Jazz

Jazz drew upon an eclectic base of musical styles in its origins, including African-American blues, Dixieland, and Western traditions as far-ranging as New England religious hymns, hillbilly music, and European military band music. It evolved in the early 20th century from various black musical forms centered in New Orleans, Louisiana, and gradually matured into its own unique style. The term jazz, however, did not gain common usage until around 1915. Jazz as an entertainment form reached a peak in the 1920s when it became the nation’s most popular form of music and gained sufficient respect to be played in concert halls. It also became the form of music most identified with the sophisticated nightlife of speakeasies throughout the Prohibition Era, and the entire decade became popularly known as the Jazz Age. In the 1930s, jazz arrangements grew larger and more elaborate and gave rise to Big Bands and the “Swing Era.” Here tunes were basically played by large ensembles, even orchestras, and were scored for the furious dance styles of that era. The best-known figures of this jazz period are bandleaders and arrangers such as Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Duke Ellington, all of whom wielded a dominant influence in swing. The era also spawned a generation of noted singers, both black and white, including Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday. An important transitional form, Kansas City Jazz, took root in the Kansas City, Missouri, jazz scene and creatively anticipated the more avant-garde bebop movement of the next decade. This style, which lent itself to soulful and bluesy renditions of more common big band and smaller ensemble arrangements, arced outward from the Midwest and eventually gained both a following and respectability in the jazz-oriented nightclubs of Harlem, New York.

By the 1940s a new form of jazz had emerged, known as bebop, which employed fewer classical formats and was skewed toward improvisation by individual artists. Performers of this style were numerous and popular, such as Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, Bud Powell, and John “Dizzy” Gillespie, whose interpretation was more innovative and far less dance-oriented. However, big bands and swing dominated the music and dance scene during World War II and retained their popularity up through the end of the decade. By then the sheer expense associated with traveling orchestras grew prohibitive, and the music gradually reformatted itself for smaller combos. Bebop subsequently evolved into the newer cool jazz, attracted aesthetic dissent from mainstream musical norms, and helped usher in the Beat generation of the 1950s. From a sociological standpoint, jazz harbored considerable implications for race. Despite widespread segregation, many white bandleaders actively recruited black musicians and showcased their talents visibly during performances. The performing stage became one of few areas in the nation where integration was the norm, exposing many whites to Aerican Americans on a positive, nonhostile basis. Sometimes integrated bands touring the South ran afoul of Jim Crow ordinances that forbade interracial mingling, and trouble resulted, but in the North and Midwest racially mixed bands were accepted without controversy.

Further reading: Peter Townsend, Pearl Harbor Jazz: Change in Popular Music in the Early 1940s (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

—John C. Fredriksen