1920s Jazz

From Harlem to Henderson: New York Jazz in the 1920s

            The second decade of the twentieth century was an especially organic and prosperous time for jazz. The big cities of New York and Chicago provided the fertile grounds of both cultural intensity through a diverse demographic, and popular interest through a burgeoning white intrigue in the new ‘hot’ music. This ideal setting allowed for jazz to develop even more than it had in the previous years. Both cities played host to numerous jazz greats and engendered their own styles of the music, however it is New York that stands out as the eminent setting at which jazz cumulated the richest music and influential players in the 1920s.

          The roots of jazz in New York city developed in the congested slums of Harlem, where blacks had moved after abandoning the hellish streets around San Juan Hill. The conditions of Harlem were dismal, with respectively high rent rates for cramped and decrepit rooms. The blacks living here were kept within their socioeconomic place by these high rents and low wages, such that “the earning differential between black and white was still an unbridgeable gulf” (Gioia, 90).  However, it was this poor lifestyle that brought people together, and where people were brought together, music could be born. Rent parties thrown to raise the money needed for living out the next month brought neighborhoods together to see the latest piano player and his innovations with the music, and so it was within these backstreet bacchanals that jazz was given the chance to evolve. Piano “ticklers” such as James P. Johnson and Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith were provided with the outlet to improvise the familiar tunes of ragtime, classical pieces, and popular dances into the jazz that soon permeated the night scene everywhere. Thus the New York style of jazz early on was very personalized and close-knit, born from community parties and informal competitive jam sessions among the players. This is contrasted against the style of early Chicago jazz, which was performed by blacks for whites in dance halls and clubs, the connection between the musician and the audience at a distance, a connection that is more or less required to create the productive and prolific dialogue between art and community (Stewart).

           The later players of New York jazz were distinguished in their ability to spread the word of jazz to the white populace as well as the black community. Fats Waller’s compositions were popularized enough that they made it to the Broadway stage and Hollywood screen (Gioia, 96). These songs exposed whites to jazz in great magnitudes in the big city, thus producing increased interest in the style and opening the way for big bands to dominate the music scene. The band that can perhaps best fulfill this description and perhaps also fulfill the description as the most influential band in New York during the 1920s is that of Fletcher Henderson’s. The Henderson band brought together a virtuosic cadre of musicians that would rise in alacrity of playing jazz music (Gioia, 102). The combination of great soloists together with an adept manager was a new concept used in big band, one that would provide the formula for jazz music for decades to come. However one final component of this formula that was missing was creative and innovative music, and the Henderson band would have failed in this regard had it not been for Don Redman. “Without Redman, the Henderson orchestra might have remained a finishing school for talented soloists, but under his influence it became something more: the birthplace of a new jazz sound and a repository for an emerging aesthetic” (Gioia, 103). This emerging aesthetic was swing, which would soon become the next big idea for jazz. Redman was able to create music for the band that marked it as the leading producer in the jazz idiom, a gift that was in part bestowed by Louis Armstrong. His introduction into the Henderson ensemble in 1924 was a “catalyst in accelerating the band’s evolution” (Gioia, 105). With his influence, “The flat-footed fox-trot rhythm that pervades the written ensembles is suddenly galvanized into something approaching swing, largely due to Armstrong’s facility in placing accents all around the beat in an ever-changing rhythmic pattern” (Fletcher Henderson, 110).

          It is worth noting that it was the New York style of jazz that allowed for the introduction of big band music in the form of Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra to pervade the music landscape and eventually evolve into swing. However, it is also important to note the impact of Louis Armstrong, originally a Chicago player, on the New York music scene. Although New York can be seen as the defining city in jazz, one cannot discount the interplay between cities within the development of jazz, and perhaps view it, in part, as a synergetic whole, “…when dealing with the topsy-turvy subject of jazz geography, be prepared for the strangest contradictions: just as much of the history of New Orleans took place in Chicago, so did sounds of Chicago jazz eventually find their most hospitable home in New York” (Gioia, 71). A hallmark of the jazz tradition is its spectacular quality of intense collaboration from all over cities, nations, and the world. However, within the 1920s, New York stands out as the major player within the jazz world, not only in bringing jazz to the most popular state it had yet been in, but also in the evolution of the music to be launched into the leading musical lexicon of the foreseeable future.

Commented on Dalton Klock