Swing University: Jazz as a Tool for Liberation is a four-session course that invites participants to explore jazz through a social justice lens and understand its historic role as a liberation tool in the United States. Each class will be led via Zoom by Seton Hawkins, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Director of Education Resources and Public Programming, in an informal lecture and discussion format with special guests from Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Septet. Classes are sequential, but each session can be enjoyed as a standalone experience. Buy all 4 events and save.

This class will celebrate the complex musical traditions of New Orleans, and look at the unique assemblage of styles in the 19th Century that gave rise to early Jazz. What do they tell us about the development of popular music in America? And what did the earliest Jazz sound like? How did New Orleans’ engagement with Jazz change throughout the 20th century?