The Tool Desk
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What did 1920s music sound like?
Jazz was varied and evolving. Its roots lay in Southern African American music, and during the decade Black and white bands played it around the country. The term “jazz” itself had uncertain origins, and the music’s meaning changed rapidly; it should not be treated as a single fixed style. The Smithsonian’s account of jazz and blues traces that development and emphasizes the music’s African American foundations.
Blues was another important part of the decade’s musical life and recording history. Popular songs and dance repertoire, including material associated with Tin Pan Alley, circulated alongside jazz and blues. The available historical accounts do not establish a reliable ranking of genres or show that one style displaced the others.
How did blues reach a national audience?
The Library of Congress credits the commercial success of W. C. Handy’s compositions with helping bring blues to wider attention. In 1920, Mamie Smith’s recording of “Crazy Blues” reached a national audience and helped spark a vogue for women blues singers performing with bands. That story is part of the wider account of blues in popular song.
#1 Best Overall
- This collection, impeccably restored to pristine clarity, is a own time machine, a way of buying into those far-off times of glitzy pleasure, when sober reality was simply not on the agenda
- This collection, impeccably restored to pristine clarity, is a own time machine, a way of buying into those far-off times of glitzy pleasure, when sober reality was simply not on the agenda
- Including The Charleston, in a version by the Savoy Orpheans which is notable for some typically tricky saxophone choruses and the danceable tempo
- With Paul Whiteman - a true giant of American dance music in every sense, for not only was Whiteman a man of impressive physical bulk, he was also the 'King of Jazz',
- Featuring Louis Armstrong, the most celebrated jazz musician of his day. His creativity, instrumental command and rhythmic daring setting the pace for a generation of musicians
A “blues” label in a song title does not by itself prove that the song represents the blues tradition: the Library of Congress notes that the word was also used as a passing commercial fashion. The distinction matters when describing a period in which marketing and musical traditions could overlap.
Who made the music, and where was it heard?
African American musicians created and sustained the traditions at the center of jazz and blues. Wider popularity among white audiences and increased commercial attention to Black performers existed alongside racism, exclusion and unequal access to venues. Black musical life was not limited to commercial entertainment: musicians also played for Black audiences, dancers, families and churches. The Smithsonian’s history of jazz places the music in that broader social context.
Rank #2
- These selections are prime monuments of the Jazz Age and arguably, some of America's finest jazz performances.
- "he best introduction to early jazz music I have come across and features a huge variety of artists from Jelly Roll Morton and Bix Beiderbecke to Basie, Ellington and the splendid Muggsy Spanier."
- It is no exaggeration to say that the fusion of several vital strands in American popular culture - the emergence of jazz on record and the upsurge in social dancing - brought an outpouring of individual creativity that was without precedent. As one jazz master after another came to maturity and triumphed, so others, influenced and inspired by their predecessors, followed on.
- All of these giants are here - enduring legends every one: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Johnny Dodds, Duke Ellington - the alphabetical litany goes on.
- The best in Twenties and Thirties hot jazz. Small groups and big bands, vocalists and instrumental stars, blues and swing, technical virtuosity and simple statements. No wonder Jelly Roll wanted more!
Live performance remained important, while phonograph records allowed performances to circulate beyond the rooms where they were made. The Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry essays describe recordings by Black jazz and blues artists as part of the record business and the preservation of a creative era.
What changed when radio arrived?
Radio added a new way for music to travel, but it did not instantly replace records, sheet music, home performance or live entertainment. Smithsonian dates KDKA’s start of regular broadcasts in Pittsburgh to November 2, 1920. That is an early broadcasting milestone, not evidence that every household owned a radio or heard the same music. Smithsonian’s 1920 collection documents the date and its context.
Rank #3
- Of course, to lovers of between-the-wars jazz, swing is far more than a portmanteau term for a musical style. But try to get a fan or indeed, a critic to define what they mean by swing and you tend to get a response which echoes Fats Waller's famous dictum: “If you have to ask, you'll never know.
- What better way to open our marvellous collection of re-mastered classics from the swing era than with At The Woodchopper's Ball? Woody Herman's greatest commercial and popular success features Woody's haunting blues clarinet and Neil Reid's punchy trombone with Saxie Mansfield on tenor-saxophone and trumpeter Steady Nelson.
- Benny Goodman makes two appearances in our compilation and that is only fitting, given his dominant position in the swing pantheon. Christened the 'King of Swing' by his promotions people, Goodman was an incisive instrumentalist, a clarinet virtuoso who had emerged from Chicago's Jewish ghetto, made good musically and formed an excellent big band.
- It was Lil Armstrong (nee Hardin) who set her husband Louis on the path to stardom with some astute promotional ideas. When he moved on and they divorced, Lil re-built her career as a bandleader and cut some tasty small-group records. Her tribute to the Lindy Hop (a dance craze pioneered at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom) spots her girlish vocal and some hot trumpet from the underrated Shirley Clay.
- Louis Armstrong so much liked Swing That Music that he used it as the title for his (ghosted) autobiography. He made two versions of this exciting piece in 1936, the first with his own band and this with the popular Jimmy Dorsey orchestra just three months later.
Was all 1920s music jazz?
No. “Jazz Age” is a useful shorthand for jazz’s visibility and its association with the decade’s cultural changes, including Prohibition-era speakeasies. It is not a complete inventory of what Americans played or heard. Blues, popular songs and dance music also belonged to the period, and jazz itself encompassed changing sounds and settings.
Nor should the decade be made to sound like the later swing era. Smithsonian describes the proliferation of big bands and remote radio broadcasts in the years before World War II; those later developments should not be projected across all of the 1920s. Nightlife, too, was only one setting among community, family, church and dance contexts, while racial exclusion shaped access to some entertainment venues.
Rank #4
- Louis Armstrong is an American icon, the first great soloist and conceptual play-maker of the new music, an artistic innovator who became a popular entertainer, recognised everywhere in the world. Here he plays the immortal St. Louis Blues, the best-known of W. C. Handy's compositions, giving it a zesty quality, allowing his exceptional instrumental facility full reign
- Louis Armstrong is an American icon, the first great soloist and conceptual play-maker of the new music, an artistic innovator who became a popular entertainer, recognised everywhere in the world. Here he plays the immortal St. Louis Blues, the best-known of W. C. Handy's compositions, giving it a zesty quality, allowing his exceptional instrumental facility full reign
- The Charleston Chasers were a white recording group, Red Nichols providing the careful trumpet lead, with rubbery trombone by Miff Mole, something of a star in twenties New York.
- Bix Beiderbecke, the cornetist from Davenport, Iowa, was destined for a safe middle-class professional career. Instead, he fell for the lure of jazz and was soon on his way, first in Chicago and then on to New York.
- Sidewalks Of New York is by Duke Ellington's great 1940 band and reveals the 'wa-wa' trombone of Tricky Sam Nanton (who achieved his effects by using a plumber's rubber plunger as a mute.
How to think about the decade’s musical variety
- Tradition: Jazz, blues, and popular song or dance repertoire overlapped in the wider musical landscape.
- Setting: Music could be heard in community life, dance settings, commercial entertainment or recorded performances.
- Distribution: Live performance and phonograph records were joined by emerging radio broadcasts.
- Social context: African American musicians shaped central traditions, while racism affected commercial visibility and access.
These dimensions help explain the decade without claiming a complete genre census or numerical comparison of audiences and sales, which the cited historical accounts do not provide.
Quick Recap
Best Value
- 20 Chilled-Out Cool Jazz Tracks
- The title track is Benny Carter's: Nightfall comes from a session organised by the writer Leonard Feather and made in April 1936
- Animation and vitality of the best swing bands
- The music swings, but there's subtlety and sophistication in these jazz performances as well.
- The CD album includes an informative physical booklet with liner notes.
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