15 - After swing: modern jazz and its impact

Summary

The decline of the big bands

Early jazz had taken some years to reach a wide international audience, and the furore caused by the visit of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to London in 1919 was an indication that the new music was destined to become notorious on account of its associations with behaviour both rebellious and, in the case of Prohibition in the United States, illegal. For most of its subsequent history, jazz was tainted by extra-musical associations: although it is often tacitly assumed that this music of African-American origin scandalized a predominantly white audience, the perceived link between jazz and moral decay was fostered as much by those middle-class African Americans for whom the blues – ‘the Devil’s music’ – had always been an uncomfortable reminder of the social problems from which they had at least in part managed to escape. The development of diverse jazz styles after the Second World War, and their impact on perceptions of the music as both art and commerce, were significantly affected by the prejudices and partisanship of an earlier generation of commentators and consumers.

Even the definition of jazz was contested. A concerted attempt to legitimize swing as ‘jazz’ was made in the pages of the journals Down Beat and Metronome in the early 1940s, in defiance of those purists who looked askance at any jazzy style that downplayed the role of improvisation and other techniques explicitly associated with the music’s African-American heritage (such as blues structures, blue notes, and ‘dirty’ timbres).