Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904–1930

Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904–1930 is a fascinating read for all interested in the development of jazz in the Windy City. William Howland Kenney's study examines the economic, social, cultural, and racial factors at play leading to jazz in Chicago, as well as the rise of the "Jazz Age" in the metropolis. A variety of these aforementioned factors led to Chicago's prominence in 1920s jazz (Prohibition, the rise of cabarets, social dancing, and the Great Migration from the South), particularly as a stage for the transformation of the genre from the New Orleans style and roots of many of its top practitioners. Jazz within the larger society is explored as a source of leisure, interracial contact and racialized exploitation, contextualized within the Chicago of the time period. This history is relevant to jazz because Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, King Oliver, Benny Goodman, Jelly Roll Morton, and a plethora of other significant figures in the history of jazz were all shaped by Chicago's jazz scene or developed their unique voice and techniques while there. 

First, through their performances at cabarets in the black South Side or segregated white venues, jazz musicians had to dress the part. This led to many southern jazz musicians adopting refined mannerisms and fashionable tastes to not appear as rustic people. More importantly for the development of the music, working in cabarets, which combined influences from ragtime, blues, vaudeville, and popular song, demanded musicians to be versatile, proficient, and, if possible, to be unique to stand out from the crowd of other artists. These conditions of the entertainment industry in Chicago, which saw a large increase of its black population during the period in question, required professional musicians in a more competitive environment than New Orleans. Thus, even though many of the best Chicago jazz artists of the 1910s and 1920s were playing music clearly rooted in the collective polyphony of New Orleans jazz, their music was shaped by the Chicago cabarets, rent parties, and consumer demand for high quality music. 

New Orleans musicians who were active in the Windy City during the 1920s also refined their technique up north, with Louis Armstrong establishing the highest of standards for jazz improvisation or a Jelly Roll Morton's Hot Red Peppers showcasing the best elements of the New Orleans sound through his composing and arranging. As for the white musicians on the North and West sides of the city, Howell's book is less interesting. Many of the white orchestras, such as that led by Isham Jones, embraced aspects of jazz for their performances in white dance halls and hotels. For most whites in the city, jazz meant the "sweet" dance bands of Jones rather than the thrilling, "hot" jazz sounds emanating from the South Side. For a number of young whites, who ventured into the South Side not so much for slumming but to experience the innovations in jazz, they eventually went on to careers in the 1930s, perhaps the most illustrious case being Benny Goodman. 

Perhaps the greatest aspect of this cultural history lies in its ability to trace, in some cases very specifically, the conditions on the South Side that led to the jazz explosion in the 1920s (and its decline, leading to the Swing Age in next decade). The standardization of the blues influence in jazz, race records, the Great Migration, and big city living's need for entertainment all came together to create propitious conditions for jazz, a dynamic mirrored in other cities like New York. Moreover, the centrality of New Orleans in jazz is nuanced here, as Chicago's black South Side had long sported ragtime and vaudeville entertainment circuits connecting the city to other parts of the country. Even before the Original Dixieland Jazz Band came to Chicago in 1916, or Tom Brown's ragtime ensemble in 1915, the city featured entertainers such as Wilbur Sweatman, who may have been playing "jazz-like" clarinet years earlier. 

Thus, despite the fact that nearly half of the best jazz musicians in the city hailed from New Orleans, Chicago and the Midwest more broadly possessed unique conditions and local histories of black musical performance. It may also explain why jazz thrived so quickly in Chicago and New York City, especially if jazz was, as argued by Howell, linked to black enterprise and leisure in urban environment's like the "Stroll" of the South Side. This community ethos of jazz, through its ties to black-owned cabarets that became neighborhood institutions or the "race records" of jazz and blues popular among black consumers, is something that returned in subsequent decades with the AACM in the 1960s, but I would like to find out more information about Chicago jazz during the Swing and bop eras before contemplating the links between the Chicago jazz scene of the 1920s and avant-garde jazz collectives 40 years later.