THE JAZZ AGE: Popular Music in the 1920s

by Arnold Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1987

Vastly detailed, all-inclusive, but largely superficial and awkwardly organized: a survey of all the popular music in the 1920's, ""when elements of black and white music first achieved a rich and permanent fusion."" After a brief introduction that recycles familiar generalizations about the period, Shaw (Honkers and Shouters, Fifty-Second Street) profiles the major jazz innovators--from the New Orleans dixieland bands to King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Bix Beiderbecke, along with nods to influential bandleaders ""Pops"" Whiteman and Fletcher Henderson. Then comes a short section on the Harlem Renaissance (""there was enchantment in the very air of Harlem"")--touching on Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, the Cotton Club, and stride piano, but emphasizing the proliferation of the blues while saluting both famous and little-known black songwriters. (One of Shaw's few interpretive notions--an iffy one--surfaces here: ""That there was something desperate in the prolonged binge of the twenties was made most evident, I submit, by the vogue of the blues."") The bulk (nearly half) of the book, however, is devoted to a year-by-year ""Tin Pan Alley"" chronicle, 1920-1929, which details the top songs of each year, along with notable concerts, vaudeville shows, musicals and revues, radio/recording developments, plus thumbnail-sketches (rather arbitrarily inserted) of composers and performers. The result, though certainly informative, is chaotic, wildly repetitious, and occasionally even misleading. (Al Jolson, though a superstar from about 1918 on, isn't profiled until the chapter on 1928.) And more repetition follows--in a chapter on ""The Musical Theatre,"" which somewhat oddly singles out Cole Porter (who may have had a 1920's sensibility but whose major work didn't come till the 1930's). Throughout, Shaw--whose own prose is sturdily pleasant at best--quotes extensively from such reliable sources as James Lincoln Collier, Alec Wilder, and David Ewen; also from memoirs and biographies (lots of familiar anecdotes). So there's little that's fresh or stimulating here. But, with a strong bibliography and a generous discography, it's a serviceable compendium in the Ewen tradition.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1987

ISBN: 0195060822

Page Count: -

Publisher: Oxford Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION