Big Apple History . Arts and Entertainment . Jazzing It Up


	Jazz records from the 1920s

F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920s "The Jazz Age." This hot new style of music -- with its blend of ragtime, blues, and improvisation -- was the perfect metaphor for Manhattan during the '20s. The music captured New York's sophistication, toughness, vitality, and sense of daring. Although jazz has its roots in New Orleans and Chicago, New York became the place where, as jazz great Duke Ellington put it, music "converged and blended together." It also helped that Manhattan was the home of all the major recording studios, radio stations, and important music reviewers.

When Prohibition made alcohol illegal in 1920, many nightclubs in Chicago, a leading jazz center, were forced to close. Unemployed jazz musicians flooded into New York. Harlem, after all, was advertised as the "Nightclub Capital Of The World," sporting over 125 licensed cabarets and clubs -- not to mention countless "speakeasies" (gangster-run nightclubs that illegally sold alcohol.)

1924 was a banner year for jazz music in New York City. That was when bandleader and composer Duke Ellington and singer and cornetist Louis Armstrong moved to Manhattan.

However, despite the enormous support of creative African Americans, prejudice continued to raise its ugly head, even in Harlem. For evidence one needs only to recall the following famous story: W.C. Handy, an African-American composer nicknamed "the father of the blues" was once refused entrance to a prominent Harlem nightclub even though he overheard one of his songs playing inside.

Illustration: Courtesy of the Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.