[BITList] Jazz and American Culture 1920s - The Crossing

[Michael Feltham]

> http://thecrossing.liverpool-one.com/jazz-and-american-culture-1920s/ <http://thecrossing.liverpool-one.com/jazz-and-american-culture-1920s/>
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> Jazz and American Culture 1920s - The Crossing
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> From its humble beginnings in the ‘honk-a-tonks’, street parades, marching bands and river boats of New Orleans, jazz music moved beyond its birthplace in the 1920s; its popularity ‘marked as indelibly on the globe as the heavy line of the equator’, as people all over the United States and other places in the world listened and danced to the musical phenomenon. Without knowing it, New Orleans musicians and the principal creators of jazz- Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and King Joe Oliver to name a few, created a music that would not only be declared as a national treasure but also be treated as an academic subject that has been rigorously studied and analysed by historians throughout the world. One of the most definitive and formative points in the long and complex history of jazz was the Roaring Twenties, famously labelled by Scott Fitzgerald as the ‘Jazz Age’.
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> During the 1920s, a communications revolution introduced radio, film and the record player, thus giving jazz a national audience by allowing people nation wide to hear the music in rural places where they could not experience it live. At the same time, a demographic revolution, primarily resulting from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to the North, meant America became an urban society majority for the first time in its history. A net effect of this was the flowering of vibrant entertainment hubs in growing industrial cities such as Chicago and New York. Jazz was a key part of their attraction.
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> It was also during this decade that a period of prosperity dawned on America after the horrors of the First World War. A booming stock market contributed to a huge growth in consumer spending, influencing a new morality for American high society as constraints of the Victorian period loosened. People chose to spend their extra time and money defying prohibition laws and dancing provocatively to jazz in underground speakeasies.
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> In Fitzgerald’s words: ’it was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess and it was an age of satire’. As the economy boomed, jazz truly captured the sense of America unwinding and looking to rejuvenate western culture after the horrors of western civilisation were revealed during the war.
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> Yet jazz was a ‘marvel of a paradox’. Notwithstanding its immense popularity, the music was regarded in middle-class opinion as having an ‘evil influence on young people’, for ‘stimulating outrageous dancing and dress styles’. It was consequently perceived in the minds of many, not simply as a new musical tradition, but as a social phenomenon, responsible for a symptom of changes witnessed by society at that time, such as with new ‘flapper-girl’ dress codes, new leisure activities, and a new sexual permissiveness that challenged Victorian conventions. This was in part the result of the stimulating effects jazz rhythm had on the body and also a result of the venues in which it was played. These included saloons and dance-halls, where interracial mixing, prostitution, bootlegging, and gambling were seen as the morally depriving activities that accompanied jazz playing, whilst catering to ‘a curious youth…and [entrapping] thousands of young girls.’
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> Yet such controversy over jazz only made it more impossible to ignore, and nowhere could this be more true than in America’s capital of culture in the twentieth century New York.
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> In Harlem, the centre of black cultural creativity in the 1920s, where influential black writers and artists cultivated a cultural movement of black artistic self expression known as the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, famous names like Duke Ellington played jungle-like jazz sounds in the neighbourhood’s most popular club, the Cotton Club.
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> In the Savoy Ballroom, the Lindy Hop broke out in popularity as people danced to the most successful big bands of the time, such as Fletcher Henderson’s Roseland Orchestra and King Joe Oliver’s Dixieland Jazz band.
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> Rent parties were a solution to the high price of rent that white Harlem landlords demanded from their captive tenants. Neighbours paid into a rent fund for admission to parties where keyboard striders entertained on pianos and excelled at boisterous, humorous, intimate jazz performing.
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> On Broadway, Louis Armstrong introduced singing to his jazz playing, giving the music a more commercial appeal.
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> On radio and record, female classic blues singers such as Ma Rainey, Ethel Walters, Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith, spoke powerfully yet subtly about racism and sexism in their immensely popular songs.
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> Then, in prestigious concert halls, white jazz musicians such as Paul Whiteman sought to ‘elevate’ the popular music styles, giving them the gravitas of classical concert music by using sophisticated composition techniques that he thought would ‘make a lady out of jazz’.
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> So to any local, visitor, immigrant or newcomer to New York in the 1920s, listening to the hot, syncopated, improvised sounds of jazz and blues emanating from the city’s cabarets, dance halls, concert halls, night clubs and broadway was simply unavoidable. Caught up in the debates about the merit of modernity, Jazz was a place for people to express their feelings about how traditional conventions were changing, and the new industrial society they were living in. It was simply everywhere, in music and in culture. Jazz was the soundtrack to modern individualism of the Roaring Twenties and a symbol of the raucous and prosperous consumer society New York city dwellers lived in.
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> Written by Liverpool ONE Soundscape Researcher Faye Brown.
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> Bibliography
> ‘Jazz,’ Outlook (5 March 1924)
> Burnet Hershey, ‘Jazz Latitude,’ New York Times Book Review and Magazine (25 June 1922)
> Scott Fitzgerald Echoes of the Jazz Age p xvi
> J.A Rogers, ‘Jazz at Home’ in Alain Locke, (ed.),,The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1992).
> Anne Shaw Faulkner, ‘Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?’ Ladies’ Home Journal (Aug 1921)
> Crime and the Civic cancer Graft https://homicide.northwestern.edu/docs_fk/homicide/crimecivic/05.pdf
> http://history.just-the-swing.com/savoy-ballroom
> Burton W Peretti, Jazz in American Culture (Chicago, 1997).
> Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, ‘The Mooche’ (1928): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_-IpeU2Su4
> Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five, ‘West End Blues’ (1928): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W232OsTAMo8
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> Back to Overview </#posts>
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