”The creation of Jazz is therefore a story of expanding creative alternatives, energized by new educational resources, profit-making opportunities, and social connections in urban America; but it is also a story of individual and group aspirations stymied, and sometimes crushed, by a partially y democratic society that upheld policies of exclusion, unbridled economic competition, and atomizing individualism.” - <a href="https://www.burtonperetti.com">Burton W. Peretti</a>

Creative Alternatives

“Sweet jazz dancing signified a temporary abandonment of <a href="https://www.almanac.com/victorian-era-etiquette-and-manners">Victorian decorum</a> and manners.” - <a href="https://www.burtonperetti.com">Burton W. Peretti</a>

Victorian Decorum

”With jazz, they were not lost in urban America.” - <a href="https://www.burtonperetti.com">Burton W. Peretti</a>

Comfort In Art

“Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, speaks to the possibilities available to the individual in a democracy.”

<ul><li>More than any other art form, Jazz was shaped by, and spoke of, these cultural reconciliations and compromises</li><li>The music was highly rhythmic, the contribution of the drums and of its symbiotic relation to dance</li><li>The music, because of its rich spiritual and social role, was complex</li></ul>

The Art Form Of Jazz

<ul><li>Musicians had absorbed the education and diverse stimuli provided by the experience of migration, they entered a stage of independent and self-definition, in which the materials of the common musical culture became elements of distinctive and acknowledged personal styles</li><li>As musicians adopted these new views, jazz shed some of its early identity as a folk music and acquired a few of the formal characteristics of an elite or art musical</li></ul>

Migration & Jazz

“In creating jazz, black players exercised a kind of cultural leadership in America that has rarely been permitted or acknowledged.” - <a href="https://www.burtonperetti.com">Burton W. Peretti</a>

Cultural Leadership

Jazz was a groundbreaking art form that allowed black musicians to thrive in urban America. This book is a great study for those interested in the medium.

As musicians, listeners, and scholars have sensed for many years, the story of jazz is more than a history of the music. Burton Peretti presents a fascinating account of how the racial and cultural dynamics of American cities created the music, life, and business that was jazz. From its origins in the jook joints of sharecroppers and the streets and dance halls of 1890s New Orleans, through its later metamorphoses in the cities of the North, Peretti charts the life of jazz culture to the eve of bebop and World War II. In the course of those fifty years, jazz was the story of players who made the transition from childhood spasm bands to Carnegie Hall and worldwide touring and fame. It became the music of the Twenties, a decade of Prohibition, of adolescent discontent, of Harlem pride, and of Americans hoping to preserve cultural traditions in an urban, commercial age. And jazz was where black and white musicians performed together, as uneasy partners, in the big bands of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman. "Blacks fought back by using jazz", states Peretti, "with its unique cultural and intellectual properties, to prove, assess, and evade the "dynamic of minstrelsy". Drawing on newspaper reports of the times and on the firsthand testimony of more than seventy prominent musicians and singers (among them Benny Carter, Bud Freeman, Kid Ory, and Mary Lou Williams), The Creation of Jazz is the first comprehensive analysis of the role of early jazz in American social history.