THE JAZZ AGE AND CHICAGO
In the 1920s, jazz spread rapidly all across America. The rise of
jazz was part of a new, post–World War I optimism, a prevailing sense that something new was happening, that America was
finally breaking from European culture and coming into its own.
Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald called the new era the Jazz Age.
with an unaccompanied trumpet passage that dazzled musicians with its daring changes of tempo and brilliant flourishes of
melody. In “Weather Bird,” from the same year, Armstrong and
pianist Earl Hines dueled with each other in a spontaneous duet
full of rhythmic and melodic innovations so advanced that other
musicians would continue to borrow them for the next 20 years.
Small bands of jazz musicians could be found virtually everywhere, but it was in Chicago that jazz developed most intensely
in the third decade of the 20th century. The city already had a
strong musical pedigree—the
World’s Fair of 1893 had
drawn musicians from across the country—and Chicago’s stockyards, stores, and factories, as well as its reputation as a rail and
shipping hub, made the city a magnet for people seeking a new
start. The Chicago Defender, the city’s African-American newspaper, regularly advised Southern blacks that there was a job for
everyone in this city, which, the paper stressed, was free of the
extremes of prejudice common in the South. If Chicago was not
exactly the promised land, moving there was still widely considered a big step toward economic and personal freedom.
After Armstrong, the instrumental solo became the centerpiece of jazz, and his singing
—his cheerful rasp and his relaxed use of language—pointed the way toward a new, distinctly American vocal tradition.
LESSON ESSAY
LOUIS ARMSTRONG
Among the thousands who answered the call and joined
the Great Migration north was a young trumpeter named
Louis Armstrong, who followed his mentor,
King
Oliver, and his Creole Jazz Band to Chicago in 1922. Two
years later, Armstrong went on to New York City to work with
Fletcher Henderson’s big dance band, a sophisticated, well-trained group that played a style of music later to be
dubbed
swing (CD1: Track 23). Armstrong’s reputation quickly spread among musicians, and he began appearing
on numerous recordings, most famously as the leader of the
Hot Five and the Hot Seven, his immensely influential small
groups. The records he made with those bands between 1925 and
1928 retained the instrumentation and some of the characteristics of pure New Orleans jazz, but in fact Armstrong’s music
was more meticulously arranged than most of what was heard
in the Crescent City, and it displayed a much higher level of musicianship. Each recording seemed to introduce something new:
“West End Blues” (CD1: Track 25), from 1928, opened
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NEA JAZZ IN THE SCHOOLS
Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, Chicago, c. late 1920s.
Courtesy of the Duncan P. Schiedt Collection.
Armstrong’s virtuosity on the trumpet was unparalleled. He
was stronger, had a wider range, and was more articulate on
his instrument than anyone else. His tone was brilliant, and the
melodies he created were graceful, intense, and full of passion.
The driving pulse of his songs made the oompah feel of two-beat
jazz seem instantly out of date; his music demanded a newer,
more flexible rhythm. After Armstrong, the instrumental solo became the centerpiece of jazz, and his
singing (CD1: Track
26)—his cheerful rasp and his relaxed use of language—pointed
the way toward a new, distinctly American vocal tradition.
Armstrong immediately lent his influence to a host of local Chicago musicians—many of them children of immigrants from
Russia, Poland, Ireland, and Italy—who crossed racial boundaries by playing side by side with black musicians. Among these
Chicagoans were clarinetist
Benny Goodman and drummer Gene Krupa, who played a uniquely Midwestern version
of jazz, often called
Chicago-style (CD1: Track 27). Like
Louis Armstrong’s, theirs was a soloist’s music, showcasing the
virtuosity of a single improvising artist instead of the collective
improvisation common to New Orleans jazz.
Listen: Find a related musical excerpt online or on the accompanying CD.
Look: Find a related photograph online or in the slide show on
the accompanying DVD.
PROHIBITION
In 1920, Congress passed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited the bottling and consumption of alcohol,
Prohibition would be the law of
and for the next 13 years
the land. But in Chicago, as elsewhere, many people ignored the
law, and entrepreneurs and criminal gangs often joined forces
to open nightclubs called speakeasies, where liquor, gambling,
dancing, and jazz were the attractions, and where money was
spent at a dizzying pace. In the end, Prohibition didn’t do much
to curtail drinking and criminality in America—by many accounts it made things worse—but it turned out to be a boon for
jazz musicians, who were suddenly more in demand than ever.
Major Artist: Find a short biography and related resources online or
in the Teacher Guide.
Learn: Find more information related to this key term in the online
essay or in a text box.
The world of jazz would one day have its place in American culture alongside the polite, segregated world of classical music.
THE DUKE
If bands like Paul Whiteman’s can be said to have opened the
door to a wider audience, then
Duke Ellington simply
knocked the door down. Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in
Washington, D.C., in 1899 and began piano lessons as a young
boy. He soon learned ragtime piano and began his professional
career organizing bands to play for dances and social gatherings.
In 1923 he moved to New York, where an African-American culHarlem Renaissance was
tural revolution known as the
under way. Ellington immersed himself in the musical life of the
city, playing and studying alongside many of his heroes, including composer
Will Marion Cook and pianists
James
P. Johnson and
Willie “The Lion” Smith. Johnson and
Smith played a style called
stride (CD1: Track 33): a complex, often rapid form of piano playing in which the left hand
quickly moves between bass notes and chords while the right
hand creates a series of variations on the melody. Drawing on
these and numerous other influences, Ellington fashioned his
own distinctive piano style, a rich blend that went beyond anything that had come before.
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
A Prohibition-era plea for alcohol, c. 1924.
Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society.
JAZZ: AN AMERICAN STORY
LESSON ESSAY
Among the groups that developed and flourished during Prohibition, in the Midwest and elsewhere, were larger ensembles
that featured as many as 10 musicians and that played both jazz
and other forms of popular music in dance halls, speakeasies,
and restaurants, bringing jazz to entirely new audiences. Two of
the best-known large groups during this era were the bands of
Jean Goldkette, who was born in France and raised in Chicago, and
Paul Whiteman, a symphony and dance band
violinist born in Denver. Audiences were especially charmed
by the Whiteman Orchestra’s ability to blend European stringorchestra music, African-American jazz, novelty songs, and
exotic tunes. Whiteman had great ambitions for his music and
talked about “making a lady out of jazz.” He walked the line
between high and low art, between classical and popular music, and when he premiered George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in
Blue” in a New York concert hall in 1924, the message was clear:
The Harlem Renaissance was a period of flourishing
artistic expression and cultural activity during the
1920s and 1930s. Based in Harlem, New York, one
of the largest urban black communities in the North
following the Great Migration, the cultural phenomenon saw some of America’s foremost black writers,
artists, musicians, and political thinkers emerge at the
forefront of American culture. Writers James Weldon
Johnson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and
the scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois
all lived in Harlem, as did many other artists eagerly
examining what it meant to be black and American.
It was also home to the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League,
and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement
Association. “Harlem, in our minds,” Duke Ellington
remembered, had “the world’s most glamorous atmosphere. We had to go there.”
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In 1927, Ellington’s ten-piece outfit landed the important job of
house band at Harlem’s
Cotton Club, where he developed
skills as a composer and arranger that would lay the foundation
for his legendary swing orchestra a few years later. “The music,”
Duke said, “must be molded to the men,” and, accordingly, the
Cotton Club band’s
handpicked members (CD1: Track
31) each had an immeasurable impact on the
group sound
(CD1: Track 30). In his compositions for the nightly floor
shows, Ellington drew on every type of music available, from
sentimental songs and classical melodies to the blues and West
Indian folk dances.
LESSON ESSAY
Duke Ellington.
Courtesy of the Frank Driggs Collection.
It was Duke’s special ability to create utterly new music from
these traditional forms that set him apart from the other musicians of his time. The celebrated African-American writer
Ralph Ellison, still a high school student in the 1920s, recalled
the Cotton Club days: “It was as though Ellington had taken the
traditional instruments of Negro American music and modified
them, extended their range and enriched their tonal possibilities. … It was not until the discovery of Ellington that we had any
hint that jazz possessed possibilities of a range of expressiveness
comparable to that of classical European music.” Indeed, over
the next 40 years Ellington would reach audiences around the
world, filling concert halls and ballrooms alike, playing music
that was as popular among the masses as it was revered by great
musicians. He had created a music that was, as Duke himself
would say, “beyond category.”
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NEA JAZZ IN THE SCHOOLS
SWING: THE SOUNDTRACK OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION
In late 1929 the Jazz Age literally ended with a crash. The collapse of the stock market and the years of
widespread
unemployment and poverty that followed seemed destined
to erase the exuberant optimism of the previous decade. And
yet jazz musicians continued to innovate new, forward-looking
styles in the face of hard times. While fewer records were actually being made, the early years of the Depression saw significant
improvements in recording technology and a noticeable expansion in the size of bands. These new, larger bands were usually
made up of a brass section consisting of three to four trumpets
and two to three trombones and a reed section consisting of
up to four saxophones and clarinets. These wind instruments
could play together in unison or in a call-and-response fashion
and were driven by a rhythm section comprised of piano, bass,
drums, and guitar. The dominant two-beat feel of most of the
music from the 1920s was now giving way to an even four beats
per bar. It was a looser, more flexible rhythm that suited a new
style of dancing known as the jitterbug, which was becoming increasingly popular in dance halls such as New York City’s Roseland and Savoy ballrooms.
The 1930s were grim for many Americans, but swing, as this
lively new four-beat music came to be called, was not given to
self-pity; it was a beacon of energy, industry, and hopefulness
throughout those dark years. Not that swing bands were always
concerned with speed and intensity; they could also play with a
slow, languid, dreamlike quality. By the mid- to late 1930s, the
beginning of the so-called Swing Era, jazz, in its varying forms,
had firmly established itself as the pop music of America. Swing
allowed bands to lend a jazz feeling to almost anything—new pop
songs, older sentimental ballads, Broadway themes, marches,
waltzes, even classical pieces. Some bands played sweet-sounding songs that appealed to an older generation; others, like
Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, looked to their
Southwestern roots, adding fiddles and mixing swing with country and square-dance music. Many young people, however, had
become interested in the purely jazz-inspired qualities of swing,
especially the solo-driven, improvisatory approach to the music. Like sports fans, they argued about the merits of particular
bands, knew all the featured soloists, and stood in line for hours
to see their favorite bands when they appeared in the popular
stage shows at first-run movie theaters. (Benny Goodman broke
all attendance records at the Paramount in New York’s Times
Square in 1937.)
swing reached every race, class, and
In spite of segregation,
age group in the country, and by the end of the 1930s, as the Depression came to an end and World War II loomed, musicians
such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong had become popular with virtually everyone. Thanks to
radio and the gradual
resurgence of the market for records, what had once been purely
regional styles could now be heard in living rooms in almost any
part of America.
music: drummer Jo Jones, bassist Walter Page, guitarist Freddie Green, and Basie on piano. The Count’s band now joined
the ranks of Louis Armstrong, singer
Billie Holiday (CD1:
Track 44), guitarist
Charlie Christian (CD1: Track
40), and trumpeter
Roy Eldridge (CD1: Track 42), all of
whom were relaxing the rhythms of jazz while maintaining the
fervent push and pull of swing that kept dancers on the floor.
The 1930s were grim for many Americans, but
swing, as this lively new four-beat music came
to be called, was not given to self-pity; it was
a beacon of energy, industry, and hopefulness
throughout those dark years.
THE COUNT
Five hundred miles southwest of Chicago, and even farther from
the swank dance halls of Manhattan, another town was being
Kansas City, Mistransformed by jazz and Prohibition.
souri, boasted a sprawling entertainment district run by bootleggers, gamblers, and small-time operators; music, particularly
the insistent train-like shuffle of the blues, could be heard at all
hours of the day and night. And with the help of an East Coast
piano player dubbed “The Count,” the city would become an epicenter of swing music. As bandleader Andy Kirk explained, in
Kansas City the stock market crash was “like a pin dropping: the
blast of jazz and blues drowned it out.”
William “Count” Basie was born in 1904 in Red Bank,
New Jersey, and grew up under the spell of East Coast ragtime
and stride piano players, especially
Thomas “Fats” Waller
(CD1: Track 33). Stranded in Kansas City while on tour with
a road show, Basie found work playing piano in a local movie
theater and soon became an integral part of Walter Page’s Blue
Devils, one of the greatest jazz bands of the Midwest. In 1935
Basie took over the band of local favorite
Bennie Moten
(CD1: Track 35) and soon began a series of radio broadcasts
that sounded very different from the music coming out of Chicago and New York.
THE WAR YEARS: MOLDY FIGS AND MODERN VISIONS
By the mid-1930s, swing had permeated nearly every aspect of
mainstream American entertainment. Swing bandleaders were
popular icons, performing for ballrooms full of wildly enthusiastic teen audiences, as well as in movies and on weekly radio
shows. Perhaps the surest sign of swing’s success was the growing interest in the music’s history, spurred by the new breed of
serious jazz record collectors and the rising influence of another
new species, the jazz critic: By the end of the 1930s, reviews of
jazz recordings and performances were appearing not only in
specialized magazines like Down Beat and Metronome, but also
in daily newspapers. A growing number of critics began to accuse swing of pandering to a wider audience and abandoning the
essentials of jazz: that is, collective and individual improvisation. Add to all this a resurging interest in New Orleans veterans
like
Jelly Roll Morton and
Sidney Bechet, as well
as the founding of independent jazz labels like Commodore and
Blue Note that specialized in older styles of jazz, and by the mid1940s the stage was set for a battle: It was the modernists (fans
of swing) versus the traditionalists (proponents of older styles of
jazz). The traditionalists quickly earned the label “moldy figs.”
JAZZ: AN AMERICAN STORY
17
LESSON ESSAY
Basie’s music (CD1: Track 36) was laden with blues
feeling; he fashioned rhythmically strong arrangements that
featured blues singers and were often built around riffs—short,
repeated figures that were played behind soloists or singers. His
band carried on a constant musical conversation: The brass and
the reeds traded riffs in a fiery dialogue that excited dancers and
Lester
inspired soloists, most notably tenor saxophonist
Young (CD1: Track 37), to new heights. Driving it all was the
most cohesive and powerful rhythm section yet heard in popular
Lindyhoppers getting carried away
at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, c. 1941.
The Charles Peterson Jazz Photo Collection, courtesy of Don Peterson.
In spite of this backlash, swing bandleaders continued to enjoy
pride of place in American popular culture.
Benny Goodman’s orchestra was one of the most successful swing bands,
thanks in part to the brilliant arrangements of the AfricanAmerican composer and bandleader
Fletcher Henderson
(CD1: Track 38). Goodman challenged the segregation that
was still common in jazz in that era. In a pioneering step toward
integration in entertainment (CD1: Track 39)—on
the bandstand, in the recording studio, and even on the movie
Teddy Wilson, with whom he’d
screen—he hired pianist
already recorded, to be featured in a trio setting (with Goodman
himself and drummer Gene Krupa) in the spring of 1936, and
just a bit later made it a quartet by adding the brilliant vibraphonist
Lionel Hampton. What may seem an unremarkable sight today—black and white musicians playing together
in public—was considered the cutting edge of civil rights at the
time and gave America a foretaste of an integrated society a decade before baseball followed suit.
LESSON ESSAY
Young people struggle to get to Benny Goodman
at the Paramount Theatre, New York City, c. 1939.
Courtesy of the Duncan P. Schiedt Collection.
America’s entry into World War II after the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, deeply affected the
evolution of jazz, as it did virtually every aspect of American
life. Musicians of fighting age from all over the country were
drafted into military service. Then, in the late summer of 1942,
the musicians’ union called a strike against the record companies, demanding that musicians be fairly compensated for radio
and juke box play of recordings. For almost two years, no new
instrumental music was recorded for commercial issue. Only
vocalists, who were not part of the union, continued to record,
accompanied only by other singers.
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NEA JAZZ IN THE SCHOOLS
While instrumental jazz seemed to be stagnating in the United
States during and after the war, it was conquering the rest of the
world, thanks in part to
American military swing bands
that traveled around Europe. Still, in the United States, the era
of the big band was unmistakably drawing to a close. The union
boycott and shifts in taste had elevated singers to heights of popularity from which they have never fallen, and disc jockeys overtook bandleaders as the music business’s new iconic personalities. Yet instrumental jazz was far from dead—by the end of the
war a new sound was beginning to emerge that would inherit
from swing the modernist mantle. It was called bebop.
SWING ERA SINGERS & SMALL GROUPS
While the Swing Era was dominated by big bands,
small groups did flourish during jazz’s heyday. Many
big bands spawned mini-bands, such as Benny
Goodman’s trios, quartets, and sextets; Artie Shaw’s
Gramercy Five; and Count Basie’s Kansas City Six.
Duke Ellington picked star sidemen like Johnny
Hodges and Cootie Williams to front small recording
groups that, despite their size, managed to retain the
unique Ellington ambiance. And virtually every selfrespecting band had its own male and female singers,
many of which, including
Ella Fitzgerald and
Frank Sinatra, went on to solo careers.
Some small groups managed to shine without the
support of a big band leader, including bassist John
Kirby’s brilliant sextet and Fats Waller’s Rhythm (as
his six-piecer was known), which often featured the
pianist’s lively singing. Other groups, like those led by
Goodman’s sidemen Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson, came together in the studio, leaving us recordings that stand as a veritable who’s who of their era.
Billie Holiday also did well recording under her own
name, as did Mildred Bailey, the first female singer
featured with a big band. The record industry coined
the term “vocadance” to market these vocalist-driven discs, which they considered dance records. But
later generations of jazz fans have learned to cherish
these records—especially the now legendary recordings featuring Billie Holiday and Lester Young—
for listening.