Living Jazz in a Small Southern City
The Knoxville Jazz Festival celebrates its fifth year in 2010, with a documentary film chronicling the city’s rich musical history, in particular, its long lineage of jazz music-makers.
It's a great story, starting in the early 20th century when mountain rhythms and melodies met up with swing tunes heard on an invention called the radio. A generation later, young East Tennessee musicians went off to war and came home with a taste for Big Bands and this new thing called bebop.
In the 1950s, jazz was the soundtrack of a nascent Civil Rights movement. It was in Knoxville that racially integrated bands performed, that a public library opened its doors to its black citizens and that an area high school became the proving ground for the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education. It was also in Knoxville that a bomb was tossed at a Louis Armstrong concert.
The young players of the '50s became mentors to today's players who also benefit from a thriving Jazz Program at the University of Tennessee. Jazz is alive and well in Knoxville. We invite you to enjoy this preview and we encourage you to help us tell the story by sending a donation to the Knoxville Jazz Festival.
