It would be impossible to underestimate the importance of jazz in the 1920s. Far from being a mere form of music, jazz was the language of the new world. It incarnated everything modern, new, daring and futuristic. 

The African-American origin

Nobody knows where, when, and how jazz arose. It is generally accepted that it was in New Orleans at the very end of the XIX or very beginning of the XX century, probably as a popular form of art, made by musicians with no formal music education belonging to the African American community. 

From the beginning, jazz went hands-in-hands a bawdy life. Often discriminated, his practitioners found job mostly in underground bars and brothels, managed by the underworld. 

When in the 1910s the Great Migration began, many of the African Americans who immigrated to the northern cities of the US were jazz musicians, who continued to practice their music, very often in the same underground environment. 

But then, at the beginning of the 1920s, Prohibition happened. 

Prohibition and the rise of the Jazz Culture

When Prohibition went into effect, places like the underground speakeasies became not only acceptable but even fashionable. 

Especially young people thronged to them to have fun at the sound of that music that spoke of everything new and forbidden. Jazz was wild, dissonant, had nothing traditional about it. It allowed for dances were bodies shook violently and touched. Young people from all walks of life recognised their language. 

Jazz then went out of the segregated, secret places, and became a mainstream form of expression which crossed the race line in America, and then the oceans to other cultures. 

Jazz became extremely popular in Europe too, where a new brand of European jazz arose. 

Still, not everything was well for this form of music. 

The Jazz controversy

Jazz was controversial for many reasons, especially in the United States. 

On both shores of the Atlantic, scholars and musicians discussed whether jazz was even music since it didn’t follow any of the traditional rules. Because it rested heavily on improvisation and personal intuition, jazz was even difficult to teach. 

The fact that it was so wildly syncopated suggested that it loosened civil behaviour and restraints, liberating a more primitive, more animal part of the human being. It wasn’t even necessarily considered bad from some of the commentators. 

Far from being a mere form of music, jazz was the language of the new world. It incarnated everything modern, new, daring and futuristic #history #jazz Click To Tweet

In Europe, where the first school of jazz was founded in Germany in the 1920s, this was generally considered good. It was a way to communicate with a more primaeval, more authentic part of the self. 
Jazz became enormously popular, and many European musicians adopted it as their own.

The situation was far more complex in america. The popularity of jazz put the African American community, which had long been suppressed and discriminated, in a position of mastery. The best and more popular jazz musicians were black, and everybody wanted to learn from them. This was a hard stroke to the colour line. Musicians, both black and white, wanted to learn jazz from the African American masters. Youths of every colour and social position adopted jazz ad their language. 

Risen from the heady 1920s environment, jazz died out as the Great Depression loomed over America, and the shadow of nationalism spread over Europe. But the changes it brought about were never forgotten, and in time, decades later, it rose again.

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RESOURSES

Ogren, Kathy J., The Jazz Revolution. Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz. Oxford University Press, New York, 1989

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