The Jazz Age has come to mean far more than the evolution of an African American art form. It describes the music of the 1920s, but also a period in American history that reshaped the social order — a time when the rights of women were being redefined, a generational divide opened up between young and old, and a younger population began questioning the way things were and pushing for change.
Even the timeframe is disputed. Taken literally, the Jazz Age runs from 1920 through the turbulent decade to the Great Depression of 1929. But if we mean the Jazz Age as a musical and cultural era, it stretches from the late 1910s into the 1930s, and socially a little beyond. What began in New Orleans reached across America, then out to Europe and Great Britain, and eventually to worldwide popularity.
The phrase itself took hold as the earliest jazz recordings became popular for listening and dancing, and as live jazz spread out from its New Orleans birthplace around 1918 into other American states. In 1922 the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald immortalised it in his book of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age.
Where the music came from
Musically, the Jazz Age documented the rise of Dixieland jazz — an early form that took its cue from the blues and the ragtime evolving in the Black American communities of New Orleans at the start of the twentieth century.
New Orleans was a multicultural city with many kinds of music in the air. Alongside ragtime and the blues there was Creole music, the early folk music of the Creoles of Louisiana. From this heady mix of Black American and European American influences, the music we call jazz — what some musicians have called Black classical music — was born, and it developed at a rapid pace. If the instruments and harmony were of European descent, the vital rhythms and personal expression were derived from Africa and the blues.
Jazz has also left its mark on the big screen, from period dramas to musician biopics — we’ve rounded up the greatest films about jazz if you want to see the era brought to life.
Buddy Bolden: the first jazz man
The legendary cornetist Buddy Bolden reportedly played by ear, and his music was an amalgamation of gospel and church music with ragtime and blues. A gifted improviser, he played in a looser style than the more rigid rhythm of ragtime.
Born in September 1877, Bolden had a relatively short career — he was only known to be musically active between 1895 and 1907. No recordings of him survive, although he allegedly made some phonograph cylinder recordings. Hospitalised at the age of 30, he spent the rest of his life in care and died at the age of 54 in November 1931.
Bolden’s name has been forever linked with the creation of “jass,” as it was first known, and he was an influence on musicians such as Bunk Johnson, Freddie Keppard and Joe “King” Oliver. His legacy lives on in the work of those he influenced — and in his best-known composition “Funky Butt,” recorded by Jelly Roll Morton as “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” and later by numerous artists as “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say.”
The 1920s: jazz goes national
Jazz really began to take off around 1917 with the arrival of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and their popular recordings, followed by Kid Ory’s Original Creole Jazz Band, whose origins lay in New Orleans but who quickly expanded their reach to San Francisco and Los Angeles.
It was there that Kid Ory’s band made their first recordings in 1922 — the first all-Black band from New Orleans to do so. Another notable recording debut that year came from the blues singer Bessie Smith.
Advances in recording, and the ability to reproduce music on shellac discs playing at 78rpm, gave birth to the single. Many of the large record companies of the time formed subsidiary labels catering to particular sections of the population, and the age of “race records” began. This helped jazz gain a foothold in the mainstream music of the twenties — though the audience for hot jazz was often among white listeners.
The musicians who dominated the decade included the young white cornet player Bix Beiderbecke, whose band The Wolverines formed in 1924, and the bandleader and arranger Fletcher Henderson. A leading dance band of the day with imaginative arrangements that fed directly into the swing era of the thirties, Henderson’s band counted saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and Louis Armstrong among its ranks — both of whom would play crucial parts in the art of jazz improvisation.
Louis Armstrong and the birth of the soloist
It was Louis Armstrong who drove the next great development in the music. As an improviser without equal — his only near rival being the clarinettist and soprano saxophone master Sidney Bechet — Armstrong changed what a jazz solo could be.
With Bechet away touring Europe, Armstrong had the field to himself. With encouragement from his wife, Lil Armstrong, he formed his famous Hot Five and Hot Seven bands, and over the next five years made some of the most vibrant and influential small-group jazz ever recorded.
If Armstrong led the way for the soloist, Jelly Roll Morton paved the way for the arranger. Recording first with the mixed-race New Orleans Rhythm Kings, then in 1926 with his Red Hot Peppers, Morton arranged his music so as to retain the spontaneity of improvisation even when the composition was fully notated.
The pianist, composer and bandleader Duke Ellington also began his career in the Harlem clubs of the twenties, going on to become one of the most influential musicians in jazz across a career lasting fifty years. This was not unusual: many musicians who established their reputations in the Roaring Twenties evolved with the music as swing and dance styles carried jazz into a new decade.
The Jazz Age beyond the music
Seen from a social and cultural perspective, the Jazz Age was a time of change and upheaval in America. Prohibition might, on paper, have curtailed the nightlife and clubs of the era — but the emergence of underground speakeasies serving illicit alcohol gave people a place to enjoy themselves, and gave jazz an audience.
The new music was not always welcomed. The young often used jazz as a means to rebel against traditional American culture, and some groups in society saw it as the “devil’s music,” a cause of moral breakdown.
The role of women was also changing radically. The women’s suffrage movement gained momentum, and American women won the vote in August 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment. Recognised increasingly for their contribution during the First World War, women took a larger place in the workforce and demanded a voice — which in turn fuelled the demand for equality. While cultural, racial and gender divides would persist for decades, many important female musicians emerged from the twenties, each with something to say. They included the blues singer Bessie Smith and the pianists Lil Hardin Armstrong and Corrie “Lovie” Austin, while Ella Fitzgerald was beginning to earn her reputation at the end of the decade.
The Jazz Age has been glamourised in novels and films as a golden moment in American history. The reality was more complicated — but it was undeniably a time that changed social attitudes and helped nurture a true American art form.
