New York in the 1920's

"As in so many other aspects of the history of jazz, the intermingling of musical genres played a critical role in shaping a new idiom, and New York served as the crucible in which this fusion of styles took place" (Gioia, 100). In the 1920's, New York was the most important city to jazz. Though Chicago had much to offer jazz in the way of talent, opportunity, and culture, much of this was limited to the streets of Chicago in a way that did not occur in New York. New York was able to provide jazz with a stage to show that jazz was more than music: it was also song, dance, acting, tapping, and the visual narrative of Black life (Stewart). This led New York to have an astounding influence on shaping what we know as jazz.

            Economic opportunities abounded in the 1920's, creating a large market place for anything and everything, but especially for the fine arts. New York, being a large city hub, was able to access this opportunity for jazz with larger venues and more of them, coupled with a burgeoning audience of people ready and willing to embrace the new music. The major center of this was Harlem. Not everyone welcomed this new emergence in the culture, however, which created a split between the part of Harlem the contained the jazz and the part of 'literary aspirations' (Gioia, 91). Despite the manner in which jazz was created or consumed elsewhere, in New York, a racial disparity existed between the almost always black performers and the predominantly white audience members. Contradictions abounded, but the opportunities that jazz musicians acquired from them are what made jazz in New York what it was.

            Performing at places like the Roseland and the Cotton Club, with predominantly white audiences, changed the way the music was done. However, there were also small cabarets in Harlem where the young musicians could exercise their new skills in jazz (Lyttleton, 102) before moving into the larger arenas. It became less about the individual soloists and more about the group as an entity. This helped to create a new building block of jazz in the form of the section (Gioia, 106). It also assisted in generating big band music. Fletcher Henderson and James P. Johnson were two of the people who benefited from this immensely: they were unlike their predecessors in New Orleans and Chicago, they were well educated, classically trained, and willing to acclimate to a  new audience and a new world. They helped in formulating this new jazz in New York, which was much more performative and therefore much more available for mainstream consumption. Henderson is an excellent example of this new style- he managed an Orchestra Organization, and was the consummate professional big band instrumentalist (Stewart).

            New York had "a different paradigm- more arranged, more harmonically sophisticated" (Gioia, 105) and more inviting for a new array of musicians as well as being more intriguing to an audience outside the city. Henderson, who originally came to New York for work as a chemist, saw this availability of music and jumped into the fray. He helped define the big band sound through the popular currents of the fine arts already existent in the city (Gioia, 102). He was one of the facilitators in the creation of this new brand of jazz. Henderson was one of the pioneers of jazz who helped to make it what it was, and still is to this day. He could not have done it without the opportunity offered to him by this new home of jazz: New York.

Commented on Dalton Klock