The Jazz Age: What is the Jazz Age ? The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s, ending with the Great Depression in which jazz music and dance styles became popular in the United States. Despite of social and economic upheaval, the 1900s prospered as a whole. Society was experiencing a total new way of life, characterized by new technology that enabled Americans to relax and enjoy what life had offered to them. During the 1920s, America had felt weary and optimistic after the previous events from World Warl but after new advances in technology were invented like the Model T and canned foods.
People began to spent more on travel and vacation resorts. Technology led to the age of electricity and many homes in America . Access to electricity gave Americans power to run labor-saving devices like refrigerators, washing machines ,radios ,phonographs, electric razor and iron and vacuum cleaners. These list of inventions helped shaped America in the 1920s. The first lightweight electric iron was invented by Earl Richardson. Richardson was an American businessman at the Ontario (California) Power Company .
In 1905 the iron with a hot point became the first commercially successful electric laundry iron and was formally named the Hotpoint iron in 1907. His design made the iron with more heat in the point. He had called his new company Hotpoint which he founded in 1911. The Thor washing machine was produced by Hurley Electric Laundry Equipment Company. It was the first electric washing machine sold in the United States . Alva J. Fisher was the Hurley engineer designer for the project. The Thor washing machine exploded mass marketed through America . Sales was reaching 913,000 units in 1928.
Music of the Jazz Age introduced Americans to large-scale radio broadcasts in 1922. American could listen to variety types of music without leaving their homes or going to a jazz club in a big city. African Americans Jazz Musicians such as Louis Armstrong received very little airtime because most radio stations preferred to play music of white American jazz singers. Big band jazz music , like Fletcher Henderson and James Reese Europe attracted large radio audiences. Jazz Music was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Different variety of ragtime ,French and opera came along to be known as ragtime and hot music .
Jazz music was easily recognized by its syncopation; meaning that variety of the rhythms were unexpected or stress a normally unstressed beat. Jazz Music was rebellious ,sheer energy that caught the listener and propelled them to a catchy dance rhythm. African Americans were having a strong influence on the musical tastes of white Americans and were developing their own sound to appeal to both races. This new sound gave new opportunities for African American musicians in the cosmopolitan music centers of the north like New York’s Harlem and the Chicago South in regards to recording and performing their jazz compositions.
White jazz fans increasingly began to migrate towards nightclub in African American neighborhoods to hear their music and to elaborate shows featuring jazz music ,scantily clad dancers ,drinks and images of Africa. Even though African Americans were leading the way in terms of skill and composition, most successful dance bands were predominantly white. When trumpeter Louis Armstrong moved from New Orleans to Chicago’s South side in 1922, he introduced Jazz to the north. His band, the Hot Five gave listeners an sound of rhythm to changed their perception of life.
Eventually moved on and pursued a soloist career, he became very famous for playing the trumpet and played in theatres. Edward Duke Ellington wrote almost six thousand tunes and performed syncopated music heavily influenced by ragtime. He was apart of the Cotton Club but left in 1931. Songs like Sophisticated Lady and It Don’t Mean A Thing , put him on the Top Five Charts and gave him his hits for signatures songs. Later years, he was a grammy favorite , and won a grammy for original best Jazz composition in 1986. The album was called In the Beginning, God. Duke continued to perform until he was overcome by illness with lung cancer in 1974.
Bessie Smith sang of unfilled love, poverty and oppression in songs like “Nobody Knows You When You Are Down and Out”. She worked with legendary trumpet artist Louis Armstrong to perform amazing tunes like “Cold In Blue Hands and “I Ain’t Nobody Gonna Play Second Fiddle”. She became the highest paid black entertainer in the world. While music was affecting the United States , new ideas with urban culture was helped glorified youth , and freedom for women . Different idea about marriage began to change. It was ta total more focus on love,romance and friendship. No longer was an economic partnership arranged with families.
People were choosing between whether to marry or not marry at all and pursue a career. Women began to defined themselves as Flappers. Wearing bobbed hair ,looser clothing, red lipstick , dancing, smoking and drinking. They were a generation of young western women, who wanted to enjoy themselves rather than be always conventional. Colleges also encouraged women to seek careers and challenge traditional values. It gave them a chance to be different and emerge to a higher level for themselves. The Jazz Age was golden period in American literature, distinguished of writers as Willa Cather, William Faulkner, F.
Scott Fitzgerald , Ernest Hemingway , Sinclair Lewis and Carl Sandburg. At the same time American writers began to influence world literature . In 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald reached a new peak in his career when the publication of The Great Gatsby. This book captured the era’s moods and styles . Ernest Hemingway writes “For Whom The Bell Tolls’ and A Farewell to Arms about war. He was seen as one of the greatest novelists during the novelists for his work. Poetry was a creativity in literary works in special intensity to given feelings and expression. Poet T. S. Elliot wrote an amazing poem The Wasteland and The Hollow Man .
He described a world that will “not with a bang ,but a whimper”. The Harlem Renaissance emerge many of Black African poets. Poets like Claude Mckay whose eloquent poetry about American racism included poems like “If We Must Die Yet and The Lynching . Langston Hughes, who was known as The Poet Laureate of Harlem wrote The negro speaks of rivers. The Weary Blues and I too as a response to I hear America singing by Walt Whitman. While Poets shaped American culture art was heavily gravitated to New York’s Greenwich Village . Artist Edward Hopper painted scenes of loneliness and isolation and isolation in urban life.
He was widely acknowledged as the most important realist painter of the twentieth-century America . His works demonstrated the realism is not merely a literal or photographic copying of what we seen. The Cinema’s or Pictures started with silent black and whites movies. Movies explained a plot and piano made of actors Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keeton, Charlie Chaplin, and Clara Bow. The 1920s were accompanied by piano or organ music. The first all-color movie was ‘Toll of the Sea ,released in 1922 and the first movie was with sound effects and music was Don Juan .
Charlie Chaplin’s popular silent comedy The Gold Rush first premiered on August 16, 1925. In 1927 Al Jolson a Jazz singer starred in ‘The Talkies’. Other Stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino , Mary Pickford , Buster Keaton, and Mae West were idolized for their performers. During the 1920s movies were a cheap form entertainment and by 1929 average hundred million Americans to Cinema every week. While Jazz ,poetry ,and inventions were shaping the World a rise in something approach . The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan and poverty in ural area of South contributed to the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities like New York , Michigan, and Virginia . Klux Klux Klan rise followed after World Warl.
The KKK were recognized as protectors of traditional values and opposers of immigration. The movement of the Great Migration was opposed by the KKK. The second KKK attracted a variety of new members to increase their racial issues and nativism in the Jazz Age . On August 8, 1925 more than forty thousand Klansmen marched through Washington filling Pennsylvania Avenue. Later in the 1920’s because of scandals the Klan began to decline.