Jazz in Los Angeles: The 1960s

About this course:

During the 1950s, Los Angeles received worldwide attention as the birthplace of the new and exciting West Coast jazz movement. Both the music and the musicians gained a tremendous amount of publicity and notoriety, but by the end of the decade, West Coast jazz had become controversial, and for increasingly political reasons, considered passé. Though the new artists and styles of the 1960s didn’t receive the national attention of their predecessors, their impact on future generations would be just as significant. In this course, we explore artists including The Jazz Crusaders, Les McCann, Joe Pass, Gerald Wilson, Paul Horn, Oscar Brown Jr. Cutis Amy, Dupree Bolton, and many more. We discuss how the music fit in and around the tumultuous political, social, and cultural challenges which included the Kennedy assassinations and the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcom X, the arrival of The Beatles and the British Invasion, the Vietnam War and the Watts Riots. The course is richly illustrated utilizing rare recordings, film footage, photographs, and memorabilia drawn from the vast archive of the Los Angeles Jazz Institute.