1924 in jazz
This is a timeline documenting events of jazz in the year 1924. Musicians born that year included the drummer Max Roach and singers Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington. In 1924, Leopold Stokowski, the British orchestral conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, observed that jazz had "come to stay." Jazz scene. In 1924 the improvised solo had become an integral part of most jazz performances Jazz was becoming increasingly popular in New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago and New York City and 1924 was something of a benchmark of jazz being seen as a serious musical form. John Alden Carpenter  insisted that jazz was now 'our contemporary popular music', and Irving Berlin made a statement that jazz was the "rhythmic beat of our everyday lives" and the music's "swiftness is interpretive of our verve and speed". Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1924, publicly embraced jazz as a musical art form and praised jazz musicians. In 1924, George Gershwin wrote "Rhapsody in Blue", widely regarded as one of the finest compositions of the 20th century, saying he conceived it "as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America–of our vast melting pot, of our incomparable national  pep, our blues, our metropolitan madness." Black jazz entrepreneur and producer Clarence Williams recorded groups in New Orleans, among them Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong. Williams moved from New Orleans to Chicago and opened a record store. In Chicago, Earl Hines formed a group and incidentally inhabited the neighboring apartment to Armstrong while he was in Chicago. Also in Chicago, trumpeter Tommy Ladnier begins playing in King Oliver's band. Bechet moved to New England with Ellington during the summer of 1924, playing dances. While in 1924 in jazz, ensembles in the Kansas City area began play a style with  a four even beat ground beat as opposed to a New Orleans two beat ground beat behind a 4/4 melody, European jazz included a fox trot by the Swiss composer Frank Martin for the Marionette Theatre in Paris. Charlie Parker grew up in Kansas City listening to this style of jazz. In 1924, Django Reinhardt became a guitarist and began playing the clubs of Paris. Noted Classic Blues singer Bessie Smith began to achieve major fame. Criticism. Both Europe and the US had critics of jazz in 1924. While the songwriter and music business executive Arnold Shaw wrote in 1989  that "1924 was a 'hot' year in jazz...", a columnist for "The New York Times" wrote in 1924 that "Jazz is to real music exactly what most of the 'new poetry,' so-called, is to real poetry. Both are without the structure and form essential to music and poetry alike, and both are the products, not of innovators, but of incompetents." The American composer and critic, Virgil Thomson, wrote in 1924 that jazz rhythm shakes but doesn't flow; it lacks a climax; and it "never gets anywhere emotionally". Jazz in 1924 was just "popular syncopated music" according to the  Austrian composer Hugo Riesenfeld.