African American Music
Teacher: Andrew Frankhouse -- afrankhouse@innovationcharter.orgThis course seeks to map the development of African American music over the last 150 years, and give students the tools and background to analyze and contextualize works by African American artists. Students will examine numerous types of primary sources, including seminal recordings by artists including Blind Willie McTell, Duke Ellington, John Lee Hooker, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, James Brown, Gil Scott-Heron, Michael Jackson, and Kanye West. Students will also explore the writings of early ethnomusicologists Alan Lomax and Ruth Crawford Seeger, collections of jazz and blues anecdotes from those "on the scene", and the incendiary autobiography of jazz trumpet icon Miles Davis.