I continue to be pleased to share the 20 episodes of the two TV shows my father, Dr. Simon Anderson, created with the local Cincinnati PBS affiliate, WCET-TV, channel 48, in association with his teaching music appreciation and pop music history classes at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music (CCM), one of the finest legit conservatories in the country. Dad was no reverse snob when it came to the merits of pop music–indeed, in this episode we get his playing, for the third or fouth time, a few bars of his favorite Mozart piano sonata–and his master’s and doctor’s degrees were in music history from the University of Michigan, another very fine legit music school. Dad didn’t elevate pop music over classical music; he just wanted equal footing, which was in no way the norm at that time–and Dad was loved by populists and dismissed by purists in equal measure. In these two shows from which I’ve been sharing on the 50th anniversary of the first’s airing in 1973, he gets to make his point.

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Episode 4 of Pop Music, U.S.A. discusses jazz, and if you get nothing else from this, I hope you’ll appreciate his discussion early on of white jazz musicians’ enculturation efforts in adapting African-American musical styles. While he doesn’t contrast enculturation with the term de rigeur in the academy in our current climate, cultural appropriation, this approach is, I think, the correct response to those who find no room for a good-faith middle-ground approach when discussing how people of different cultures create music typically associated with the culture of others. Along the way, Dad discusses the disrepute with which jazz was held in the early days (e.g., when no conservatory in the world would have considered starting a jazz-studies program, as CCM did around that time), and though I’m sure 50 years on Dad might have chosen a different way to illustrate that concept, I guess he makes his point pretty clearly.

If you’ve read this far, thanks, and I hope you enjoy part one of Dad’s look at jazz.