Jazzbandism

Abstract

A paramount example of “making it new” in the early twentieth century was the unprecedented global phenomenon of jazz. This chapter chronicles the impact of jazz, understood not strictly as music but as agent of American modernity as the implacable engine of the new. During the Twenties a reciprocity between modernism and jazz was taken for granted; jazz was lifestyle modernism. In Europe jazz was welcomed as a vehicle of postwar revitalization. In America it was denounced as a fad or craze, albeit defended by some as a new artform, along with film, comics, vaudeville, and other popular entertainments. Debates about folk authenticity versus commercial exploitation, primitivism versus the ultra-modern, as well as racial and cultural purity swarmed around jazz for more than a decade. It also became a surrogate subject for modernism in music, with Stravinsky held up as avatar of all things progressive and/or regressive—and, it was assumed, a spawn of jazz.