History Unlimited: Introduction to the Jazz Store

History Unlimited

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Introduction to the Jazz Store

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From Dance Hall to Concert Hall

It could be argued that Jazz followed an exactly opposite route to Blues as the 20th Century progressed. The Blues began as ethnic and regional music, growing into wider acceptance and wider influence, and merging comparatively unsullied with popular music from the mid-century on; the early bluesmen were, and are, the lodestone to which popular musicians constantly turned. Jazz, on the other hand, emerged full-blown as a populist form with the first commercial sound recordings but, by the time that Delta and Country Blues achieved general recognition, was losing much of its popular appeal.

Through the 1920s,1930s and 1940s Jazz entertained black and white listeners alike through the media of records, radio, dance halls and cinema (the first ‘talkie’ was The Jazz Singer in 1927 - although jazz was little evident!). In the 1940s, however, a strain of self-absorption emerged that drove Jazz forward into new territory, shedding audiences as it went. More and more, Modern Jazz was to become a musician’s music, serious, theoretical and experimental, leaving the public to follow where it could.

But this strain had been evident since the beginning. Formally trained jazz musicians were by definition familiar with European musical heritage. Jazzmen, from ragtime to the big bands, from Scott Joplin to Duke Ellington, regularly sought to establish Jazz as the American counterpart of the European classical tradition (and this extended to popular composers such as George Gershwin) through jazz-based symphonies and operas. And although Jazz took inspiration from many musical sources, Europe continued to exert influence. The Great War, for the brief period of US involvement, brought Americans of all backgrounds to the Continent. The interwar years saw expatriate writers, artists and musicians gravitating towards European cultural centres, and especially London and Paris; American music and black performers were embraced by Europe; and at the same time, there was an artistic exodus to the USA in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and through the rise of fascism. The two-way process heightened during WWII, not least as band leaders were recruited to boost the morale of combat troops; and the interchange accelerated in the post-war years as experimentation overwhelmed every manifestation of the arts. Music was close to the hub of the artistic revolution — ‘cool’ jazz was often the music of choice for European New Wave Cinema; but nowhere was music more integrated with the artistic milieu than in the USA, where modern jazz formed a seamless whole with ‘Beat’ writing and poetry, abstract expressionism, experimental theatre and the subversive comedy of the hipster scene. All of this was underwritten by growing politicisation of the arts, especially as the civil rights movement gathered pace.

Nonetheless, the progressive strand in jazz was losing ground with the younger generation, coming under attack as a popular form from the blues revival and the raw energy of rock ‘n’ roll; and the political impetus was, in the early 1960s, taken forward by folk singers looking back to left wing activists of the 1930s such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Folk provided the language of protest for the young, whether in support of civil rights or in opposition to American involvement in Viet Nam. By the time of the legendary jazz festivals of the 1960s, and as modern jazz became ever more rarefied, intellectualised and dissonant, the music was being marginalised by demographics.

But between the 1920s and the 1960s, between the dance hall and the concert hall, jazz injected vigour and flamboyance into American life and, together with Hollywood, helped transform American popular culture into a global phenomenon — for better or worse.

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Ordering From This Site

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Important Information

· Featured Album titles will take you to individual album pages where you will find Track Listings, Reviews and, in some cases, Audio Sampling of selected tracks. We have also included a single representative MP3 track sample of each of our featured artists; wherever possible this has been taken from one of the listed albums.

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