Chicago Jazz Era

            Although New Orleans is often cited as the original birth place of jazz, Chicago played a significantly more crucial role than New York in advancing and shaping the art of jazz in the 1920s. According to Liz Cohen, “Chicago was the jazz capital of the nation for much of the 1920s”. A particular style of jazz emerged out of Chicago, for reasons influenced by the social, racial, and economic conditions present at the time.

Chicago as well as much of the United States in the 1920s was in the beginning stages of the Great Depression. Regardless, people still needed entertainment in order to emotionally survive financial struggles, and so they turned to commercial jazz clubs to dance and sing the troubles away. This allowed for a more commercial stage for jazz to occur in Chicago. The Chicago Race Riots in 1919, in which a white man stoned a black man to death at a beach, set the stage for racial segregation of Blacks and Whites in the 1920s. This situation taught the Black community to rely on those within their community, thus a distinct Black culture emerges in Chicago. A sort of discrepancy occurred within the jazz audience- Whites were allowed to freely enter predominantly Black neighborhoods, whereas Blacks could not enter predominantly White neighborhoods. Black musicians’ innovations colonized American culture, and was commercialized in order to satisfy the White community.

A new kind of aggressive, upbeat style was rising in Chicago, predominantly introduced by King Oliver in his band, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. This new sound was distinct from the New Orleans style- “the Chicago horns often join together for brief written introductions and interludes, a technique closer to the big band idiom” (Gioia, 75). An authentic sound of brash, sparkling, upbeat trumpet playing formed, alongside a bluesy swinging rhythmic portion of the composition. Chicago-style music heavily involved and necessitated a feeling of dance, rhythm, and motion- in alignment with Thompson’s African art elements of motion, attack, and vital aliveness. Louis Armstrong is perhaps the most influential Chicago musician who left the biggest footprint in jazz history- all musicians that followed him merely attempted to emulate his style, thus leading to a new sound of jazz.

Chicago’s main contribution was the commercialization, or the commodification of jazz music into American society- which in turn affected the actual style of music that was produced. The Chicago jazz scene was controlled mainly by gangsters, under whom legends like King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington, and the Austin High Gang all worked for. These gangsters assumed their natural roles as bosses, thus putting a damper in the artistic, creative freedoms of the musicians themselves. The gangsters were solely interested in the profit nature of the jazz industry, and thus were responding to consumer tastes and preferences- squashing the musicians’ autonomy and say in what they were to play, when, and how.

Mikhail M. Bakhtin states that “each dialogue takes place as if against a background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue... The aforementioned third party is not any mystical or metaphysical being - he is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it” (126-127). Bakhtin makes the reference that art is a dialogue between the audience and the creator of the art; it is a relationship. He believes that art is “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationship that is artistically expressed”. This concept is crucial in understanding how jazz, or any art form is shaped and altered. The identity of jazz is the culmination of the consumer’s desires as well as the musician’s credentials, with the addition of racial, societal, and economic conditions that prevail. Chicago led the way in innovation and reigned tremendous influence that led to the Jazz Age in the 1920s, due to its characteristic living conditions and main artistic figures that changed jazz indefinitely.