To help introduce NEA Jazz in the Schools, the Arts Endowment and Jazz at Lincoln Center will jointly present the curriculum at a workshop on January 14 at the annual conference of the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE), the world's largest gathering of the global jazz community. The presentation will be held at 9:00 a.m. in the Trianon Ballroom of the New York Hilton. Participants in the IAJE conference -- some 7,000 educators, musicians, recording executives, exhibitors, journalists, and jazz enthusiasts -- may also explore the curriculum at the booths of the Arts Endowment and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The five-unit, multimedia curriculum (www.neajazzintheschools.org) is available free to high-school social studies, U.S. history, and music teachers, to help their students explore jazz as an indigenous American art form and as a means to understand American history. The curriculum, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, is produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center, a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to enriching the artistic substance and perpetuating the democratic spirit of America's music, and is supported by a $100,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation.
According to Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, “We are committed to creating arts education programs of the highest quality that help our nation's teachers enliven their classrooms and that provide meaningful connections to the arts for their students. This curriculum, produced by our partner Jazz at Lincoln Center, offers a unique perspective on American history and the multi-dimensional means to explore that history."
“Since our inception, Jazz at Lincoln Center has been committed to creating jazz listeners of all ages through education, concerts, and broadcasts," states Wynton Marsalis, Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. “It's our privilege to be working with the National Endowment for the Arts to further this mission, and we're looking forward to reaching a whole new audience -- our American history and social studies teachers and their students. Jazz music gives us a different, more homegrown mythology, with heroes like Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, and jazz provides a voice for some of our nation's most significant historic events."
“This Verizon Foundation grant reflects our commitment to help organizations implement innovative youth programs that use teaching tools available in this broadband age," comments Patrick R. Gaston, president of the Verizon Foundation. “This is an exciting initiative that will bring a revered American art form to thousands of students through the use of web-based technologies."
NEA Jazz in the Schools provides five flexible units, each of which can be taught in a day or expanded into a more comprehensive series of lessons. Each unit includes a short introductory video; a lesson essay; links to a wealth of multimedia resources (musical excerpts, period photographs, and additional sources of information); a teacher's guide with teacher tips, cross-curricular activities, and assessment methods; and student activities. The units meet lesson objectives and national curriculum standards in five subject areas: U.S. history, social studies, arts education / music, civics and government, and geography. Materials are free and available through www.neajazzintheschools.org and as a multimedia toolkit. The toolkit, designed primarily for high school teachers without adequate web access, will include all of the materials featured on the website including a Teacher Guide, two CDs, a DVD, and a timeline poster.
The five units of NEA Jazz in the Schools are The Advent of Jazz: The Dawn of the Twentieth Century; The Jazz Age and the Swing Era; Bebop and Modernism; From the New Frontier to the New Millennium; and Jazz: An American Story. The Advent of Jazz went on-line before the beginning of the autumn 2005 school term. The full curriculum is now in classrooms.
NEA Jazz in the Schools is released in partnership with the International Association for Jazz Education, which is utilizing its membership network to encourage use of this curriculum and is reaching out on its behalf to other professional organizations, such as the National Association for the Social Studies.
The National Endowment for the Arts has taken a leadership role in supporting jazz artists and organizations since 1970, providing millions of dollars in grants and awards. NEA jazz programming has grown significantly in recent years to include an expansion of the NEA Jazz Masters programs as well as broadcast initiatives, musical recordings, publications, and research. NEA Jazz in the Schools continues the NEA's program of joining with other organizations to invest in jazz education, helping reconnect young people to a defining American art form. The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts -- both new and established -- bringing the arts to all Americans, and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Arts Endowment is the nation's largest annual funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases. For more information on jazz programs, visit www.neajazzmasters.org.
Jazz at Lincoln Center is a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz. With the world-renowned Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and a comprehensive array of guest artists, Jazz at Lincoln Center advances a unique vision for the continued development of the art of jazz by producing a year-round schedule of performance, education, and broadcast events for audiences of all ages. These productions include concerts, national and international tours, residencies, weekly national radio and television programs, recordings, publications, an annual high school jazz band competition and festival, a band director academy, a jazz appreciation curriculum for children, advanced training through the Juilliard Institute for Jazz Studies, music publishing, children's concerts, lectures, adult education courses, and student and educator workshops. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, Chairman of the Board Lisa Schiff, President & CEO Derek E. Gordon, Executive Director Katherine E. Brown, and Jazz at Lincoln Center board and staff, Jazz at Lincoln Center will produce hundreds of events during its 2005-06 season. In October 2004, Jazz at Lincoln Center opened Frederick P. Rose Hall -- the first-ever performance, education, and broadcast facility devoted to jazz. For more information, visit www.jalc.org.
The Verizon Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Verizon Communications. In 2004, the foundation awarded more than 26,000 grants totaling more than $70 million to charitable and nonprofit agencies that focus on improving basic and computer literacy, enriching communities through technology, and creating a skilled work force. The foundation uses its resources in the United States and abroad to develop partnerships in technology and connect them with organizations serving the needs of diverse communities, people with disabilities, victims of domestic violence, and the economically and socially disadvantaged. The foundation also supports Verizon Volunteers, an incentive program that last year encouraged Verizon employees to volunteer 528,000 hours in their communities and provided $37.6 million in combined contributions to charitable and nonprofit organizations.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
