The Jazz Age

The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s, ending with the Great Depression, in which jazz music and dance styles became popular, mainly in the United States, but also in Britain, France and elsewhere. Jazz originated in New Orleans as a fusion of African and European music and played a significant part in wider cultural changes in this period, and its influence on pop culture continued long afterwards. The Jazz Age is often referred to in conjunction with the Roaring Twenties.

The birth of jazz music is credited to African Americans, but expanded and over time became modified to become socially acceptable to middle-class white Americans. Those critical of jazz saw it as music from people with no training or skill. White performers were used as a vehicle for the popularization of jazz music in America. Even though the jazz movement was taken over by the middle-class white population, it facilitated the mesh of African American traditions and ideals with white middle-class society. Cities like New York and Chicago were cultural centers for jazz, and especially for African-American artists. People who were not familiar with jazz music could not recognize it by the way Africans Americans wrote it. Furthermore, the way African-Americans writers wrote about jazz music made it seem as though it was not a cultural achievement of the race.

From 1920 to 1933 Prohibition in the United States banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies which became lively venues of the "Jazz Age", hosting popular music including current dance songs, novelty songs and show tunes. Jazz began to get a reputation as being immoral, and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old cultural values and promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring Twenties. Professor Henry van Dyke of Princeton University wrote: "... it is not music at all. It's merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion." The media too began to denigrate jazz. The New York Times used stories and headlines to pick at jazz: Siberian villagers were said by the paper to have used jazz to scare off bears, when in fact they had used pots and pans; another story claimed that the fatal heart attack of a celebrated conductor was caused by jazz.

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