Jazz in the 1920s: The Musicians, Cities and Records of the Decade

Jazz music in the 1920s moved out of New Orleans to Chicago and New York, onto records and onto the radio, and changed from a band music built on collective improvisation into a music of star soloists and written arrangements. The players who drove that change were King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, while blues singers such as Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith opened up a record market aimed at Black buyers. This page follows the music city by city and ends with the recordings to start with; for the wider culture of Prohibition, flappers and the Harlem Renaissance, see our guide to what the Jazz Age was.

Where 1920s Jazz Came From

Jazz took shape in the Black communities of New Orleans in the early 1900s, out of blues, ragtime and brass band music. In the New Orleans style a front line of cornet, clarinet and trombone improvised together over a rhythm section: the cornet carried the melody while the other horns wove lines around it. The first jazz record, however, was made by a white New Orleans group, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, whose “Livery Stable Blues” (Victor, 1917) was the first jazz record ever issued.

In November 1917 New Orleans shut down Storyville, its regulated red-light district, after the Army and Navy demanded its closure. King Oliver, who had played cornet in the district’s bands, moved to Chicago in 1918. Many musicians took the same route north as part of the Great Migration of Black Southerners to industrial cities, and in the early 1920s many of the leading New Orleans players were working on Chicago’s South Side.

Chicago: King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band

From June 1922 to early 1924 King Oliver (c. 1881-1938) led his Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens, a dance hall at 459 East 31st Street that could hold about 1,000 dancers. In 1922 he brought his protégé Louis Armstrong up from New Orleans to play second cornet, alongside Johnny Dodds (clarinet), Honoré Dutrey (trombone), Lil Hardin (piano) and Baby Dodds (drums).

In April 1923 the band took the train to the Gennett studio in Richmond, Indiana, and later that year recorded for Okeh, Paramount and Columbia. These records brought the New Orleans ensemble style to a wider audience. Recording was still acoustic, into a large horn, and Armstrong played so loudly that he had to stand about 15 feet from Oliver in a corner of the room. On “Dippermouth Blues” (Gennett, April 6, 1923) Oliver’s plunger-muted cornet solo became one of the most imitated solos of its generation.

Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five

Armstrong left Oliver in 1924 to join Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra in New York, where he switched to trumpet, and returned to Chicago in 1925. In November of that year he began recording for Okeh with his Hot Five: Kid Ory (trombone), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), Johnny St. Cyr (banjo) and Lil Hardin Armstrong (piano). It was a studio band that played in public only at two Okeh parties, but its records changed jazz.

“Heebie Jeebies” (1926) was not the first scat vocal on record, but it became a bestseller and made scat singing famous. For a week in May 1927 the group became the Hot Seven, adding tuba and drums, and on “Potato Head Blues” (May 10, 1927) Armstrong played a stop-time chorus in which the band only punctuates his line. “West End Blues,” recorded on June 28, 1928 with Earl Hines on piano, opens with an unaccompanied trumpet cadenza and is counted among the most influential improvisations in jazz. Across these sessions the improvised solo replaced collective playing as the center of the music. Our ranking of the best Louis Armstrong songs goes through them one by one.

Jelly Roll Morton and Composed Jazz

Jelly Roll Morton (c. 1890-1941) worked from the other direction. The New Orleans pianist had published “Jelly Roll Blues” in 1915, one of the first jazz compositions in print, and he later claimed to have invented jazz. Critics have disputed that boast, but he is often called jazz’s first arranger. In 1926 he signed with Victor, which let him bring a rehearsed band of New Orleans players, among them Kid Ory, Omer Simeon and Johnny St. Cyr, into its Chicago studio as the Red Hot Peppers.

“Black Bottom Stomp,” recorded on September 15, 1926, shows the method: in one short piece Morton fits breaks, stop-time and solos for clarinet, piano, trumpet and banjo into a written structure that changes key halfway through. Careful rehearsal of this kind was unusual in early jazz.

Paul Whiteman, Bix Beiderbecke and the White Dance Bands

The bigger market for jazz-flavored dance music in the 1920s belonged to white orchestras such as Jean Goldkette’s and Paul Whiteman’s. By the mid-1920s Whiteman was the most popular bandleader in the United States, and the press called him the “King of Jazz.” On February 12, 1924 his orchestra premiered George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, with Gershwin at the piano, in a concert called “An Experiment in Modern Music” at Aeolian Hall in New York. Critics have long argued over how much of Whiteman’s ornately orchestrated dance music was jazz at all.

Whiteman’s bands included many of the most respected white musicians of the decade. Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931), a cornetist from Davenport, Iowa, first recorded with the Wolverines at Gennett in February 1924. With saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer and guitarist Eddie Lang he recorded “Singin’ the Blues” (Okeh, 1927), whose lyrical cornet solo pointed toward the jazz ballad; in 1977 it was one of the first jazz records inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. After Jean Goldkette’s band folded in September 1927, Beiderbecke and Trumbauer joined Whiteman.

New York: Fletcher Henderson and Stride Piano

Fletcher Henderson (1897-1952) came to New York with a chemistry degree, worked as musical director for the Black-owned Black Swan label from 1921 to 1923 and accompanied blues singers on record. His band became a regular working unit in 1924 and that July began playing the Roseland Ballroom on Broadway, a hall for white patrons only. Armstrong joined in October 1924 and stayed about a year.

Henderson’s arranger in these years was Don Redman, who joined in 1923. Redman played the brass and reed sections off each other in call and response, one section punctuating the other, a technique that became the basis of much big band writing. His “Sugar Foot Stomp” (1925), a reworking of “Dippermouth Blues” with Armstrong in Oliver’s role, was added to the National Recording Registry in 2023. The band’s tenor saxophonist, Coleman Hawkins (1904-1969), joined in 1923 and became one of the first prominent soloists on his instrument; he and other reed players appear in our list of jazz saxophone players. When Henderson’s band broke up in 1934 he sold arrangements to Benny Goodman, whose orchestra made many of them swing-era hits.

Harlem also had its own piano school, stride. James P. Johnson (1894-1955) recorded “Carolina Shout” for Okeh in 1921, one of the first jazz piano solos on record. Duke Ellington and Fats Waller learned it note for note from his piano roll, as our guide to the greatest jazz pianists explains. Johnson also wrote “The Charleston” for the 1923 Broadway show Runnin’ Wild, and the dance that went with it came to stand for the whole decade.

Duke Ellington and the Cotton Club

Duke Ellington (1899-1974) came to New York from Washington, D.C. and from 1923 played a four-year engagement at the Hollywood Club, later the Kentucky Club, in midtown with the Washingtonians, a band he took over in 1924. Trumpeter Bubber Miley’s growling plunger mute gave the band its early sound, heard on “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” first recorded in November 1926, and “Black and Tan Fantasy” (1927). In October 1927 Adelaide Hall sang a wordless vocal on “Creole Love Call,” using her voice like another horn.

On December 4, 1927 Ellington’s enlarged band opened at the Cotton Club in Harlem, a whites-only club owned by the bootlegger Owney Madden, where it played the music for floor shows that traded on “jungle” stereotypes. Radio broadcasts from the club, first on New York stations and from 1929 over the NBC network, made Ellington known across the country. The best Duke Ellington songs page covers the pieces from these years. For the recording dates, Ellingtonia.com keeps an online discography of his records.

The Blues Singers on Record

The record business discovered Black buyers through singers rather than bands. Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (Okeh, 1920) sold 75,000 copies in its first month, other labels went looking for Black blues singers, and in 1922 Okeh coined the term “race records” for discs marketed to Black audiences. Bessie Smith (Columbia) and Ma Rainey (Paramount) both began recording in 1923, and jazz players worked on their sessions: Armstrong is on Rainey’s “See See Rider Blues” (1924) and Smith’s “St. Louis Blues” (1925). The full story is in our guide to 1920s jazz singers.

How Records and Radio Spread the Music

Until 1925 records were made acoustically, with musicians crowded around a recording horn. That spring Victor and Columbia began recording electrically with microphones, which caught quieter and more detailed sounds; Bessie Smith made her first electrical record in May 1925. A standard 10-inch 78 held a little over three minutes per side, so bands and arrangers shaped their pieces to that length, and Ellington became a master of the three-minute miniature.

Radio grew alongside records. KDKA in Pittsburgh, often counted as the first commercially licensed station, began with election returns on November 2, 1920. By the end of the decade remote broadcasts from clubs and ballrooms such as the Cotton Club carried bands into homes far from New York and Chicago, although jazz reached its widest radio audiences in the 1930s.

1920s Jazz Recordings to Start With

What Came After the 1920s

By 1930 the New Orleans ensemble style was already a relic. The future lay with the larger orchestras of Henderson, Ellington and, in Chicago, Earl Hines, who opened at the Grand Terrace in 1928, and with soloists in the Armstrong mold. Those bands shaped the swing era of the 1930s, the next chapter in our overview of the main styles of jazz.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was jazz like in the 1920s?

At the start of the decade most jazz bands played in the New Orleans style, with cornet, clarinet and trombone improvising together over a rhythm section. By 1929 the music centered on improvised solos, led by Louis Armstrong, and on written arrangements for larger bands, such as those Don Redman wrote for Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington’s work at the Cotton Club. Blues singers, stride pianists and white dance orchestras such as Paul Whiteman’s were part of the same scene.

Who were the most important jazz musicians of the 1920s?

Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, Coleman Hawkins, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington shaped the instrumental side, and Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were the leading blues singers. Paul Whiteman led the most popular dance orchestra of the decade.

What was the first jazz record?

“Livery Stable Blues” by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, a white New Orleans group, issued by Victor in 1917, was the first jazz record released. The recordings King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band made in 1923, with Louis Armstrong on second cornet, brought the New Orleans style of Black musicians to a wider audience.

What does the name Jazz Age say about jazz in the 1920s?

It shows that jazz had become an important part of American popular culture, not that it was the only music people heard. Dance orchestras, Broadway songs and blues records sold alongside it, and jazz did not fade after the decade ended: it moved on to the swing bands of the 1930s and is still played today.