Sonny Dumb Music And Music Analysis: MDC Jazz

Have you ever made a hard decision? That’s what Mel has to do. He has to decide between has friends band garage or a career in a jazz band. While Mel may enjoy the time and band with his friends but he should do the Jazz band. Mel should do the Jazz band because we should always do what we can to get better at what we love. Even if that means we lose something else.

During the 1900s, passion of composing music arose and encouraged many young teens to create garage bands and elder to perceive music as career. Famous musicians like Robert Johnson, Bill Monroe, and Elvis Presley were seeking the same. Although many were composing songs, most of them adapted their own versions from many which created a list of similarities and differences between them. Most commonly similar were themes or forms yet some differentiated in delivery style or instrumentation. Many artists got more creative and used similar instruments but give a twist into the sound play. This can be seen in the script or heard in the audio of the songs “Walkin’ Blues” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky” like many others.

     The music called Jazz was born sometime around 1895 in New Orleans. It combined elements of Ragtime, marching band music and Blues. What made Jazz such a different perspective of traditional music was its act of improvising. There was a widespread use of improvisation often by more than one player at a time. Songwriters would write the music down on a piece of paper, and then the Jazz musicians would try their best to play the music. Usually in a Jazz piece, musicians would use the song as a starting point to improvise around. Jazz musicians would play a familiar song to the audience, and by the time they were done with the piece they would stir up a totally different feeling away from the

The narrator, a teacher in Harlem, has escaped the ghetto, creating a stable and secure life for himself despite the destructive pressures that he sees destroying so many young blacks. He sees African American adolescents discovering the limits placed on them by a racist society at the very moment when they are discovering their abilities. He tells the story of his relationship with his younger brother, Sonny. That relationship has moved through phases of separation and return. After their parents’ deaths, he tried and failed to be a father to Sonny. For a while, he believed that Sonny had succumbed to the destructive influences of Harlem life. Finally, however, they achieved a reconciliation in which the narrator came to understand the value and the importance of Sonny’s need to be a jazz pianist.

Miles Davis known as Miles Dewey Davis III was born May 26, 1926 in Alton Illinois. Miles Davis mother was Cleota Mae Henry-Davis and his father was Miles Dewey Davis Jr. Miles got married three times to Cicely Tyson, Frances Taylor and Betty Mabry. The marriages didn’t last, He got a divorce! He had one daughter, three sons and seven grandchildren. Miles died September 28, 1991 in Santa Monica, California at the age of 65 of of pneumonia, respiratory failure, and a stroke. Miles was a Jazz musician, trumpeter, composer, and bandleader. Miles Davis played the trumpet, organ, piano, flugelhorn, and synthesizer. At the age of 13, his music studies started. Miles mother, Cleota was a blues pianist and she wanted him to learn the piano also. But his father, Miles Davis Jr gave a trumpet. His father arranged it so that a local musician name Elwood Buchanan would give him some lessons.

Alto saxophonist Sonny Simmons was born on Sicily Island, Louisiana. At a young age, he moved to Oakland, California with his family, bringing the budding musician into contact with touring musicians like Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker as well as local modernists. Simmons plays primarily in an avant-garde style, often delving into free jazz. By the early '60s, Sonny had moved to LA to record and work with altoist Prince Lasha; in 1963 Simmons moved to New York to play and record with Eric Dolphy, Elvin Jones and other major figures in the new jazz. With his then wife, trumpeter Barbara Donald, Sonny recorded as a leader and in 1970 returned to the West Coast. Personal problems derailed both his music career and home life, leading to divorce

James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues is a short story focused around the narration of Sonny’s brother. The narrator in the case of Sonny’s Blues is the most important character in a cast of characters not only because he is the narrator, but due to the dynamic change of his character we see at the end of the story. Baldwin effectively uses the first-person narration of Sonny’s brother in order to convey the theme of communication. Throughout the entire story of Sonny’s Blues, the narrator and his brother interact through exchanging words countless times. The question posed is whether or not the narrator can truly hear what his brother is saying to him.

During the early 1900’s, a new style of music began to take shape in the colorful city of New Orleans. People from all over the world came to exchange stories, conversation, and music. Although it is a very hard genre of music to define, it is said that Jazz is the combination of European and African music that was brought in via the ports. With mostly an African American population, the musicians shared their music in Storyville - a cultural melting pot, and began to spread the “New Orleans Sound”. They contributed to what would soon be known as Jazz in 1917. The spontaneous nature of Jazz’s syncopation and sound makes it a very humanistic style of music and makes every performance original. Every day we improvise, whether it is in conversation or spur of the moment decisions. These truly unique elements caused Jazz to become a symbol of America, and changed music forever.

If you truly want to appreciate the music you listen to, I would recommend that you

Born on May 26, 1926, Miles Davis is considered to be one of the most influential jazz musicians in history. Being a trumpeter, keyboardist, composer, and band-leader, Miles is responsible for the popularization of many styles of jazz throughout his long and prolific career.

Who was Miles Davis and why was he such an important element in the music of Jazz? Miles Davis, as we would know him, was born Miles Dewey Davis in Alton, Illinois on the 25th of May 1926 to a middle-class black family.. A couple of years later, Miles went on to St. Louis where he grew up. Since he was a youngster, Miles' hobby was to collect records and play them over without getting tired of them. Since his family knew Miles was so interested in the music of his time, primarily Jazz, for his thirteenth birthday Miles received his first trumpet, although he had been playing since the age of nine. With this Miles began to practice and play his trumpet along with his records. Who would have known that just three years later, at the

New Orleans jazz is attractive to the military culture in the shared aspect that “New Orleans jazz developed as a synthesis of social and cultural factors that merged at a particular time and place in history” (Metzger and Ernest 406). Moreover, “the usual New Orleans musicians’ response to disaster … has long been an inclination to use music to mitigate the harsh realities endemic to a city that finds itself perennially in harm’s way” (Raeburn 812) in which, post-WWI, WWII, Cold War, Vietnam War, Desert Storm, and most recently post-9/11, directly relates to military sentimentality. Further justifying the connection of the need to mitigate harsh realities with music, a sentiment shared between both New Orleans natives and U. S. Military communities, “the Naval School of Music add[ed] classes to perform in real-world settings that include performances in war-torn and developing countries” (Jones 52). This resulted in its recent curriculum “innovation [of] a New Orleans style brass band to provide the ability to send small, mobile acoustic groups to entertain audiences in difficult performance conditions” (Jones 52). The Naval School of Music takes direction from the employed fleet musicians and their supervisors’ feedback, rather than faculty, to quickly adapt a curriculum to the changing naval landscape (Jones 47-52).

Jelly Roll Morton, Joe KIng Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong were from the ¨Big Easy¨ city of New Orleans. All except Duke Ellington, he was brought up in Washington D.C. Most of the jazz artists played different instruments, Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington played the piano. Louis Armstrong and Joe King Oliver both played cornet and ended playing together. Sidney Bechet was a clarinet player.

Cool Jazz originated in the late 1940 's. It was created from the mix of classical music and jazz music. Miles Davis is known as the creator of cool jazz and his most important album was "Birth of Cool". People also say that cool jazz was a smoother style of bebop. The rhythm of cool jazz is more of a melodic flow. Cool jazz also originated in New York

The mystery of Jazz and its powerful impact on the music community can be explained largely by the context of it’s creation. Jazz was born in the United States, and because of this, many have referred to Jazz as “America’s music.” Like America, Jazz has a balance between structure and spontaneity. It capitalizes on the fluidity of the musicians, having several different instruments with independent spirits, coming together as one to form a great piece of music. Unlike other styles of music, Jazz has a certain way about it that makes it stand-alone in the world of genres. It improvises, moves, and transforms itself in a moment’s notice based on the musician’s intuition. Just as America harbors democracy, so too does a jazz ensemble, showing both the responsibility to a larger group, yet still allowing room for individual freedom. It all comes down to how well others can respect the overall framework and structure of the jingle.