The document summarizes the origins and development of jazz music in the 1920s. It discusses how the Great Migration led many African Americans to move from the rural South to northern cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia. In these cities, rent parties featuring boogie woogie piano styles emerged. Technological advances also helped spread jazz, with Thomas Edison developing the phonograph in 1877 and early jazz recordings by bands like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Louis Armstrong significantly innovated jazz in the 1920s through his melodic and rhythmic style and approach to improvisation. However, some saw jazz as a corrupting influence associated with the underclass.

1. Jass Becomes Jazz
1920s
The Urban Experience
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2. Migration
• The Early part of 20th century saw the large scale movement of
blacks from the Southern states to Northern cities.
• As plantation economies dried up Blacks were attracted to the
industrialised North’s large manufacturing plants.
• Chicago, New York, Detroit and Philadelphia.

3. Boogie Woogie
• Parties were held to
raise money for rent
known as “rent parties”.
• Featured solo pianist
who needed to convey
the rhythmic feel.
• Boogie Woogie
produced.

4. Musical characteristics of
Boogie Woogie
• Piano instrumental music.
• Ostinato L.H pattern (Rolling Octaves).
• Blues form.
• Frequently Improvised.

5. Boogie Woogie Artists
• Meade Lux Lewis
• Big Joe Turner
• Albert Ammons

6. HUGE TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
• In 1877 Thomas Edison
developed a method of putting
sound on to an artificial medium;
The Edison Phonograph.
• The first “recorded” jazz band
was the all white Original
Dixieland Jazz Band's (ODJB)
recordings.
• There was now a rush to record
the arrived black artists and
imitation white groups all playing
Jazz in the 1920’s.

7. Louis Armstrong
• Armstrong went to
Chicago in 1922 with
Joe Oliver’s band.
• He parted Oliver to start
his own group the Hot
5’s and the Hot 7’s.

8. Louis’ Innovations
• Melodic interpretation
• Rhythmic phrasing. “innovator of swing”
• Approach to improvisation
• Scat Singing.

9. Jazz – Socially located
• Jazz had spread to Europe and other parts of the
world
• The associated images of freedom and
connection to alcohol and underclass meant it
was frowned upon by certain levels of society.
• Some saw it as the perverse music of the Negro
corroding society.
• It had set the foundation for the thoroughly
dominant Swing age to follow.

10. Works
• Baraka, Amiri. Blues People: Negro Music in White America.
New York: W. Morrow, 1963. Print.
• Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History.
New York: W.W. Norton, 1971. Print.
• Starr, Larry, and Christopher A. Waterman. American Popular
Music: From Minstrelsy to Mp3. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007. Print.

11. www.stefanwalcott.com
music.culture.music