Jazz- The first Thirty Years
As a musical language of communication, jazz is the first indigenous American style to affect music in the rest of the World.
The city of New Orleans features prominently in early development of jazz. A port city with doors to the spicy sounds of the Caribbean and Mexico and a large, well-established black population, the Crescent City was ripe for the development of new music at the turn of the century. New Orleans was home to great early clarinetists Johnny Dodds, Jimmy Noone and Sidney Bechet.
Chicago became the focal point for jazz in the early 1920s when New Orleans musicians found their way north after clubs in the Storyville area of New Orleans were closed. Chicago was a magnet for musicians in the Mid-West.
New York City contributed to the richness of jazz in many ways. The first piano style to be incorporated into jazz was stride. The city was also the center of the music publishing business. Also in New York, James Reese Europe experimented with a style of jazz that involved large orchestras.
In the late twenties, the jazz center of the the United States moved from Chicago to New York City as many musicians did also.
As jazz evolved, highly arranged dance music became the norm. When white musicians like Benny Goodman added black arrangements to their scores, jazz began to move into the Swing or Big Band period. Large black and white jazz bands toured the United States filling the radio airwaves with swing, a term which became synonymous with jazz. Great African American bands during the swing era were Jimmy Lunceford, Chick Webb, Mills Blue Rhythm and Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy.
