Jazz

Jazz is a distinctively American music rooted in African American culture and incorporating Euro-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latin musical traditions into its unique sound. Jazz's evolution reflects the transition of the United States from a rural to a predominantly urban and industrial nation at the beginning of the 20th century. The music has no exact date of origin; however, the music first labeled jazz emerged around New Orleans before World War I and became a popular music for listening and dancing across the nation by the 1930s. Characterized by polyrhythmic, syncopated, and improvisational qualities, early jazz incorporated ragtime, stride piano, brass band marching music, and the blues. Jazz musicians rely on a call and response between instruments, including the human voice, to develop their improvisations as an ensemble. Classic jazz from the earliest era was characterized by collective or heterophonic improvisation; in later jazz styles, individual solo work became more common.

Jazz evolved through several significant styles, beginning with New Orleans classic jazz, followed by swing, bop, cool, free, fusion, and modal jazz, to name the most prominent forms of the music. Some styles are remembered in terms of the cities and musicians who generated exciting new jazz variations. Chicago Jazz, for example, is represented by performers King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and the Austin High Gang (1920s); Kansas City Swing featured Lester Young, Count Basie, and Mary Lou Williams (1920s and 1930s); bebop was played by Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker and brought fame to jazz clubs on 52nd Street in midtown Manhattan (1940s and 1950s); and West Coast jazz, focused in Los Angeles, brought together cool jazz performers like Art Pepper and Gerry Mulligan (1950s).

The entertainment cultures that sustained jazz musicians and ensured their audiences have been located primarily in urban areas. First, in multicultural New Orleans, African American, Creole, and European immigrants experimented together as they created jazz, sometimes competing in contests on the streets to advertise their bands. Subsequently, jazz musicians converged in Chicago, New York, Kansas City, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In its first decades, jazz was performed in many locations, for example, street parades and funerals in New Orleans. It was also associated with the vice districts of urban areas, where zoning regulations concentrated saloons, dance halls, nightclubs, and brothels into common neighborhoods. Jazzmen found work in these “red-light districts.” Entrepreneurs with ties to organized crime controlled several of these zones, for example, Tom Anderson in New Orleans's Storyville, Al Capone and Joe Glaser in Chicago, and Tom Pendergast in Kansas City. These enterprises brought jazz into close proximity with Prohibition Era speakeasies and “gin joints.” Some musicians depended on gangsters as agents; for example, Louis Armstrong worked for Joe Glaser. The qualities of the locations where jazz was played shaped the attitudes of some early white jazz audiences, who went “slumming” in jazz clubs with “exotic” or deviant names, such as the Oriental, the Bucket of Blood, or the Novelty Club.

Some vice districts—notably Storyville in New Orleans—were closed by order of the War Department in 1917. Jazz musicians, already joining African Americans in the Great Migration from the rural South to Chicago and New York, looked to the northern cities for new opportunities. After World War I, young people in particular associated jazz with a modern revolt against the staid mores of the Victorian Era. Jazz and its locations symbolized for them the emergence of sophisticated sounds and the opportunity for dancing. Hence, the 1920s are often described as a “jazz age” in reference to the celebration of hedonistic and urbane values. Musicians and their audiences came together in new jazz centers, particularly Chicago, New York, and Kansas City.

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