26 July 2008

Dance Music in the “Jazz Age”

Early jazz grew popular among a young, urban subculture

Jazz composer, pianist, and bandleader Duke Ellington.

(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)

Although jazz was initially regarded by the music industry as a passing fad, its impact on the popular music mainstream represented an important cultural shift. A new subculture emerged from the white upper and middle classes, symbolized by the “jazz babies” or “flappers” (emancipated young women with short skirts and bobbed hair) and “jazzbos” or “sheiks” (young men whose cool yet sensual comportment was modeled on the film star Rudolph Valentino). This movement involved a blend of elements from “high culture” – the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the paintings of Pablo Picasso, the plays of Eugene O’Neill – and from popular culture, particularly styles of music, dance, and speech modeled on black American prototypes. The idea of the jazz age was promoted by the mass media, especially by Hollywood.

Following on the heels of ragtime, the jazz craze represented the intensification of African-American influence on the musical tastes and buying habits of white Americans. While it did increase opportunities for some black musicians, the world of dance orchestras remained strictly segregated. African-American musicians appeared with increasing frequency in fancy downtown cabarets and hotel ballrooms (although they could enter these places only as employees, not customers). During the late 1920s white jazz fans began to frequent nightclubs in African-American neighborhoods. In New York’s Harlem and the South Side of Chicago, these “black and tan” cabarets offered their predominantly white clientele an array of jazz music. Performing at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, the great jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington developed a style that he called “jungle music,” featuring dense textures and dark, growling timbres.

[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]