New York

By the middle of the 20s New York was the natural center of the music industry. Most of the new phonograph companies were there as were many of the new radio stations. The music publishing business, nicknamed Tin Pan Alley, was also in New York.

New York's music industry imagined it had a problem.

While the New Orleans ensemble sound and the blues were sources of great dynamism, it believed that New Orleans music was too insistent, too raucous, too choppy for a mass market. It also believed that its upfront, raunchy sound made the connection between dance and sex a little too obvious.

This 'problem' had been addressed by a white West Coast arranger and pianist, Ferde Grofé, back in 1915. Grofé, familiar with both European classical music and 'low-life' dance music, was experimenting with symphonic techniques for a dance-band using saxophones to carry a harmonized theme with written parts for other instruments.

Paul Whiteman, an ambitious young bandleader. augmented his popular dance-band with Grofé's imaginative arrangements. This symphonic jazz was an immediate hit. (3 million copies sold of his very first disc in 1922.) On the strength of this success, the bandleader billed himself as the King of Jazz.

There was hardly any jazz in the New Orleans sense in Whiteman's orchestra. But it sounded like jazz with the rough edges smoothened away. His music certainly did not 'improve' jazz. But it did sound stylish and elegant and close enough to jazz to widen the taste for it. His influence in New York was so strong and inviting, that all musicians in the dance business tried to emulate him.

One such emulator was a black chemist Fletcher Henderson. Discarding his chemistry degree for his mother's piano lessons, Henderson and his arranger Don Redman improved on Whiteman's interplay of brass and reeds and the use of contrasting voices.

Henderson had realised that the dancing public was not as solidly sold on refinement and restraint as the music industry thought. He used jazz improvisers to raise the temperature of his music and the dancers.

Fletcher Henderson brought Louis Armstrong to New York in 1924 for just this reason. And he revolutionised the jazz of the next decade.

Duke Ellington followed suit. His dance-band called the Washingtonians hired 'Blubber' Miley to do the same thing. And, also falling into line was Whiteman, who changed his mind about 'discordant early jazz' and hired Bix Beiderbecke and saxophonist Frankie Tumbauer.

As the New York music scene changed on the upmarket dance floors, its sub-culture altered too with the city's Harlem Renaissance.

Black poetry, art, music, literature and philosophy flowered. For a while, white intellctuals began to see black people as the privy to the secret of a more spiritual and enlightened life than the materialism of their own.

Harlem's night spots became magnets for a white audience. And Duke Ellington at the Kentucky Club and, later at the Cotton Club, thrived on a frequently caricatured image of African life. Elington's famous 'Black and Tan Fantasy' was composed to celebrate this notion of 'the noble savage'.

But Harlem buzzed in more than just the night spots.

'Rent Parties', where tenants engaged musicians in their own homes (and charged a modest fee to cover their rent expenses) were immensely popular. Luckyeth Roberts, James P. Johnson and Fats Waller made a circuit out of these parties. In 1925, after coming out of prison, the guitarist and blues singer Huddie 'Leadbelly' Leadbetter also frequented these rent parties.

The music industry thrived and developed 'race' labels specifically for black shops, fuelling a blues boom.

Bessie Smith brought a fortune to troubled Columbia Records. Armstrong, King Oliver and Sydney Bechet were among the many young black jazz musicians who accompanied recording blues sessions...all the while learning more about phrasing, timing and emotion.

A new life-blood was flowing into dance music. By the early 30s Duke Ellington's blues-steeped verison of symphonic jazz had displaced Whiteman at the popularity polls.

But, alas, The Jazz Age, which Scot Fitzgerald called the 1920s in The Great Gatsby, died with the resulting slump of the Wall Street Crash.

And the Swing Age of the big bands stood waiting in the wings.