cover image The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s

The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s

Arnold Shaw. Oxford University Press, USA, $27.95 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-19-503891-0

According to popular music historian Shaw (Honkers and Shouters, the jazz age began in 1917, with the appearance at Reisenweber's in New York of the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band and their first recordings of ""the new music.'' The years between then and the Wall Street crash of 1929often recalled as the roaring, torrid, frenzied '20swere a period seemingly dominated by flappers, gangsters and traffic in illegal booze but also, as Shaw demonstrates, by a fusion of black and white music and a plethora of revues, operettas and musical comedies created by ``a flock of gemlike show composers.'' Drawing heavily on books by Gerald Boardman, David Ewen and Charles Hamm, and reprinting anecdotes from the lives of the people he catalogues, Shaw presents, in roughly chronological order, the achievements of Bix, Cole, Duke, Eubie, Flo, Hoagy, Jelly Roll, Satchmo, Vincent (Lopez and Youmans), Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers, ``Smack'' Henderson, ``Pops'' Whiteman and many other song writers and pluggers, lyricists, publishers and literary wits. Discography, lists of bestselling songs and film biographies. (September)