5 - Classic jazz to 1945

Summary

Precursors

Jazz has proved to be one of the most significant forms of music to arise in the twentieth century. Aesthetic considerations aside, it has been the source for the two most important forms of popular music in the West, and to a considerable extent elsewhere: the big dance band, which dominated popular music from about 1925 to 1945, and what is loosely called rock, in its various manifestations. Without jazz neither of these forms could have existed. As for ‘classic’ jazz, this term arose in the last twenty years or so of the twentieth century as a catch-all to subsume a variety of forms of music that existed before the arrival of ‘modern’ jazz in about 1945. The word ‘classic’ is a loaded one, chosen for its overtones of prestigious classical music, and reflecting the pressure during this period to assimilate jazz within the academic canon of great music; in this chapter, however, it is employed simply as a convenient term to cover pre-modern jazz, including Dixieland, swing and their variants, all of which share harmonic and rhythmic systems that are significantly different from those of modern jazz.

Jazz arose in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century out of a unique set of circumstances: the presence of a concentrated population of blacks and racially mixed ‘Creoles’ in the New Orleans area; rapidly developing systems of mechanical entertainment, including the player piano, sound recording, and radio; a craze for social dancing; and a dramatic shift in American attitudes occurring in about 1910–25.