The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s

New
Paperback
1987
$33.33

It all happened in America in the 1920s: blues, jazz, band music, torch ballards, operettas, and musicals. Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Duke Ellington, Kern, Gershwin, Berlin, and Porter, all burst on to the musical scene in this decade. Harlem celebrated its own artistic and musical renaissance, while the world of prohibition, extravagant parties, and speakeasies produced timeless tunes such as 'Stardust' and 'Tea for Two'. Christened by F. Scott Fitzgerald and declared 'open' by Louis Armstrong, the Jazz Age saw the flowering of the most prolific musical talents of this century. Arnold Shaw's lively account embraces all the major personalities from instrumentalists to composers, and from singers to lyricists. The book includes a bibliography, a detailed discography, and lists of songs and films from the 1920s.

Synopsis

It all happened in America in the 1920s: blues, jazz, band music, torch ballards, operettas, and musicals. Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Duke Ellington, Kern, Gershwin, Berlin, and Porter, all burst on to the musical scene in this decade. Harlem celebrated its own artistic and musical renaissance, while the world of prohibition, extravagant parties, and speakeasies produced timeless tunes such as 'Stardust' and 'Tea for Two'. Christened by F. Scott Fitzgerald and declared 'open' by Louis Armstrong, the Jazz Age saw the flowering of the most prolific musical talents of this century. Arnold Shaw's lively account embraces all the major personalities from instrumentalists to composers, and from singers to lyricists. The book includes a bibliography, a detailed discography, and lists of songs and films from the 1920s.

$33.33

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 364
Edition: Reprint
Publisher: Oxford University Press UK
Published: 01 Jan 1987
ISBN 10: 0195060822
ISBN 13: 9780195060829

Media Reviews

Arnold Shaw has produced an interesting history of the music of the twenties, relating it strongly to the social and political influences of the decade. Agreeably anecdotal, the whole making up a rich kaleidoscope which will be of use to researchers as well as to the general reader * Stage and Television - November 1988 *
Shaw's research also yields an attractive breadth of biography and social history. He sketches all sorts of luminaries of the time, producing a rich harvest of anecdote along the way. * Country Life *
lively account of the Roaring 20s in America * Publishing News *
Arnold Shaw has written an authoritative, exuberant, encyclopaedic book ... Shaw's knowledge ... appears infinite. Panoramic in scope, exhaustive in detail and affectionate in tone, The Jazz Age will be pored over by those who are enraptured by the period. * David Dale, The Times *
eminently readable essays ... At #5.95 Lee's book is a snip. * New Musical Express *
this book is so full of inside information on the era it's almost unbelievable ... a lively informative book which will be a joy to many ... Fine detail and an engaging style ... a great read. * Bernie Ralphs, Beat Scene *
a feast for jazz-lovers ... goes into the jazz history of what were called the Roaring Twenties with a wealth of detail * Kieran Nally, Irish Independent *

Author Bio

Arnold Shaw, winner of three ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, and author of such books as Honkers and Shouters, The Dictionary of Pop/Rock, Black Popular Music in America, and Fifty-Second Street, and biographies of Sinatra and Belafonte, is Director of the Popular Music Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.