03 Jazz America Panel

Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America. —George Gershwin, composer, ((1898–1937) Jazz is among the great art forms of the 20th century and one of America’s highest contributions to musical expression. Its roots can be traced to the 1890s, when musicians began combining African-American blues with popular marching-band tunes. By the 1920s, the characteristic features of jazz had taken shape: embellishment of scripted music with spontaneous improvisation, syncopated rhythms, and energetic polyphony. The 1920s is often called the “Jazz Age,” signifying both the expansion of this music and the raucous energy and shifting social mores of that decade. In the era when jazz emerged—and was first exported abroad—it was heralded by some as youthful, brash, modern, and quintessentially American. For others, it represented an affront to propriety and was considered to be “devil music.” Visual artists—both black and white, American and European—made jazz a major American subject. They used their modernist vocabularies of vibrant colors, slashing lines, and exaggerated forms to convey the beat, improvisation, freedom, and unconventionality of the new music and the dancing it inspired. African-American modernists claimed this subject as their own, creating some of the most dynamic paintings and prints of black dancers and musicians ever made. European artists visited Harlem to listen and dance to jazz. They returned to their studios to capture the wonders they had heard and seen.