Tools for exploring jazz history, improvisation traditions, and music's role in society — drawn from MIT OCW and UT Austin curricula.
Pick a jazz standard and trace how improvisers navigate it — the chord changes, the available modes over each chord, and how bebop, modal, and free approaches handle the same harmonic material differently.
Pick a decade of jazz history and see the key recordings, the musicians, the clubs and venues, and the social context — how jazz evolved from New Orleans through bebop, cool, free, and fusion.
Pick a jazz recording and get a structured listening framework — instrumentation, form, soloist choices, rhythm section interaction, and how the recording fits its historical moment and stylistic context.
Pick a musical genre and trace its social context — who created it, who the audience was, how it was received by the mainstream, what it meant to its originating community, and how that meaning changed.
Pick two improvisation traditions and compare how each approaches melody, rhythm, structure, and the relationship between the individual soloist and the ensemble — what each tradition values and why.
