Jazz Age

The Jazz Age was a period during the 1920s and 1930s when jazz music and dance styles gained worldwide popularity. The cultural impact of the Jazz Age was primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz. Originating in New Orleans, jazz drew heavily from African American culture and played a significant role in broader cultural changes during this time, with its influence on popular culture extending well beyond the era.

The Jazz Age is often mentioned alongside the Roaring Twenties and significantly overlapped with the Prohibition Era in various cross-cultural ways. The movement was largely influenced by the introduction of radios across the nation. During this period, the Jazz Age became a key part of emerging youth culture and also played a role in introducing jazz to Europe.

Background

The phrase "Jazz Age" gained popularity prior to 1920. In 1922, American author F. Scott Fitzgerald further cemented its fame with the publication of his short story collection, "Tales of the Jazz Age."

Jazz music

Wikipedia article: Jazz

Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, developing from roots in blues and ragtime. New Orleans offered a cultural milieu where jazz could flourish, as it was a port city with diverse cultures and beliefs. In this city, individuals from various races and backgrounds often lived in close proximity, allowing for cultural interaction and nurturing a vibrant musical environment. The evolution of jazz in New Orleans was shaped by Creole music, ragtime, and blues.

Jazz is considered by many to be "America's classical music." The earliest jazz styles, which originated in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York in the early 1920s, are often referred to as "Dixieland jazz." Throughout the 1920s, jazz gained recognition as a significant form of musical expression. It evolved into various traditional and popular styles, all linked by a shared heritage of African American and European American musical influences, with a strong focus on performance. Jazz derived its rhythm, "blues," and traditions of expressive playing or singing from African roots, while acquiring its harmony and instruments from European traditions.

Louis Armstrong brought improvisational solos to the forefront of jazz, transforming the original polyphonic ensemble style of New Orleans jazz. Jazz is typically distinguished by swing and blue notes, call-and-response vocals, polyrhythms, and improvisation.

Prohibition

Wikipedia article: Prohibition in the United States

Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933. The laws were frequently ignored during this period, leading to substantial tax revenue losses. Well-organized criminal gangs seized control of the beer and liquor supply in many cities, unleashing a crime wave that shocked the nation. Gangsters like Al Capone exploited this prohibition, with approximately $60 million (equivalent to $1,312,361,111 in 2024) in illegal alcohol smuggled across the Canadian-U.S. border.[18] The resulting illicit speakeasies became vibrant venues of the "Jazz Age," hosting popular music that included contemporary dance songs, novelty tunes, and show tunes.

By the late 1920s, a new opposition was forming across the U.S. Anti-prohibitionists, referred to as "wets," criticized prohibition for leading to crime, reducing local revenues, and enforcing rural Protestant religious values in urban America. Prohibition ended with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 5, 1933. Some states maintained statewide prohibition, representing one of the later phases of the Progressive Era.

Speakeasies

Wikipedia article: Speakeasy and Black and Tan clubs

Created as a result of the Eighteenth Amendment, speakeasies were venues, often controlled by organized criminals, where patrons could drink alcohol and unwind. Jazz music was performed in these speakeasies as a countercultural form of entertainment that matched the illicit atmosphere. Jazz musicians were frequently hired to play at speakeasies. Al Capone, the notorious crime boss, ensured steady incomes for jazz musicians who had previously lived in poverty. Thaddeus Russell, in "A Renegade History of the United States," notes, "The singer Ethel Waters fondly recalled that Capone treated her 'with respect, applause, deference, and paid in full.'" In the same book, "The pianist Earl Hines remembered that 'Scarface [Al Capone] got along well with musicians. He liked to enter a club with his henchmen and have the band play his requests. He was very generous with $100 tips.'" The culture of speakeasies gave rise to what were known as ‘black and tan’ clubs, which featured multiracial crowds.

There were many speakeasies, especially in Chicago and New York City. At the height of Prohibition, New York City had about 32,000 speakeasies. Inside these speakeasies, both payoffs and strategies for concealing alcohol were commonly employed. Charlie Burns, who owned several speakeasies, remembered these tactics as crucial for maintaining his and Jack Kriendler's illegal establishments. These tactics included building relationships with local law enforcement. One clever mechanism, designed by a trusted engineer, allowed liquor bottles to be hidden quickly by dropping them through a chute when a button was pressed, preventing detection during raids. An alarm would sound if the button was activated, alerting patrons of the potential police intervention. Another device used by Burns was a wine cellar with an inconspicuous thick door. It had a small, nearly invisible hole for a rod to be inserted, allowing access to a secret lock that opened the door.

Rum running/bootlegging

Regarding where speakeasies acquired alcohol, there were rum runners and bootleggers. Rum running, in this context, referred to the organized smuggling of liquor by land or sea into the U.S. Quality foreign liquor was considered high-end alcohol during Prohibition, and William McCoy had some of the finest available. Bill McCoy was involved in the rum-running business and was ranked among the best at various times. To avoid capture, he sold liquor just outside the territorial waters of the United States. Buyers would come to him to pick up his booze as a precaution on McCoy's part. McCoy specialized in selling high-quality whiskey without diluting the alcohol. Bootlegging involved the production and smuggling of alcohol within the U.S. Since selling alcohol could yield significant profits, several major strategies for this were employed. One tactic used by Frankie Yale and the Genna brothers gang (both connected to organized crime) was to provide poor Italian Americans with alcohol stills to produce liquor for them, paying $15 for a day's work. Another tactic was to purchase liquor from rum runners. Racketeers also bought closed breweries and distilleries, hiring former employees to produce alcohol. Another figure notorious in organized crime, Johnny Torrio, teamed up with two other mobsters and the legitimate brewer Joseph Stenson to produce illegal beer in a total of nine breweries. Finally, some racketeers resorted to stealing industrial grain alcohol and redistilling it for sale in speakeasies.

History

Starting in 1919, Kid Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band, comprising musicians from New Orleans, performed in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 1922, they became the first black jazz band of New Orleans origin to make recordings. That same year also marked the first recording by Bessie Smith, the most renowned blues singer of the 1920s. Meanwhile, Chicago emerged as the main hub for developing the new "Hot Jazz," where King Oliver collaborated with Bill Johnson. Additionally, Bix Beiderbecke formed The Wolverines in 1924.

In the same year, Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson dance band as a featured soloist, leaving in 1925. The original New Orleans style was polyphonic, characterized by theme variation and simultaneous collective improvisation. Armstrong mastered his hometown style, but by the time he joined Henderson's band, he had already become a trailblazer in a new phase of jazz that emphasized arrangements and soloists. Armstrong's solos went far beyond the concept of theme-improvisation, improvising on chords rather than melodies. According to Schuller, in comparison, the solos by Armstrong's bandmates (including a young Coleman Hawkins) sounded "stiff, stodgy," with "jerky rhythms and a dull, indistinct tone quality." The following example presents a brief excerpt of the straight melody of "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind" by George W. Meyer and Arthur Johnston (top), compared with Armstrong's solo improvisations), recorded in 1924. (This example approximates Armstrong's solo but cannot convey his unique use of swing.)

Armstrong's solos were a significant factor in establishing jazz as a true 20th-century language. After leaving Henderson's group, Armstrong formed his virtuosic Hot Five band, which featured musicians Kid Ory (trombone), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), Johnny St. Cyr (banjo), and his wife Lil on piano, where he popularized scat singing. . Jelly Roll Morton recorded with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in an early mixed-race collaboration and then formed his Red Hot Peppers in 1926. There was a larger market for jazzy dance music performed by white orchestras, such as Jean Goldkette's and Paul Whiteman's orchestras. In 1924, Whiteman commissioned Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which premiered with Whiteman's orchestra. Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald noted that Rhapsody in Blue idealized the youthful spirit of the Jazz Age. By the mid-1920s, Whiteman was the most popular bandleader in the U.S., achieving success based on a "rhetoric of domestication" that elevated and gave value to a previously inchoate style of music. Other influential large ensembles included Fletcher Henderson's band, Duke Ellington's band (which opened a significant residency at the Cotton Club in 1927) in New York, and Earl Hines' band, which debuted at The Grand Terrace Cafe in Chicago in 1928. All of these groups significantly influenced the development of big band-style swing jazz. By 1930, the New Orleans-style ensemble was a relic, and jazz had become a global phenomenon.

Many musicians grew up in musical families, where family members often taught them to read and play music. Among this group was the bandleader Guy Lombardo, who, along with his brothers Carmen and Lebert, formed the Royal Canadians Orchestra in Canada during the early 1920s. By 1929, their "sweet" big band was performing regularly at the iconic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, and later in 1959, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where they entertained audiences nationwide for decades with a velvety smooth interpretation of the "sweetest music this side of heaven." Despite [[Benny Goodman]'s assertion that "sweet" music was a "weak sister" compared to the "real music" of America, Lombardo's band enjoyed widespread popularity that transcended racial divides and received praise from Louis Armstrong, who named it one of his favorites.

Some musicians, like Pops Foster, learned to play on homemade instruments.

Urban radio stations played African American jazz more often than suburban stations due to the concentration of African Americans in urban areas like New York and Chicago. Younger demographics popularized Black-originated dances, such as the Charleston, as part of the immense cultural shift generated by the popularity of jazz music.

Jazz aimed to cultivate empathy by first challenging established norms and those who adhered to them, before enchanting them with its ethereal allure. It sought to blur the societal divides of race, class, and political affiliation, as illustrated in James Baldwin's celebrated short story, "Sonny's Blues," where the transformative power of jazz unites two estranged brothers through the deeply emotive melodies played by Sonny. In Fitzgerald's works and beyond, jazz served as a leveling force, promoting a sense of equality within both literature and society.

In 1925, "The Great Gatsby" epitomized this phase of Fitzgerald's career, capturing the romanticism and superficial charm of the Jazz Age. This era began with the end of World War I, the onset of women's suffrage, and Prohibition, ultimately crumbling with the Great Crash of 1929.

Swing in the 1930s

Wikipedia article: Swing music and 1930s in jazz

The 1930s were dominated by popular swing big bands, where virtuoso soloists became as renowned as the band leaders. Key figures in the development of the "big" jazz band included bandleaders and arrangers like Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, [[Benny Goodman], Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Harry James, Jimmie Lunceford, Glenn Miller, and Artie Shaw. While it was a collective sound, swing also provided individual musicians the opportunity to "solo" and improvise melodic, thematic solos that could sometimes be complex and significant.

Over time, social constraints regarding racial segregation began to loosen in America: white bandleaders started to recruit black musicians, and black bandleaders began to recruit white ones. In the mid-1930s, [[Benny Goodman] hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. During the 1930s, Kansas City Jazz, exemplified by tenor saxophonist Lester Young, signified the shift from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump blues featured small combos, uptempo music, and blues chord progressions, drawing inspiration from boogie-woogie of the 1930s.

Radio

The introduction of large-scale radio broadcasts facilitated the swift national spread of jazz in 1932. Radio was referred to as the "sound factory." It allowed millions to hear music for free—particularly individuals who had never attended costly, far-off big city clubs. These broadcasts originated from venues in major cities like New York, Chicago, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. There were two types of live music on the radio: concert music and big band dance music. The concert music, known as "potter palm," was performed by amateur musicians, usually volunteers. On the other hand, big band dance music was played by professionals and was showcased in remote broadcasts from nightclubs, dance halls, and ballrooms.

Musicologist Charles Hamm identified three categories of jazz music during that era: black music for black audiences, black music for white audiences, and white music for white audiences. Jazz artists like Louis Armstrong initially received very limited airtime because most stations preferred featuring the music of white American jazz singers. Other notable jazz vocalists include Bessie Smith and Florence Mills. In urban areas like Chicago and New York, African-American jazz was played on the radio more frequently than in the suburbs. Big-band jazz, exemplified by James Reese Europe and Fletcher Henderson in New York, attracted large radio audiences.

Several "sweet jazz" dance orchestras also gained national recognition through big band remote broadcasts, including Guy Lombardo's Royal Canadian Orchestra at New York City's Roosevelt Hotel (1929) and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (1959), as well as Shep Fields's Rippling Rhythm Orchestra at Chicago's historic Palmer House Hotel (1936), the "Star-light Roof" in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (1937), and the Copacabana nightclub.

Elements and influences

Young people in the 1920s harnessed the power of jazz to challenge the traditional culture of previous generations. This youth rebellion featured flapper fashions, women smoking cigarettes in public, a readiness to discuss sex openly, and radio concerts. Dances like the Charleston, created by African Americans, quickly gained popularity among the youth. Traditionalists were shocked by what they viewed as a decline in morality. Some urban middle-class African Americans referred to jazz as "devil's music" and believed that its improvised rhythms and sounds encouraged promiscuity.

Jazz acted as a platform for rebellion in various ways. In dance halls, jazz clubs, and speakeasies, women discovered refuge from societal norms that restricted them to traditional roles. These venues provided them with more freedom in their speech, clothing, and behavior. Reflecting the dominant Freudian psychology of the 1920s, jazz encouraged "childlike" behavior, with patrons known as Flappers often referred to as "Jazz Babies." The uninhibited and spontaneous essence of jazz fostered primal and sensual expression. As the older generation dismissed it, jazz became a means for young women (and men) to challenge the values of their parents and grandparents.

Role of women

With women's suffrage—the right to vote—at its height following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920, and the emergence of the free-spirited flapper, women began to assume a more prominent role in society and culture. Having entered the workforce after World War I, women now had many more opportunities regarding social life and entertainment. Concepts like equality and open sexuality gained popularity during this era, and women seemed to embrace these ideas. The 1920s witnessed the rise of many renowned female musicians, including Bessie Smith. Bessie Smith drew attention not only for her remarkable singing but also as an African-American woman and a symbol within the LGBTQ+ community. Throughout her musical career, she was unapologetically herself, expressing the struggles of the Black working class and addressing issues like poverty, racism, and sexism, alongside themes of love and female sexuality in her lyrics. She has become one of the most respected singers of all time and has inspired later performers such as Billie Holiday.

Lovie Austin (1887–1972) was a bandleader, session musician (piano), composer, singer, and arranger based in Chicago during the classic blues era of the 1920s. She and Lil Hardin Armstrong are often recognized as two of the top female jazz blues piano players of that time.

Piano player Lil Hardin Armstrong was originally a member of King Oliver's band with Louis and later played piano in her husband's group, the Hot Five, and his subsequent band, the Hot Seven. It wasn't until the 1930s and 1940s that many women jazz singers, like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, gained recognition as successful artists in the music industry. Another notable female vocalist who rose to fame at the end of the Jazz Age was Ella Fitzgerald, one of the most popular female jazz singers in the United States for over half a century, who was later hailed as "The First Lady of Song." She collaborated with all the jazz greats of the era, including Chick Webb, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and [[Benny Goodman]. These women were determined to establish their presence in the music industry and pave the way for future female artists.

Influence of middle-class white Americans

The birth of jazz is attributed to African Americans, but it was modified to be socially acceptable to middle-class white Americans. Critics of jazz viewed it as the music of people lacking training or skill. White performers served as a vehicle for the popularization of jazz in America. Although jazz was embraced by the white middle-class population, it facilitated a blending of African American traditions and ideals with white middle-class society.

Beginnings of European jazz By the 1920s jazz had spread around the world. According to The New York Times in 1922:[80]

Jazz latitude is marked as indelibly on the globe as the heavy line of the equator. It runs from Broadway along Main Street to San Francisco: to the Hawaiian Islands, which it has lyricized to fame; to Japan, where it is hurriedly adopted as some new Western culture; to the Philippines, where it is royally welcomed back as its own; to China where the mandarins and even the coolies look upon it as a helpful sign that the Occident at last knows what is music; to Siam, where the barbaric tunes strike a kindred note and come home to roost; to India, where the natives receive it dubiously, while the colonists seize upon it avidly; to the East Indies, where it holds sway in its elementary form — ragtime; to Egypt, where it sounds so curiously familiar and where it has set Cairo dance mad; to Palestine, where it is looked upon as an inevitable and necessary evil along with liberation; across the Mediterranean, where all ships and all shores have been inoculated with the germ; to Monte Carlo and the Riviera, where the jazz idea has been adopted as its own enfant-chéri; to Paris, which has its special versions of jazz; to London, which long has sworn to shake off the fever, but still is jazzing; and back again to Tinpan Alley, where each day, nay, each hour, adds some new inspiration that will slowly but surely meander along jazz latitude.

Since only a limited number of American jazz records were released in Europe, European jazz traces many of its roots to American artists such as James Reese Europe, Paul Whiteman, Mike Danzi, and Lonnie Johnson, who visited Europe during and after World War I. Their live performances inspired European audiences' interest in jazz, along with a fascination for all things American (and thus exotic) that accompanied the economic and political struggles in Europe at that time. The beginnings of a distinct European style of jazz began to emerge during this interwar period.

British jazz began with a tour by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919. In 1926, Fred Elizalde and His Cambridge Undergraduates started broadcasting on the BBC. After that, jazz became an important component of many leading dance orchestras, and jazz instrumentalists became increasingly numerous. Very soon, the ensuing music craze in the United Kingdom led to a moral panic, exemplified by Scottish artist John Bulloch Souter's controversial 1926 painting The Breakdown. This painting has been described as capturing the fears of Western civilization toward jazz music, and it was later destroyed by its creator to appease critics who insisted the work should be burned.

The European style of jazz gained prominence in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de France, which started in 1934. Much of this French jazz blended African-American jazz with the symphonic styles that French musicians had been well-trained in; in this respect, it's clear to see the inspiration drawn from Paul Whiteman, whose style was also a fusion of the two. Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt popularized gypsy jazz, a blend of 1930s American swing, French dance hall "musette," and Eastern European folk, characterized by a languid, seductive feel. The main instruments included the steel-stringed guitar, violin, and double bass, with solos alternating between players as the guitar and bass establish the rhythm section. Some researchers suggest that Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti were pioneers of the guitar-violin partnership that became synonymous with the genre, a partnership that made its way to France after they had been heard live or on Okeh Records in the late 1920s.

Criticism of the movement

During this time, jazz began to gain a reputation for being immoral, with many in the older generations viewing it as a threat to traditional cultural values while promoting the new decadent ideals of the Roaring Twenties. Professor Henry van Dyke of Princeton University remarked: "[I]t is not music at all. It's merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion." The media also criticized it, as The New York Times in the 1920s suggested that jazz was to blame for the decline of Western civilization, the decrease in quality of Italian tenors, a poor trade balance with Hungary, a classical musician's fatal heart attack, and even scaring bears in Siberia.

Classical music

As jazz flourished, American elites who favored classical music sought to broaden the audience for their preferred genre, hoping that jazz would not become mainstream. Conversely, jazz influenced composers as varied as George Gershwin and Herbert Howells.

Further reading

• Allen, Frederick Lewis (1931). Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties, 1st, New York and London: Harper & Brothers. 
• Allen, Frederick Lewis (1939). Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America. New York: Harper and Row. 
• Dinerstein, Joel (2003). Music, Memory, and Cultural Identity in the Jazz Age 55. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 303–313. Digital object identifier:10.1353/aq.2003.0012. 
• Doerksen, Clifford J. (2005). American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-0176-5. 
• Dumenil, Lynn (1995). The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 0-8090-1566-8. 
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1945). "Echoes of the Jazz Age", The Crack-up. New York: New Directions Publishing, 13–22. ISBN 0-8112-0051-5. 
• Kyvig, David E. (2002). Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1939: Decades of Promise and Pain. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29555-7. 
• Leuchtenburg, William (1958). The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-47368-6. 
• (1929) Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 
• Mowry, George E. (1963). The Twenties: Fords, Flappers, & Fanatics. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. 
• Parrish, Michael E. (1992). Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920–1941. New York and London: W.W. Norton ^↗. ISBN 0-393-03394-5. 
• Sullivan, Mark. Our Times, 1900–1925: Volume IV – The Twenties. "{wl.  |year=1936 |edition=1st |location=New York and London |ref=none |author-link=Mark Sullivan (journalist) |url-access=registration |via=Internet Archive}}

External links

• The Jazz Age In America
• Roaring Twenties from U S History.com

Jump to: Main Page • Micropedia • Macropedia • Icons • Sexology • Time Line • History • Life Lessons • Links • Help
Chat rooms • What links here • Copyright info • Contact information • Category:Root