Speakers Bureau Speaker
Janice Jarrett, Tucson
Janice Jarrett, a jazz musician, journalist, educator, and ethnomusicologist received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology and her Masters in World Music from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and her B.A. in voice and composition from Antioch College in Ohio. She has taught jazz studies at the University of Arizona and music and arts in various universities and colleges, as well as in a number of community and K-12 school arts programs. She is a published lyricist, vocal arranger, and journalist, and currently runs her own vocal technique studio in Tucson offering private and small group lessons in voice and musicianship. JJJazz is the name used for her live performance groups, which draw on the best of Tucson’s professional jazz community. Her artist profiles and reviews have appeared locally in the Arizona Daily Star, the Phoenix New Times and the Tucson Weekly.
Presentations are suitable for high school as well as adult audiences.
The Healing Art: How Does Music Soothe the Soul?
In antiquity, pitches and scales were associated with times of day, moods, colors and many other values. A number of cultures today hold a belief in music's ability to aid healing, either alone or in conjunction with other therapies. Many people also listen to or make music for reasons they consider more profound that just "entertainment." Besides relaxation or another unspecific "pleasure," music is thought to be able to address complex human needs, including those connected to personal identity, self-image, and one’s social or community relations. Learn more about the fascinating physics of sound, the provocative ideas and beliefs connected to it, and what potential benefits you never knew may be found in music.
• Host organization provides CD Player and white board, black board, or large paper-pad.
Jazz and the American Identity
The history of jazz goes back over 100 years and is intimately interwoven with a number of historical events and cultural traditions unique to America. A self-invented country, the United States broke from the European mold, and jazz, for decades the popular music of America, improvisatory and based on individual expression, closely reflects many of the attributes associated with this nation. Jazz is also highly regarded internationally as a valuable art form, and is, like America, closely associated with the concepts of freedom and democracy. Learn how a musical genre can be a window into profound national issues, controversies, and contradictions, and a means of deepening understanding of American history as a whole. Hear the music and stories of a great art that America invented.
• Host organization provides CD Player and white board, black board, or large paper-pad.
Steal from the Best: Music's Inherent Internationalism
From being honored as national treasures to being considered second-class citizens under state control, the musicians’ status run the gamut across cultures and through the centuries. All the while, the best of them remain focused on their art, inquisitive and acquisitive, ignoring and even defying political, racial, and social boundaries. Scholars and historians chase characteristics down and name a style or musical genre before it ultimately changes. It is an interesting paradox: that music can express, even define, a culture or society, yet musicians, more often than not, work to create something original and unique, outside the limits of easy categorization. What can these cultural wanderers, these human bridges between cultures, reveal about what is often casually called a "universal language"? Is their process of crossing borders one we can model for dealing with other kinds of cultural obstacles? In this presentation, explore the fluid nature of music, and the independent nature of musicians.
• Host organizations will provide CD Player and white board, or black board or large paper-pad.
Your Musical Brain: Can Music Make You Smarter?
According to one brain expert, music can be described as "auditory cheesecake," while another asserts its prominent role in evolutionary survival and suggests that it was a critical precursor to the development of language. What happens in our brains when we make music or when we just listen to it? Do theories like the "Mozart effect," asserting that music rewires the brain, have any validity? Why were the ancients concerned about the power of music? Learn about the most recent studies and continuing controversies surrounding music and the brain, and the implications for your own creative and learning processes.
• Host organization provides CD Player and white board, black board, or large paper-pad.
