Jazz in the 20s

        The evolution of jazz from the New Orleans ensemble style, to the “hot” club music that increasing emphasized the role of the soloist, and then to Swing, is suggestive of the corresponding shift in the center of Jazz music from New Orleans to Chicago and eventually to New York.  New York may have produced its own unique fusion of Northern and Southern influences in the form of Stride piano, but its late beginnings in improvisation and blues intonation are largely indebted to the arrival of southern bands before whom, one musician claimed “there wasn’t an Eastern musician who could really play the blues” (Fletcher Henderson, 101).  Louis Armstrong’s Chicago style playing, which “represented the Western style of jazz” (103), was similarly disseminated in New York during his 1924 tenure in the Fletcher Henderson orchestra.  Thus although it was in New York that big bands of the Swing Era emerged in the late 20s, these developments were made on a foundation that had its origin in Chicago.
Particularly in Chicago, many of the changes during the early 1900s in the American socioeconomic climate led to shifts in jazz's geographic and aesthetic locality.  The Great Migration led more than "1.5 million" (Gioia, 46) African Americans northward in search of better social treatment and jobs that were a result of expanding industrialism.  Black musicians in particular were affected by the closing of Storyville and were also accompanied by white New Orleans jazz musicians who wanted to "tap the larger economic base of the northern city" (46).  Directly related to industrialism was the development of new technology like recordings and broadcasts that allowed musicians "who offered a personal, direct...delivery....to rise to fame" (Gioia 83).
In Chicago, the new population of blacks participated heavily in mainstream culture by buying from chain stores and standard brands but ironically it made them "feel more independent and influential as a race, not more integrated" (Making a New Deal, 154) as the mass market was molded to the shape of their needs.  This created a new urban identity that "expressed race pride through jazz". (154)  How specifically this changed jazz is difficult to ascertain but it certainly changed the way jazz was perceived by the black population and the relationship between the musician and his music.
        Black musicians in Chicago at the time worked mainly in clubs, which experienced great popularity, but were often owned by gangsters who, through coercion, managed their employees tightly, and as a result the "black people who played [jazz] were never free agents."(The Jazz Slave Masters, 48)  They also faced great discriminatory injustice from the whites, whose clubs they were prohibited from entering, but whose musicians would feverishly attend black performances essentially "doing what is known in the theatrical world as stealing." (You Are Going To Be More Than Me, 68)  This is interaction is some of the most direct evidence for Bahktin's dialogic theory that art is created through the figurative dialogue between the performer and the audience. In this case, the white's attempts to imitate black jazz would create a music that would in turn provoke a response from black musicians.  This theft however played a large part in the creation of what some would call the Chicago style.
There are two somewhat distinct lineages of the type of jazz music played in Chicago during the 1920s.  The older one is essentially the progression of the New Orleans ensemble style, brought by bands like the Original Creole Orchestra and King Oliver's, which under the influence of Louis Armstrong, began to focus on improvisational soloing while pursuing a "hotter" sound that was in demand at the various dance clubs of the time.  This style is described as being highly reminiscent of the "old style" (New Orleans) but also the backdrop for "[Oliver's] protege's discovery of a freer rhythmic form" (King Oliver, 48).
A separate but related style is that of Bix Beiderbecke and other white musicians whose sound emerged from imitations of New Orleans jazz and later the Austin High Gang who attempted to imitate Beiderbecke and traditional influences like the Original Dixieland Jazz band.  Some have suggested that these imitations "[were] not a style at all" (Chicagoans, 162), but Gioia points out several distinguishing characteristics from the New Orleans style such as “a certain restless energy” and that “counterpoint lines no longer weave together." (Gioia, 72)  In particular there has been what is described as a "thrusting aggressiveness" to their music that sets them apart from "the recordings of that period by New Orleans" men (Chicagoans, 162).
  Together these styles formed what Gioia describes as "the quintessential sound of jazz." (Gioia, 71)