Jazz and the Cultural Imagination

135 Church Street,Burlington VT 05401

06 June, 2022

Description

This panel will explore the role of jazz as a cornerstone of the modern cultural imagination. Why is jazz so interesting to poets, photographers, actors, athletes, architects, filmmakers, chefs, video game designers, and fashionistas? How does jazz improvisation, rhythmic groove, call-and-response interactivity, hipness, soulfulness, urbanity, mobility, and multicultural vibrancy inspire and inform so much creativity across the arts and culture? UVM professor and jazz scholar John Gennari (author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics and Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge) leads a panel in which he and several students from his course “Jazz and the Cultural Imagination” (Grady Kennison, Lexie Perlow, and Emily Thibodeau with Foul Contending Rebels, a local theater group) explore jazz as a model for innovative writing, moving, seeing, stylizing, thinking, and feeling – jazz, that is, as a cornerstone of the modern cultural imagination.