.

I highly recommend this class for anyone that wants to learn more about Jazz and the different versions it has undergone. The Professor makes his class fun and begging for more.

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
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    5 out of 5 stars

Messenger Needs to Replace Greenberg

This little short course is fantastic. It's better than fantastic. I wish Greenberg would cut the corn and follow Messenger's style.

The course is packed with very interesting history, anecdotes and opinions. The professor is a very talented musician and he plays pieces throughout the course---and he plays brilliantly.

This is a fun and very worthwhile course. I loved it. 6 Stars!!!!

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

good for jazz history basics

It was great, a well balanced but somewhat topical course. Definitely good for non jazzers. No in-depth theory, though.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

It's too short!

I enjoyed the course very much but the whole course is too short. In particular the more modern elements were really short changed as well as Latin elements.

This was recorded in the 1990s and could Stan updating.

All that said I learned a lot about the history of jazz.

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Very Good Shew

I recommend this course to anyone with an interest in music history who doesn't happen to be a musician. A basic knowledge of music helps, but this class is over my head there at times. What I enjoyed the most was learning how the music of a time reflected everything else that was going on in that time. Sometimes the recording was too...quiet, muted sounding, a technical issue?

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Needed a few more lectures

I enjoyed the course and got stuff out of it, but it would have been improved with a couple more lectures.

An introduction was most seriously lacking, something to set the tone and provide an overview to fasten the rest of the lectures to. A lecture about pre-cake walk music, covering African music and maybe spirituals and gospel would have been helpful.

Maybe it would also have helped to have 2 blues lectures, one in the origins and one on its development and influence on other styles. But because the blues is one lecture with a guest, all of blues is covered in about 20 minutes.

And then breaking up modern jazz into 3 instead of 2, and spending more time on, say, Latin Jazz, or presenting the development in a bit more detail. The final lecture also has guest musicians, but it would have been more helpful and interesting if they would have talked a bit more about what we were hearing.

This is the first great courses music course I listened to that wasn't done by Robert Greenberg, and while it was interesting, it wasn't nearly as good as the Greenberg lectures. I wish I could give it 3.5.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Topics in Jazz and Related Genres


I thought this was an excellent introduction to jazz and related genres. I felt it started slow, but fairly soon into the recording I was hooked. The lecturer is one of the better Great Courses professors; I enjoyed listening to him. Contrary to one of the other reviewers, I thought this one was perfect on audio. I never had any confusion because this wasn’t in video form. And I find I make much more progress on Great Courses that are in audio since I’m not tethered to the TV.

I’m surprised to see the negative reviews, because I really enjoyed this. I’m sure it is aimed at a listener like me who lacks a deep knowledge of jazz and jazz history. Given the length, it was more a sampler of topics in jazz history, including ragtime, blues, and swing. I think some of the negative reviewers may have been looking for a comprehensive survey.

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4 people found this helpful