Jazz, Hip-Hop, & Urban Experimentalism

This discussion based seminar will present a
survey of historical and contemporary musical
idioms in which com-posers, producers, and sound
designers associated with the fileds of hip hop,
jazz and contemporary R&B have consciously and
actively developed strategies for experimentalism
in the rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, and timbral
composition of their work. Kendrick Lamar,
Thundercat, Meshell Ndegeocello, JLin, Craig
Taborn, JDilla, and Steve Coleman are among the
artists whose work will be covered. The goal of
this course is to collectively move, via directed
reading, listening and discussion, toward the
development of new andinterdisciplinary
perspectives on the nature of experimentalism in
African American music that nolonger adheres to
standard taxonomies of high and low culture.