The Jazz Age

4 Key excerpts on "The Jazz Age"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Fashion and Jazz

  Dress, Identity and Subcultural Improvisation

  • Alphonso McClendon(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  In the late teens, a faction of musicians with honed skills on a variety of instruments departed New Orleans for Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles and New York. This black and white movement facilitated the influence of the Dixie style to new populations. Performers circulated the technique in urban centers, where it mimicked the hectic rhythms of crowded tenements, factory work and nightlife. The music was given the designations “jass” and “jazz.” The latter name, being the adopted title, embodied the vibrant energy and harmonic blend of the ensemble. In analysis of the genre’s ubiquity, Gioia asserted: “it seems almost anything in fashion would, sooner or later, be classified as jazz” (Gioia 1998: 77).

  The pursuit of freedom continued to be a theme that found voice in the generation born after 1900. Many were part of the great migration, a time when African Americans left the south for opportunity in large cities of the north. Although faced with continued segregation and economic barriers, these groups found solace in religion, as well visual, literary and performance art. This out-flowing initiated the Harlem Renaissance, a period between 1919 and 1929 that demonstrated interest, patronage and elevation of black arts. Although the experience was beneficial for a select group, a broader view places the renaissance as an essential marker on the path to civil rights for African Americans. The artists of the renaissance disseminated black aesthetics through fine art, photography, literature, stage performance and music. In a similar capacity, a youthful white population, coveting an escape from the

  First World War and the National Prohibition Act of 1919 that regulated the commerce of “intoxicating liquors,” indulged in socially liberating behavior. The music and dance exchanged between blacks and whites during The Jazz Age spawned challenges to racial constructs that would be triumphant in decades to come.

  Following the period of marching bands, vaudeville, tent shows and minstrel performances, the swing aesthetic exemplified the most polished of these fares. It fused visual and artistic qualities of each entertainment style into a single package. Considering this richness, Louis Armstrong recalled the musical assortment of the Joe Oliver Band in 1920s Chicago, when the ensemble traded between theatrical playing, dance tunes and blues renditions (Armstrong 1999: 53). Swing bands prospered into the 1930s with a unique blend of symphonic composition, polyrhythms, famed soloists and uncompromising appearance. Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Count Basie and Benny Goodman developed considerable fame during this period, when elements of African American art were absorbed into the white mainstream. As recorded by the Pittsburgh Courier in 1929, an article featuring Harlem’s Cotton Club as a mecca of beauty and grace noted: “the crowd of New York’s white elite pounding the tables with tiny hammers for more” (Pittsburgh Courier

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  This Is Our Music

  Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture

  • Iain Anderson(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1

  The Resurgence of Jazz in the 1950s

  “Jazz Makes It Up the River,” declared a New York Times Magazine headline of August 24, 1958. “The long voyage from New Orleans barrel-house to public respectability ends in a triumph.” Gilbert Millstein, author of the accompanying article, was not alone in recognizing a dramatic improvement in the music’s fortunes during the middle and late 1950s. “Jazz Achieves Social Prestige,” marveled Leonard Feather in a Down Beat article of 1955. The same year, Life magazine’s photo-spread acknowledged a “New Life for U.S. Jazz,” and a few years later Esquire celebrated “The Golden Age of Jazz” with a twenty-page feature and photo special. Jazz music’s glowing reviews shared two common and repetitive elements. First, they characterized the music as an art form, not the folk or dance music of its past but a cultivated creative achievement that shared the spirit, and increasingly the audience of the best modern classical music. Second, reviewers identified jazz as the product of a sociopolitical environment unique to the United States. Thus numerous magazine features employed similar metaphors for jazz: Esquire ’s editors dubbed it “America’s major original art form” or “America’s one indigenous art form,”Collier’s recognized it as “a true American art form,” and High Fidelity as “America’s . . . vital art form.”1

  The increasing acceptance of jazz as “America’s art form” during the 1950s appeared unlikely at the beginning of the decade. Bebop, the dominant style of the late 1940s, had capitalized upon the complex musical language of wartime jam sessions to exploit a niche market for virtuoso improvisation among urban sophisticates. Musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Kenny Clarke struggled to make it pay on the fringes of a collapsing dance band economy yet failed to make the transition from popular to art status willed by their supporters in the jazz press. The difficulty lay not only in their ambivalent engagement with the legacy of western art music, although bebop’s belated exploration of chromatic harmony and unsettling rhythmic momentum (signaled by explosive bass drum bombs and double-time passages) underlined the distance between the traditions. More seriously, the music industry’s persistent institutional racism dashed expectations of meaningful professional advancement raised by the swing era’s business boom, infusing musicians’ artistic stance with a militant style that proved difficult for cultural gatekeepers to digest. Owing as much to the urban hipster as the avant-garde modernist, bebop’s code of language, behavior, and dress, and recurrent association with illegal drugs, carried the allure and the menace of a racialized nonconformity, its comedic and tragic sides modeled alternately by Gillespie and Parker. White admirers of bebop frequently mistook hip transgression as the only authentic expression of black identity, rather than as one manifestation of a diverse and contested culture. As such, they helped distill public perceptions of the musicians as deviant outsiders through a series of essential symbols such as the beret, horn-rimmed glasses, zoot suit, goatee, and hep talk. These images disturbed greatly those musicians, critics, and businessmen who had pinned their hopes on the potential for modern jazz to shepherd the music to respectability.2

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Palaces of Power

  The Birth and Evolution of London's Clubland

  • Stephen Hoare(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 8

  The Jazz Age: ST JAMES’S IN THE 1920S AND ’30S

  I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales. ‘It was simply grand,’ he said ‘Topping band’ and she said ‘Delightful, Sir,’ Glory, Glory, Alleluia! I’m the luckiest of females For I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales. Lyrics by Herbert Farjeon 1927

  Following the First World War, life started slowly returning to normal for the shops, cafes, restaurants and hotels of St James’s and Piccadilly. In keeping with the spirit of the age, the area embraced popular culture. Women who had worked in factories and staffed the buses and public transport and who were soon to be given the vote were more visible on the streets. With long cigarette holder, beaded Charleston frock and bobbed hair, the 1920s ‘flapper’ shouted independence. The Great Depression which had spread to Britain after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 brought mass unemployment. In Britain 2 million workers had lost their jobs, mainly in the North, Wales and the Midlands. London did not escape its effects. What is sure is that The Jazz Age sparked a counterculture – a constellation of exciting new clubs and a night-time economy catering for a richer, more varied demographic than the traditional gentlemen’s club.

  Post-War Recovery

  The First World War had cast a very long shadow over Clubland. During 1914–1918 almost an entire generation of young officers had been killed in action. Where once fathers would have arranged for their sons to be elected to their club, the generational link was severed. It would take many years to recover. Membership of some clubs fell sharply as new members were insufficient to replace older members after their death.

  Some, however, view the interwar years as a golden age for members’ clubs. Where once men in uniform were seen around the clubs, now clubs reintroduced Edwardian formality and members were expected to wear full evening dress for dinner. Likewise servants, in many cases men too old to have fought in the war, donned livery in club colours. The old order could not continue. Harold Macmillan, Tory prime minister from 1957–1963, was one of the first politicians to sever the tribal ties between politics and Clubland. In marrying Lady Dorothy Cavendish in 1920, Macmillan had joined one of the foremost families in the land. His father-in-law, the 9th Duke of Devonshire, was a leading member of the Liberal-leaning Brooks’s and was the owner of the exclusive Pratt’s Club. Despite being a Tory, family connections trumped political affiliation as the highly clubbable Macmillan joined the duke’s inner circle. Although Macmillan subsequently became a member of the Tory Carlton Club, he was completely at home at Brooks’s, the Beefsteak, and Pratt’s Club.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Flappers 2 Rappers

  American Youth Slang

  • Tom Dalzell(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 The 1930s:The Joe and the Jerk

  “They’re mugging light, they’re muggin’ heavy, they’re in the groove. They’re goin’ to town! They’re SWINGIN’!”

  T he early 1930s were chaotic years in the United States. The national banking system collapsed, industrial output was drastically depressed, unemployment mounted without respite, and hourly wages plunged for those who were lucky enough to be working. Hunger, homelessness, desperation and dejection were epidemic. One-third of the nation was, President Roosevelt said, “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Those who were not were ever conscious of the precipice over which they too could plummet.

  Popular youth culture was in many ways undaunted by the nation’s troubles. The entertainment industry knew an opportunity when it saw one, and the 1930s were glory years for the escapes of radio, movies, and music, all of which held no small appeal for America’s young. Low-cost entertainment such as miniature golf, pinball, and jukeboxes swept the country, as did fads such as goldfish swallowing. As Grace Palladino observes in Teenagers: An American History, until the Great Depression most young Americans worked for a living and high school was the domain of the privileged few. The Depression forced young Americans out of the farm, factory, or the home into high school, and in the process of this shift they became for the first time a generational age-group, a separate teenage nation.

  Popular youth culture of the early 1930s was defined as much by its revolt against the excesses of the Flapper era as it was by the exigencies of the Great Depression. Youth culture for a few years shied away from the subversive and daring ethic of the Flapper, with Joe College (according to Maurice Weseen “An imaginary typical college boy; a college student of the rah rah type”) and the soda fountain worker (the jerk) epitomizing the cheerful, optimistic, wise-cracking young. Especially in light of what hardships were to come, those who came of age in the early 1930s were a naive yet hopeful group, with a popular culture that reflected the small town, hometown, rural character of the country more than the urban values of Harlem and jive. While spurning the outlaw aspects of the Flapper years, popular youth culture of the early 1930s was nevertheless full of vitality, energy, and humor.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book