New York: Jazz Capital

The 1920's are called the Jazz Age for a reason – they were boisterous, loud, hot, economically bullish and defined by the jazz music emanating from the instruments of greats such as Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington.  However, while both cities were integral to the growth of jazz, I believe that New York contributed more to the tradition through the development of the Harlem Stride piano style and the popularization of big bands such as Duke Ellington's at venues like the Cotton Club, where the artists and the consumers of art formed a rapport and entered into a dialogue with one another.

New York was a fertile spawning ground of jazz music due to the European musical and social sensibilities of the richer, more established black Harlemites and the Southern swing and blues brought by former sharecroppers during the Great Migration. These two communities were simultaneously at odds and intrinsically linked together. The richer Harlem, famous for the Harlem Renaissance,  attempted to distance itself from the more rough-and-tumble Harlem of “racy music and racier dancing, of cabarets famous or notorious according to their king, of amusement in which abandon and sophistication are cheek by jowl” (Survey Graphic). In the poorer sections of Harlem, festivities thrown to help cover the cost of lodging (known as rent parties) used the musical acrobatics of skillful pianists to attract dancers (Gioia, 96). This gave rise to a very competitive yet mutually respectful community of musicians who, as with Bahktin's theory, in turn interacted with their audience to create the most mutually compatible sound.

Their most famous prodigy was James P. Johnson, who first popularized the usage of a percussive beat with a “single note on the first and third beats and a chord of three or four notes on the second and fourth beats” (John S. Wilson, The New York Times). His style is one of the first styles of jazz piano, giving credence to the importance of New York as a center of jazz; Chicago's style, meanwhile, remained fairly derivative of the New Orleans sound. Of all of the New York composers, it was Duke Ellington's compositions that really put the Big Apple on the map.

Duke Ellington rose to prominence after jazz had already became a major force in America's cultural identity. He represented a new breed of artists, highly educated, socialized and stylized in order to match the increasing popularity of jazz. The new jazz consumer was more high-class and was predominantly white and upper-middle class, a stark change from the predominantly poor, black audience of the rent parties. His compositions reflected this increased sophistication, and he became famous for his ability to create moods through a sparse aesthetic (Gioia, 121). Through this maturation, Ellington pushed jazz into the realm of fine art. Such professionalism was not as visible in Chicago at the time. Ellington's skillfully crafted persona and compositions that reflected the intense knowledge he had of his artists' strengths and weaknesses contributed to the modern vision of jazz that exists today and cements New York as the center of innovation in the 1920's.