Jazz Music In The 1920s Essay

America in the 1920s saw many instances of drastic change, impacting the lives of many Americans. The Roaring Twenties brought about many new inventions, wealth, and a new outlook on the common American lifestyle. With these new times came new influences and much change to the musical industry of jazz. This investigation will study the evolution of jazz music in the rapidly changing times of America in the 1920s and how the new American lifestyle and optimistic times influenced the music. Two sources that are used in this investigation are Jazz from its Origins to the Present by Lewis Porter, Michael Ullman, and Edward Hazell, and Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History by William Howland Kenney and published in 1993, which will be evaluated for their origins, purposes, values and limitations.
The book, Chicago Jazz, a Cultural History 1904-1930, was written by William Howland Kenny and published in 1993. This book is a secondary source which explains many of the cultural elements and emotions – such as liveliness – and how they were infused into jazz. The purpose of this text is to analyze jazz music and its culture from its origins up to the great depression. It was written as a scholarly text and as a means of exploring the past of jazz. This source demonstrates value as …show more content…
Though there were pieces of written sheet music that were published, commercialized recordings and the insertion of jazz into movies, finding jazz music examples from the twenties is limited. This is due to the fact that jazz music in the twenties was experimental. There was a rise of improvised solos and a free form manner of playing songs that deviated from the more structural ragtime – which rose prior to the 1920s. Unless there were recordings of songs, the same song could be played many different ways during different