Jazz Age Music: The Sound That Defined a Generation

On February 12, 1924, the most important concert in the history of American popular music took place in the Aeolian Hall on West 42nd Street in New York City. The concert was the brainchild of the bandleader Paul Whiteman, a tall, dignified violist from Denver who had built a 26-piece “symphonic jazz” orchestra in the early 1920s and was widely known as the “King of Jazz.” Whiteman had commissioned the young composer George Gershwin to write a piece that would bridge the gap between jazz and the concert hall. The result, premiered that afternoon, was “Rhapsody in Blue” — a piece for piano and orchestra in which the syncopated rhythms and “blue notes” of African American music were combined with the harmonies of late-Romantic European music. Gershwin himself played the piano. The audience, made up of New York’s musical and social elite, gave the piece a standing ovation. “Rhapsody in Blue” became an immediate sensation and remains one of the most recognizable pieces of American music.

The premiere of “Rhapsody in Blue” was, in many ways, the moment when jazz arrived. It had been the unofficial music of the Roaring Twenties for years, but the 1924 concert was the moment when the broader American public — and especially the white, middle-class public that had been slow to warm to the music — officially accepted jazz as something more than a passing fad. By the end of the decade, jazz was America’s first genuinely popular art form, played in dance halls and speakeasies, broadcast over the new medium of radio, and recorded on the rapidly growing record industry. The story of that music, from its origins in New Orleans to its conquest of the national stage, is one of the great cultural transformations of the twentieth century.

The story of 1920s American culture cannot be told without jazz, and the rise of jazz is in turn inseparable from the broader history of the flapper movement that danced to it (covered in the flapper movement) and the Prohibition era that gave the music many of its most important venues (covered in Prohibition and speakeasies).

The Origins: New Orleans and the Great Migration

Jazz was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The city’s unique cultural mix — French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, American — made it one of the few places in the United States where enslaved and free Black musicians had been able to develop a sophisticated public music tradition. By the 1890s, New Orleans was home to a dense network of brass bands, dance halls, cabarets, funeral processions, and social clubs, and the music these ensembles played was already recognizably “jazz,” even if the word itself was not yet in wide use.

A crucial institution was Storyville, the legalized red-light district established by the city in 1897 and shut down by the U.S. Navy in 1917. The saloons, dance halls, and bordellos of Storyville employed many of the city’s best musicians, and the music played there was both musically innovative and morally suspect in the eyes of respectable New Orleans. Buddy Bolden (1877–1931), Jelly Roll Morton (1890–1941), King Oliver (1881–1938), and a young Louis Armstrong (1901–1971) all played in Storyville before the Navy’s crackdown. A more detailed history is told in the history of jazz music.

The Great Migration — the movement of roughly one million African Americans out of the rural South between 1910 and 1930 — took jazz north. Chicago, the nearest major city to New Orleans, was the first destination. King Oliver moved his Creole Jazz Band to Chicago in 1918, and Armstrong followed in 1922. By the mid-1920s, Chicago was the jazz capital of America, home to a dense network of dance halls, speakeasies, and recording studios. The city was also home to a group of white teenage jazz musicians who called themselves the Austin High Gang (after the Austin High School they attended), including the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (1903–1931) and the saxophonist Bud Freeman (1906–1991), who would help invent a cooler, more lyrical style of jazz that would influence the next generation of musicians.

New York and the Harlem Nightclubs

By the mid-1920s, New York had overtaken Chicago as the center of the American music industry. Manhattan was home to the major record labels (Victor, Columbia, OKeh, Brunswick, Edison, Vocalion), the powerful music publishers of Tin Pan Alley (centered on West 28th Street), and the largest concentration of dance halls, theaters, hotels, and nightclubs in the country. Above all, it was home to Harlem, the upper-Manhattan neighborhood that had become, by the 1920s, the largest Black community in the United States and the center of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem nightclubs of the 1920s were the most important jazz venues of the decade. The most famous was the Cotton Club, which opened in 1923 at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue and was run by the bootlegger Owney Madden from 1926 onward. The Cotton Club was a whites-only establishment (except for the employees) that featured some of the best Black musicians in the country, including Duke Ellington (1899–1974), whose orchestra was the house band from 1927 to 1931. The Savoy Ballroom, which opened in 1926 on the other side of Harlem, was integrated from the start and was the birthplace of the Lindy Hop. The Connie’s Inn, the Small’s Paradise, and the Hot Cha were other important venues. The full history of these clubs is told in Harlem nightclubs in the 1920s.

The great soloists of 1920s jazz were the men and women whose recordings defined the art form. Louis Armstrong, with his Hot Five (1925–1927) and Hot Seven (1927–1928) recordings, transformed jazz from a collective ensemble music into a soloist’s art. Bix Beiderbecke, a white Iowa-born cornetist whose delicate, lyrical tone was the antithesis of Armstrong’s, became the first important white jazz soloist and helped establish a “cool” style that would be the foundation of later West Coast jazz. Fletcher Henderson (1897–1952), the bandleader and arranger, helped invent the big-band format that would dominate jazz in the next decade. Benny Goodman (1909–1986), Jack Teagarden (1905–1964), Coleman Hawkins (1904–1969), and Lester Young (1909–1959) were all in their formative years in the 1920s.

The Women of Jazz

The 1920s were also a period of extraordinary achievement for African American women in popular music. The era’s biggest female star was Bessie Smith (1894–1937), known as the “Empress of the Blues.” Smith had grown up in poverty in Chattanooga, Tennessee, had been discovered by the great Ma Rainey (1886–1939), and had become a star of the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit, the network of Black-owned theaters that toured Black artists through the South and Midwest. In 1923, she signed with Columbia Records, becoming the highest-paid Black recording artist of the decade. Her records sold in the hundreds of thousands. A fuller treatment of the musicians of the era is in famous jazz musicians of the 1920s.

Other women of 1920s jazz and blues included Ma Rainey, the “Mother of the Blues,” whose 1920s recordings established many of the conventions of the female blues; Ethel Waters (1896–1977), who became a star of Broadway and the first African American woman to star in a major film (On with the Show, 1929); Florence Mills (1896–1927), the singer and dancer whose 1922 show Shuffle Along helped launch the Harlem Renaissance; Ida Cox (1896–1967), another major TOBA star; and Alberta Hunter (1895–1984), the blues singer who had a parallel career as a nurse after retiring from the stage in the 1950s. The full story of the women of the Harlem Renaissance, including the singers, is told in the Harlem Renaissance music and art section of this site.

Paul Whiteman and the Big Bands

The 1920s were also the decade of the big band — the large, brass-and-reed ensemble that would dominate American popular music from the late 1920s through the 1940s. The first and most famous big bandleader of the decade was Paul Whiteman (1890–1967), the Denver-born violist whose Ambassador Orchestra popularized “symphonic jazz” in the early 1920s. Whiteman was as much a showman as a musician; his concerts were lavishly staged events, and he was famous for his conducting style (no baton, white gloves, foot tapping, and gestures that were part conducting, part choreography). The 1924 Aeolian Hall concert that premiered “Rhapsody in Blue” was his masterstroke, and for the rest of the decade he was the most powerful figure in American popular music.

Whiteman was not the only important bandleader of the decade. Fletcher Henderson was building the most influential Black big band in New York, employing, at various points, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter (1907–2003), and Don Redman (1900–1964). Jean Goldkette (1899–1962) was the most important white big-band leader outside of Whiteman, with a Detroit-based band that featured Beiderbecke. Ben Bernie (1891–1943) and Leo Reisman (1897–1961) ran other prominent New York orchestras.

Tin Pan Alley and the Songwriters

Alongside the jazz and blues musicians, the 1920s were also the great age of the Tin Pan Alley songwriter. Tin Pan Alley was the nickname for the cluster of music publishers on West 28th Street in Manhattan, where, from the 1890s through the 1950s, most American popular songs were written, published, and sold. The Tin Pan Alley model was a piece of music written by a small group of professional songwriters, published as sheet music, and sold to amateur musicians for performance in parlors and dance halls; the radio and the recording industry that came to dominate popular music in the 1920s were, in a sense, the death of the model, but the songs that came out of the model were still some of the most durable in the American repertoire.

The greatest Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the 1920s were Irving Berlin (1888–1989), the Russian-born immigrant who wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911), “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” (1919), and, in 1927, the score for the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer; George Gershwin (1898–1937), whose “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924), “The Man I Love” (1928), and dozens of Broadway songs with his brother Ira Gershwin (1896–1983) helped define the 1920s sound; and the rising young Cole Porter (1891–1964), who would dominate the 1930s. Jerome Kern (1885–1945), Harold Arlen (1905–1986), Hoagy Carmichael (1899–1981), Johnny Mercer (1909–1976), and Richard Rodgers (1902–1979, with Lorenz Hart as his lyricist through 1943) all did significant work in the 1920s.

The Dance Crazes

The music of the 1920s was, above all else, music to dance to. The decade saw one of the most extraordinary series of dance crazes in American history. The foxtrot, a smoother dance derived from the one-step and the two-step, was popular in the early 1920s. The Charleston, a fast, energetic, African American dance that had originated in the port city of Charleston, South Carolina, exploded into the national imagination in 1923 with the song “Charleston” in the Broadway musical Runnin’ Wild; the dance required partners to swing their arms, kick their heels, and turn rapidly, and it was widely condemned as immoral by older Americans. The Black Bottom, another African American dance, became a national craze in 1926. The Lindy Hop (also called the Jitterbug) appeared at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in 1928. The tango, originally from Argentina, became a fad in the United States around 1910 and remained popular through the 1920s.

The new dance halls and ballrooms of the 1920s — the Roseland Ballroom in New York, the Arcadia Ballroom in Chicago, the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem — were the principal venues for these dances, and they were the places where many of the era’s best-known bands were heard. The dance halls were also, in many cases, the same places where illegal alcohol was served during Prohibition, and the connection between jazz and the speakeasy was close. The history of Prohibition and speakeasies is treated separately, but the musical culture of the era cannot be understood without it.

The Recording Industry Boom

The 1920s were also the decade in which the recording industry became a mass-market American industry. The technology of recorded sound had been invented in the late nineteenth century by Thomas Edison (the phonograph, 1877) and Emile Berliner (the gramophone and the flat disc record, 1887). The early decades of the recording industry were dominated by acoustic recording, a process in which performers sang or played into a large horn, which focused their sound waves onto a cutting stylus that inscribed the sound into a wax master. Acoustic recording was poor at capturing high frequencies and low volumes, which made jazz — a music that depended on high-frequency overtones and quiet passages — very difficult to record well.

In 1925, the Bell Telephone Laboratories developed a process for electrical recording that was quickly licensed to the major labels. Electrical recording used microphones and electronic amplifiers to capture sound, and it produced records that were vastly clearer and more faithful to the original performance. The first major electrical recordings appeared in early 1925, and the technology became standard by 1927. The result was a revolution in recorded sound: jazz, with its complex harmonies and wide dynamic range, could now be recorded with reasonable fidelity, and the best recordings of Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, Beiderbecke, Ellington, and Bessie Smith are the result of the new technology.

The major labels of the 1920s were Victor (later RCA Victor), Columbia, OKeh (which had issued some of the first “race records” in the 1920s), Brunswick, Edison (which withdrew from the consumer market in 1929), and Vocalion. The standard record was a 78 RPM disc, ten or twelve inches in diameter, that could hold about four minutes of music per side. The first jazz records sold by the hundreds of thousands, and the labels that had been a small corner of the music industry in 1920 became a major industry by 1929. The phonograph itself was, by 1930, a fixture in many American homes; the Victrola, a console phonograph manufactured by the Victor Talking Machine Company, was the most common model.

The Radio Disruption

The recording industry’s boom of the 1920s was cut short, however, by the rapid rise of radio. Commercial radio broadcasting had begun with KDKA in Pittsburgh in 1920; by 1930, more than 12 million American households owned a radio. The radio was free, while records cost money; the radio offered live music, while records offered the same music repeated; and the radio could play for hours, while a 78 RPM disc held only four minutes per side. The major labels fought back, in part by refusing to license their records for radio play, and in part by buying into the broadcasting business themselves (RCA, the radio company, eventually bought the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1929). The story of radio broadcasting in the 1920s is told in detail elsewhere, but the impact on the recording industry was significant: by 1933, the record industry had contracted to about a tenth of its 1929 size, and a generation of jazz and popular music stars would find their careers transformed by the new medium.

The Sound of a Decade

The music of the 1920s was, in the end, the music of a society in rapid transition. The African American genius of New Orleans and the migration north, the European classical tradition that Gershwin was trying to absorb, the African American music of the Harlem clubs, the white dance bands of the Midwest, the songwriting industry of Tin Pan Alley, the new technology of electrical recording, and the new medium of radio all converged in a single decade to produce the sound that has, ever since, defined the era. Jazz would go on to become one of America’s most important cultural exports; the dance crazes would be replaced by new ones; the record industry would grow and shrink and grow again; the radio would eventually be replaced by television and the phonograph by streaming. But the music of the 1920s — Armstrong’s West End Blues, Beiderbecke’s Singin’ the Blues, Ellington’s East St. Louis Toodle-Oo, Smith’s Downhearted Blues, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Berlin’s Blue Skies, Whiteman’s version of both — has been heard ever since. A closer look at the history of jazz music, the era’s famous jazz musicians of the 1920s, and the world of the Harlem nightclubs in the 1920s is offered in the linked sections.