The characteristics of The Jazz Age

Introduction

Jazz is arguably the most distinctive and influential musical form to have come out of the United States in the twentieth century. Its sheer variety and range profoundly altered patterns of musical performance and consumption, as well as highlighting the significance of the African-American contribution to US culture.

While it is conventional to emphasize that its development was encouraged by the work of a number of significant innovators, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, it is also important to note that it has always depended on a sense of collective collaboration within, between, and across communities. While American in origin, and dominated up until the beginning of the twenty-first century by Americans, jazz has proved to be very adaptable in terms both of its reception in other places and the way it has encouraged non-Americans to play a key part in contributing to its diversity. Jazz has become an important part of the culture of many countries, including Britain, and it may now be considered to be an international rather than a national form, within which countless musicians work whose first loyalty is to the music itself.

Roots Of Jazz

Historians trace the earliest roots of jazz to slave music of the pre-Civil War era that used techniques, such as improvisation and call-and-response (where the performer would call out a word or phrase and the audience would respond with another word or phrase), that were common to African music. This style of music was the forerunner of the blues, which appeared in the 1890s and contributed strongly to the development of jazz. Techniques such as the slurring and bending of notes, the use of falsetto wails, and vocal improvisation were common features of African American secular music of the time as well as of sacred music such as spirituals.

The traditional jazz revival of the late 1940s in the United States had a particular impact on Britain, where musicians such as George Webb, Humphrey Lyttleton, Chris Barber, and Ken Colyer advocated it as a reassertion of authenticity in the face of what they saw as the narrow cultural restrictions of the postwar years. Colyer famously enlisted in the British merchant navy in order to travel to New Orleans, where he jumped ship to play with his idols. British revivalism in part ended up in the ritualized stereotypes of the “trad jazz” boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which a number of British bands, including those of Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, made both the US and UK charts; but it also brought a fresh sense of energy and new influences. Moreover, it resisted that trend in the development of jazz that saw it becoming an elite art form, rather than a continuing part of wider popular culture.

The Jazz Age

Jazz music made strong contributions to artistic movements focused in American cities. The Harlem Renaissance (1920-1935) brought together African American intellectuals, artists, and musicians, several of ...