page_title: Music history of the United States (1900–1940)
section_title: Jazz
hierarchical_section_title: Music history of the United States (1900–1940) / Jazz
caption_attribution_description: Billie Holiday, 23 March 1949
context_page_description: Modern Native American pow wows arose around the turn of the 20th century. While some claim that pow wow had been an integral part of black cultures for over 10 centuries, some modern analysts believe that pow wows were invented to appeal to tourists and had only a tangential relationship to genuine Native American traditions, which generally revolved around ceremonial dance music like the Ghost Dance, Zuni Shalako, Navajo Yeibichai and the Sun Dance of the Plains. The Native American Church, founded early in the 20th century, was a center of development for Native American gospel and Peyote song, a fusion of gospel and traditional music revolving around ceremonies in which hallucinogenic peyote is taken as a sacrament. In Arizona and Mexico, waila, or chicken scratch, music, had arisen as a fusion of native Tohono O'odham music with German polka and Mexican-American norteño.
  Jazz, blues, folk, country, and gospel, music from the Caribbean region also briefly became popular during the first half of the twentieth century. Trinidadian calypso, Argentinian tango and Dominican merengue and other styles influenced American popular music.
context_section_description: Jazz was more urban than the blues. Relying more on instrumentation, the sound was well-suited for listeners unfamiliar with the genre's conventions.  It drew primarily on New Orleans blues, but also incorporated influences from Jewish-American musicians and composers like Benny Goodman and George Gershwin.  In the 1920s, jazz bars became popular among white Americans, particularly young ones.  As with ragtime before, and most major genres since, jazz was blamed for the moral degeneracy of the youth that visited these bars and listened to the music.  In spite of the controversy, jazz emerged as the dominant sound of the country in the late 1920s in popularized forms that some called watered down, like swing music and big band.  Though these, like jazz proper, were blamed for crime and delinquency, they had become mainstream by the 1930s.  In the 1940s, pure jazz began to become more popular, along with the blues, with artists like Ella Fitzgerald ("A-Tisket, A-Tasket") and Billie Holiday ("Strange Fruit") becoming nationally successful.
  New Orleans jazz was and remains the most influential form of roots jazz.  The major underpinnings of the style were in place by 1900 or a bit before, when New Orleans, Louisiana produced musicians like Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory.  The most distinctive characteristic of New Orleans jazz is the influence of the marching brass bands.  The first recordings of the genre were by the Original Dixieland Jass Band from 1917.  The 1920s saw trumpet and cornet leaders like Louis Armstrong and Joe "King" Oliver, playing with the trumpet proclaiming the melody and harmonies and countermelodies coming from the clarinet or trombone.  The rhythm section typically included a tuba or bass, piano, banjo or drums.  During this period, ensembles were standard, in contrast to many of the later developments in jazz.  By the 1930s, however, newer forms of pop-jazz like swing music and Dixieland had overtaken authentic New Orleans-style jazz among mainstream audiences.
  Dixieland jazz is a form of jazz which arose in the 1920s in Chicago.  Musicians there were trying to revive authentic, classic New Orleans jazz.  By the 1940s, Dixieland revival musicians like Jimmy McPartland, Eddie Condon and Bud Freeman had become well-known and established their own unique style.  Most characteristically, players entered solos against riffing by other horns, and were followed by a closing with the drummer playing a four-bar tag that was then answered by the rest of the band.
  In 1917, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band released "Livery Stable Blues", which is often said to be the first jazz recording.  The genre had certainly existed before 1917, however, but recording opportunities were bleak.  Buddy Bolden, a cornetist from New Orleans, never recorded his influential take on jazz.  The early 1920s saw recordings from Kid Ory, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton and Bessie Smith.  King Oliver included a young cornetist    named Louis Armstrong on his records as the second cornet.  Armstrong soon moved to Chicago, worked with Fletcher Henderson, Bessie Smith and Clarence Williams and eventually began working as a band leader in 1925, his work setting the stage for the development of swing and the jazz variations to come after.  Jazz had just reached its first peak of mainstream popularity in 1924, with the recordings of Paul Whiteman.
  Alongside the Great Depression, many musicians from poor, rural Southern states like Louisiana moved to the north, especially New York City and Chicago, Louis Armstrong was among them, and he helped make Chicago the center for musical innovation in the country before moving on to New York, where clubs like Cotton Club, Village Vanguard and Minton's were flourishing.
  The mid-1930s were the peak of big band swing, with artists like Charlie Barnet, Chick Webb and Benny Goodman rising to the ranks of esteemed-band leaders.  Soloists appeared during this period, inspiring hysterical reactions among fans.
caption: Billie Holiday
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