The idea of this assignment is to broaden your musical experience so make an effort to watch something that you normally wouldn’t watch. It is not required that you “like” the concert. When you are writing your review just explain why you liked or disliked the performance. Supporting your opinion is more important to me than what that opinion is.

Use MLA style for the paper. See any MLA style guide for samples. I am mainly looking for correct use and placement of citations but also spacing, margins and format of “Works Cited” page. You don’t need a separate title page but you should have the title information at the beginning (again, see a sample MLA paper)
At least two in text citations, in each paper, from at least two different sources (MLA Style) backed up with “Works Cited” page entries.
The idea of this assignment is to broaden your musical experience so make an effort to watch something that you normally wouldn’t watch. It is not required that you “like” the concert. When you are writing your review just explain why you liked or disliked the performance. Supporting your opinion is more important to me than what that opinion is.

How to construct your paper:

    1) Describe the event you watched. What, when, who, etc...

    2) Go through the show, song by song if possible, and give your impressions of each. This will require that you take a few notes while you are listening. Tell me what you liked or didn’t like about the music. Jazz concerts rarely have a program or song list and often the artists do not even mention the name of the song they are playing. Don’t worry about that. Describe it in any way that you feel confident about (“The third song” or “this next featured the saxophone player”).

    3) This is the research part of the assignment. Pick something about the program that you can do a little research on. This might be the artist, the genre, maybe the instrument played, or the featured composer.  I highly recommend The Oxford Music Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Go to “Oxford Music” in the articles section of our library’s web page and you can access this excellent source. We also have a regular book set in our library. If you use a different internet source, make sure it has some legitimacy (no “Joe Bob’s Jazz Page”) and make sure you cite it correctly. (MLA Style Guides are available on our library page and the net)

    4) Tell me about the performance itself. Consider the things we have talked about in class. Live self expression and creation. Technical ability etc. Did it seem to be a good performance? Did the musicians seem to be “together” and playing well? When they improvised (took their solos) did they seem to be expressing some immediate emotions or messages or were they not really “into” it? Did the soloist “construct” the solo well? Did they seem comfortable and make you feel comfortable?  Talk about specific areas that you liked, didn’t like, or you thought they “screwed up”.

    5) Wrap it up with your overall impressions of the show and the style of music. Did you become a new fan?  Was it as bad as you thought it would be?  Or worse?

    6) You should have your citations (in MLA format) included in the body of the paper and at the end in the form of a bibliography page. The Butte College Library website has examples of MLA citations. If you “google” “MLA style guides” you will get a whole list of pages with instructions. The “Owl” at Purdue is somewhat of an industry standard for these style guides.

When do I use a citation?

    The general rule I use is: Is this statement something that might be challenged or is in some way special? So, “Louis Armstrong was a trumpet player.” would not need to be cited. “Louis Armstrong was the greatest figure in all of jazz history” should probably be cited because this is a challengeable opinion of someone else’s that you are putting in your paper. Any time you quote someone else’s work you must give a citation. If you are using the same author’s statements throughout a paragraph you can simply cite it at the end rather than every time within that paragraph. But, if you have changed the subject and come back to the same author later in the paper you should cite it again.

Here are the links. I would prefer that you use one of these to do your report on but if you have an artist or video that you are really wanting to see more of, you can probably write on that. CHECK WITH ME FIRST and we will decide if it would be good for this assignment. Again, CHECK WITH ME FIRST!

I have arranged them somewhat by when they appear in our class materials.