Jazz music's evolution was shifted and influenced by every big city it passed through. Although New Orleans and Chicago, in turn, added their own flavor and culture to the growing hodgepodge that was jazz, it was the racial blending, commodification, and need for entertainment present in diverse New York City that most profoundly affected the revolutionizing of jazz.
The origins of jazz lie deep within the historical blurring of racial lines, eliciting a transformation in the musical style every time it encountered a situation where cultures mixed together. Musically, jazz is known as the amalgamation of native African call-and-response style and classical European waltzes, a combination that laid an irrefutable foundation for blacks and whites to come together over shared taste in music. The proximity of the white upper class to impoverished black musicians in New York parallels that present at the birth of jazz in Congo Square and during slavery. Where Chicago pushed jazz forward, encouraging increasingly wilder interpretations of the style, New York pulled it back towards its essential roots. However, the relationship between the two races in New York was much different than in the Antebellum South, providing yet another opportunity for jazz to transform. Unlike their enslaved, downtrodden ancestors, blacks found prominence and significant importance in the “two Harlems” of New York (Gioia 94). Yet again, a mixture was essential to the rise in popularity of jazz, as the Harlem Renaissance, born out of the drawing together of the “cultural elite” coexisted with the harsh realities of living in an isolated slum. Rent parties arose from a combination of poverty and bursting creativity, and were very important in not only jazz as a whole but partly in the popularization of the piano as part of the musical style. “The instrument represented conflicting possibilities—a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling card of lowbrow nightlife, a symbol of middle class prosperity, or, quite simply, a means of making a living,” (Gioia 96). Because of this, the piano became essential to the modern 20th century home, and, because of its crowd-pleasing nature, to jazz. Like the brass bands of New Orleans, jazz’s incorporation of the piano offered a middle ground to its audience that would be absolutely essential in the economization of the music.
Chicago, although not as important in the overall history of jazz, laid an important foundation for the hot economic commodity it would become in the city of New York. The bustling, culture-rich city made the wild and crazy music bred in the slums of New Orleans and nurtured in the nightclubs of Chicago into a marketable, widespread musical phenomenon using a combination of dirty money and interracial relations. Artists like Duke Ellington and Fletcher Hendersong found their voices here, often very driven, fame-crazy musicians who were willing to “take the low road” to achieve success (Lecture 10/26/10). Similar to the environment in New Orleans that so gently nurtured jazz music, New York had a historically diverse community that allowed for partnerships not possible in segregated Chicago. For example, Duke Ellington worked with a Jewish agent in order to get ahead in the jazz game, using his connections with willing members of the white community to get the best bookings and venues. New York was where jazz became about entertainment again, falling back into the historical routine of morphing however necessary to please its audiences, be they black or white. Although an incredible form of music, jazz was most importantly a commodity, both in New York and New Orleans, and released some of the most memorable records under the pressure of economics. The fact that the New York culture was able to bring jazz full circle highlights its importance in the history of jazz, a style of music that needed strong cultural mixing, economic importance, and a lot of soul to maintain it.
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