F. Scott Fitzgerald named it, Louis Armstrong launched it, Paul Whiteman and Fletcher Henderson orchestrated it, and now Arnold Shaw chronicles this fabulous era in The Jazz Age. Spicing his account with lively anecdotes and inside stories, he describes the astonishing outpouring of significant musical innovations that emerged during the "Roaring Twenties"--including blues, jazz, band music, torch ballads, operettas and musicals--and sets them against the background of the Prohibition world of the Flapper.
The jazz age set the sound of popular music into the 1950s. It included the flowering of improvised music by such artists as Armstrong, Bix Benderbecke, and Duke Ellington; the maturation and Americanization of the Broadway musical theatre; the explosion of the arts celebrated in the Harlem Renaissance; the rise of the classical blues singers starting with Mamie Smith and climaxing with Bessie Smith; the evolution of ragtime into stride piano; the spread of "speakeasy" night life and the emergence of the Cabaret singers; the musical creativity of a whole range of composers and songwriters including Kern, Gershwin, Berlin, Youmans, Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter, whom Shaw calls Song Laureate of the Roaring 20s.
Here is a lively account of all these significant developments and personalities. A bibliography, detailed discography, and two informative lists--songs of the 20s in Variety's Golden 100 and films featuring singers and songwriters of the era--round out the book.

`The Roaring Twenties' - the time when Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Gershwin, Berlin, and Porter all burst onto the musical scene.

Covering blues, jazz, band music, torch ballads, operettas, and musicals, Arnold Shaw's lively account embraces all the major personalities of the Jazz Age, from instrumentalists to composers, singers to lyricists. It also includes a bibliography, a detailed discography, and lists of songs and relevant films from the 1920s.

Back in the thirties and forties, when New York City was the capital of the jazz world--you could hail a cab, ask the driver to take you to "The Street," and find yourself on 52nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Musicians, jazz lovers, college students, big businessmen--everybody knew that this was "The Street that Never Slept," the Street where every night was New Year's Eve, the Street that "Variety" editor Abel Green so aptly dubbed "America's Montmartre." Here, for the price of a drink or two, you could walk through the whole history of jazz. Hot jazz was born and raised on The Street, as were the big swing bands of the thirties and the modern "cool" jazz combos of the forties. Comics like Alan King and Joey Adams got their start on the Street, as did musicians like Erroll Garner, Jack Teagarden, and Coleman Hawkins. Bessie Smith performed on the Street, and so did Count Basie, Charlie "Bird" Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, Sarah Vaughn, the Dorsey Brothers, Artie Shaw, and other jazz greats.Arnold Shaw was there--as musician, composer, PR man, and just plain listener--and he recreates for us the three swinging decades that were the history if the Street: its birth in Prohibition-era speakeasies, where musicians jammed for gin or just for the fun of it; its post-Repeal blossoming as the center of the jazz universe, lined up and down on both sides with tiny, smoke-filled rooms where black and white musicians played to capacity crowds; its postwar decline as the Street became a tawdy tenderloin of strip and clip joints.