The Music Workshop Company Blog 

Each month the Music Workshop Company publishes two blogs. One blog, written by the MWC team addresses a key issue in Music Education or gives information about a particular genre or period of music. The other blog is written by a guest writer, highlighting good practice or key events in Music Education. We hope you enjoy reading the blogs. 
 
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To contribute as a guest writer please email Maria@music-workshop.co.uk 

Posts tagged “JAZZ”

When the Watford Jazz Junction was founded in 2020, its festival put inclusion and mental wellbeing at its heart. (It’s one reason we at the Music Workshop Company didn’t hesitate when we were asked to be involved, and we’re delighted to be back this year delivering a special workshop for young people aged 4-12). 
 
Each year, Watford Jazz Junction works to ensure its events represent the various communities it serves, offering people of all backgrounds a way to connect and express themselves. With the organisers busy preparing a diverse programme for 2024, Chris Newstead, the festival’s Director and Founder, took time out to tell us more about the ethos behind the event. 
 
 
(Image: participants at the Music Workshop Company's 2023 workshop at Watford Jazz Junction.) 
 
This month our blog explores the life and work of George Gershwin. Famous as a songwriter with his brother, Ira, Gershwin mixed European Classical music traditions with Blues and Jazz to create a sound that is particularly linked to his birth city of New York. 
 
Despite a relatively short life, Gershwin's musical output was huge, including musicals, an opera, orchestral music and film scores. 
 
The Model Music Curriculum suggests listening to two of his most famous songs “I Got Rhythm” and “Summertime” as well as “Rhapsody in Blue”.  
 
This blog explores “Rhapsody in Blue” and suggests activities linked to creating arrangements. 
 
 
 
 
Image credit: Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons 
Jazz standards are musical compositions that form a fundamental part of the repertoire and language of jazz.  
 
They are often performed and recorded, and are therefore widely known to listeners.  
 
They are also used within education to introduce key musical concepts such as certain chord progressions and modes. 
October 2017 marks what would have been the 100th birthday of two jazz legends: Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. 
 
Born 11 days apart on October 10 and 21, 1917, pianist, Monk and trumpeter, Gillespie, shaped the landscape of jazz composition and improvisation, each exploring harmonies with a complexity previously unheard in jazz, leaving behind an immense legacy of music. 

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