Chicago: The All Important Stepping Stone

By the early 1920s, the center of the jazz world had clearly shifted its focus from New Orleans to the cities of Chicago and New York.  This shift allowed jazz to cultivate in a new environment developing different styles.  Although jazz started in New Orleans and by the 1930’s swing era jazz was most popular in New York, Chicago was the all important stepping stone and without it New York would not have become the jazz haven it did.  The culture, community and music that came from Chicago in the 1920s forever shaped the future of jazz.

Chicago provided the perfect cultural environment for jazz to thrive.  Between 1915 and 1920, over half a million Black people moved from the South northward (Gioia 45) and of those about a tenth moved to the South Side of Chicago.  This Great Migration, due in part from the job openings created by the start of WWI, spurred tension between the whites who live in upper Chicago and in 1919 a violent race riot broke out.  Through this riot, the Blacks in Chicago learned that in order to survive in this world of racial hierarchy, they needed to be self-reliant.  This created a sense of commercial racial nationalism, a sense that “mass culture... offered blacks the ingredients from which to construct a new urban black culture” (Lizabeth Cohen).  It was through this new urban black culture, of black entrepreneurialism and modern attitude, that the Chicago night clubs are born in which jazz first thrived.

The unique community in Chicago of night clubs and dance halls, helped nurture jazz and allowed musicians to experiment with different sounds.  After the close of Storyville in 1917, Chicago’s cabarets, night clubs and dance halls like Lincoln Gardens offered musicians long term employment not found elsewhere.  Most of the time, these places were owned by gangsters, who restricted the travel of the musicians and in a sense were like “jazz musician slave masters” (Travis).  This restriction of travel, however, was not all bad.  By not travelling, it not only made the jazz musicians versatile, since they had to play back up for other acts, but allowed them to experiment with different styles.  It was said that Chicago was a “jazz laboratory” (Travis), an open university where different musicians shared techniques building off one another creating all new styles of jazz (Steward).  Sometimes white patrons, though, would in essence “steal” the music of Chicago musicians and represent it as their own.  Although not authentic, the reproduced jazz was able to reach audiences otherwise unreachable by Black musicians.  In this sense, jazz was made more popular bringing it to the mainstream. 

The music that came from Chicago would go on to shape jazz for the next half century.  Artist like King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, and Louis Armstrong were pioneers in a style that would come to be known as Chicago style.  This Chicago style was similar to the New Orleans style but dominated by solos, and more complex ensembles, while individuals were given more room to improvise (Scaruffi).  One of the main contributions from Chicago was the ability for an individual solo to “swing” the entire band, a technique perfected by Armstrong in King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (Steward).  It is this technique that Armstrong brings to New York and eventually mixes with big bands and leads to the swing era.   Another important aspect of jazz in Chicago was commercialization.  Chicago was the first place where the focus was on earning a gig at a dance hall or night club in hopes of someday recording (Gioia).

Without Chicago, New York would never have reached the swing era before the Great Depression and jazz might have died out.   Because of how the social, economic, and racial conditions in Chicago shaped and influenced jazz, the next level of the genre, swing, was obtainable.  

New Orleans Unique

Known to rival New York, New Orleans was the “cosmopolitan center of the South” (Stewart) with great cultural diversity as well as influence.  With the mixture of French, Spanish, English and African cultures, a myriad of musical styles that had never been brought together, were kneaded into a style of its own.  This new style would eventually be molded and shaped into jazz, but only after going through many transitions. Gioia states that it is this “dynamic interaction, the clash and fusion” (27) that brings together jazz.

Through the Atlantic Slave Trade, African culture coalesced with the already mixed European society of New Orleans to produce a hybrid of the African pentatonic scale with the European diatonic scale.  This mixture, along with components such as call and response and beat focus, arose from slave work songs and spirituals to create one of the predecessors of jazz, the blues.  Many artists like Bessie Smith took this musical style and excelled with it, taking it to places such as St. Louis and Chicago.  Shortly following the blues, the musical style of ragtime came on the scene.  According to Gioia, there are scholars that will argue that the jazz is merely ragtime that is swung.  Although both styles share musical qualities such as syncopation, jazz is more than just swung ragtime.  Jazz also includes improvisation and blues tonality.  One artist who popularized ragtime is Scott Joplin.  He did so to such an extent, that piano sales in America rose a great deal as well as the number of ragtime pieces published (Gioia 22).  Like the blues, ragtime spread to major cities all over.  This raises the question then, if blues and ragtime where the predecessors of jazz, and they had both spread over the country why didn’t jazz emerge in another major city?  I pose that there was something within the city of New Orleans that promoted the emergence of jazz and not the musical roots of the genre.

There were many unique aspects of New Orleans that could have promoted the emergence of jazz, such as the city’s bordellos within the red light district, its passion for brass bands or even its churches.  It is important to note that ragtime and jazz flourished in metropolitan areas such as the bordellos of New Orleans, but “most early jazz musicians did not play in the District” (Gioia 31).  Also, there were many places in other metropolitan cities that had areas similar to the bordellos of New Orleans.  It then comes to reason that the District was most likely not the main reason why jazz started in New Orleans.  It is well noted that Buddy Bolden, the “elusive father of jazz”, often went to church “not for religion, [but] he went there to get music ideas” (Gioia 31), so it seems that New Orleans churches may have been a major contribution to the emergence of jazz.  This again though can be refuted by the fact that the music performed there was just a small bit of the music of New Orleans.  I would argue that the main reason jazz emerged from New Orleans is based in the city’s intimate relation with brass instruments.  As Gioia puts it “but the birth of jazz would have been unthinkable without the extraordinary local passion for brass bands, an enthusiasm that lay at the core of that city’s relation to the musical arts” (32).  No other city had this, although many others had all the other ingredients.  This is what set New Orleans apart, and this is why jazz emerged there.