Blog 2

The Importance of New York to Jazz

Chicago was a city deeply entrenched with jazz in the 1920’s, producing some outstanding artists and giving the music an environment where it could thrive. However, what New York offered far surpassed that of the Windy City. It was the bustling centre of American culture and the creative and competitive demands of the city produced new forms of jazz and took the genre to greater heights.

The conditions of New York city made it a perfect setting for the growth and development of jazz music. With the Harlem Renaissance, during the 1920’s, black cultural and intellectual life was able to blossom, “In this new setting an entire cultural elite had come together, drawing confidently on the full range of human expression” (Gioia 89). However, despite this side of Harlem there was another much darker one reflecting the cruel realities of life. These realities came in the form of economic strife such as low salaries and daunting rent payment. The interactions between these two sides are one of the major factors that enabled jazz to triumph in the city. While the developing intellectual, creative side of Harlem set the cultural context for jazz the harsh economies and rent parties of the neighborhood created the music (Gioia 90). But what New York offered that no other city could was Broadway. The city was the center of American Theatre giving creative minds an even greater platform to flourish on. Performers like Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller now had opportunities to play in the various orchestras that accompanied these productions and even feature in them which only made them richer and more famous. Furthermore, the racial situation of New York helped contribute to the success of jazz. Despite being a largely black population in Harlem many of the African Americans looked down on the jazz musicians perceiving this southern style of music as unsophisticated. They wanted to be able to identify themselves with the higher, whiter echelons of society and thus condemned the cultures that migrated to New York from places like New Orleans. Therefore, in order to best satisfy these cultural desires, the musicians of the city had to create something new out of the crucible of New York.

The community pressure to respond to their temporal and spatial environment forced those with genius to produce new forms of music that wouldn’t exist if they weren’t in that environment (Lecture 1/29). One of these that I feel highlights New York city was stride piano with the most famous New York stride musicians being James P. Johnson, Willie “The Lion” Smith and Fats Waller. Stride piano playing became popular in New York alongside particular styles of dancing and was a key component to the Harlem rent parties. Harlem stride piano, “stood as a bridge between the ragtime idiom of the turn of the century and the new jazz piano styles that were in the process of evolution” (Gioia 91). This competitive world of New York stride piano playing is highlighted by James P. Johnson. Although he wrote many popular songs, some broadway shows and even a one-act opera it is as “the Father of Harlem Stride Piano” that James P. Johnson will always be best known (James P. Johnson article, 30). Johnson’s music linked the worlds of ragtime and jazz but what made him special was his ability to look outside of these styles for techniques he could apply to his compositions. His desire to find these new styles to improve the appeal of his playing highlights the competitiveness of the New York jazz scene. While there may have been better musicians, “few artists of his day sensed so clearly the latent potential of African American music or worked so vigorously to bring it into reality”(Gioia 93).

Although Chicago was very important to the development of jazz New York offered it a larger capitalist nexus. The city allowed jazz to flourish with its creative competitiveness and the economic stimulus it provided..



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