Jazz on A Saturday Night

As part of our focus on music, we read the book Jazz on a Saturday Night, which I had ordered from Scholastic last month without really knowing the story. It turns out, the book introduces a dream team of Jazz musicians as if they were playing together as one band for an audience in a club. It focuses on the instruments they play. First, there is Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis on the trumpet. The kids remembered Louis from when we sang "What A Wonderful World" earlier in the year. Then there is John Coltrane and Charlie Parker on the saxophone. Their horns have a conversation. Next, Max Roach on drums. Thelonious Monk is the keyboard player, Stanley Clark plays stand up bass (we noticed how big the case was for that) and finally, Ella Fitzgerald was the singer, whose only instrument was her voice in the microphone.  The cool thing was, after seeing the ensemble playing together in the book, the bandstand in the classroom during play time became more cohesive. They pretended like they were playing music together.
I realized, as I was reading and explaining to the kids who the real people were in the book, that I had CDs of all of them at home except Charlie Parker and Max Roach. I burned CDs at home and made a new playlist for the iPod. Today, during play time, I was able to play the music of all of these greats for the kids. They really got a kick out of me belting out "Don't Fence Me In" with Ella Fitzgerald. It was great to see the band pretend today with the music in the classroom reflecting the people we had learned about from Jazz on a Saturday Night.