26-H102 Swing, Poetry and Prose: How Jazz and Literature Impacted Each Other – Mboya Nicholson
$85.00
Please note: Individual sessions of this course will be recorded and available to registered students outside of the actual course time.
Take a journey through jazz and literature intersections. This course catches various authors at the height of their youth during the jazz age. We will examine the Harlem Renaissance and how jazz and its cultural dynamics shaped writers like Langston Hughes and contemporaries like Sterling Allen Brown. We will also explore post-Harlem Renaissance works by authors like Albert Murray, whose time honoured and revered treatise Stomping the Blues will be an example. We will also look at works by Ellington in his later years as he reinterprets Tchaikovsky’s musical interpretation of Alexandre Dumas’s literary re-interpretation of “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”. Ellington’s musical interpretations of John Steinbeck’s and Shakespeare’s works will also be looked at among other iconic works. We will delve into the structural elements of jazz and how various orchestral innovations resulted in dynamic tonal portraits of place, character and circumstance, originally rendered on the printed page.
Instructor: Mboya Nicholson
Mboya Nicholson, a jazz pianist and composer from Edmonton, has written string arrangements for conductor Colin Mendez Morris’s recording projects and has performed for the Consul General of the Netherlands in Toronto. Performing in Japan, Italy and Guadeloupe, he has shared the stage with jazz masters like trumpeter James Zollar. In 2023, Mboya released a recording of solo piano compositions entitled “Melodic Faces”. While teaching at MacEwan University, he developed a jazz history course embedding the cultural context of African American origins as the main perspective, as well as using historical context to show the impact society had on jazz, and how jazz impacted various eras. Mboya performs solo as well as with a trio, and in the Mboya Nicholson Jazz Orchestra. He is currently preparing to make two new recordings.
