Syncretism In The 1920s

Syncretism--the blending together of cultural elements that previously existed seperately. This dynamic remains powerful even in the present day. Forcibly torn from the social fabric that had given structure to their lives, African immigrants clung to the elements of their culture that they could carry with them. Among these elements were music and folktales. Although there were many people who had an influence on jazz and changed the dynamics of the culture and race relationships people like Benny Goodman, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong were among the most influential and played a big role in many of the events that helped break the color barriers in jazz. Some of these events included establishing black entertainment markets and performing …show more content…
"Black and white professional jazz orchestras in the 1920s established the basic instrumentation, arrangement, and techniques of the big band dance orchestras that dominated American popular music until the 1950s." (Lopes, pg. 47) Jazz continued as a popular music during the swing big band era of the 1930s. "By the end of the nineteenth century black musicians were successfully establishing their own professional class. Metronome was a magazine for white professional musicians, however, and until the 1930s ignored these developments among black musicians." (Lopes, pg.22) Racial segregation assured that the development of music as a profession among black urban musicians ran along parallel lines. However, a growing commercial market for black entertainment grew in relation to the growth of black communities in major cities around the country and provided the foundation for black urban musicians to develop professionally. Although developed seperately, these two professional classes shared similar musical techniques and music repertoire. However, black professional musicians did distinguish themselves through the black vernacular in popular music making. Black artists also had a distinct relationship to the development of an American vernacular tradition and European cultivated tradition among professional musicians that played a role …show more content…
"At the same time, black musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Teddy Wilson gained recognition among white musicians and white music critics as premier artists in American popular music." (Lopes, pg. 96) This was a great change from the Jazz Age when black professional musicians were denigrated and absent in the written commentary of top white musicians and critics acclaiming the cultivated jazz vernacular. Transformations within the profession of popular musician also reflected changes in the reception of jazz outside this profession. In the early 1930s, when the swing craze hit the nation it faced less resistance than the jazz craze in the 1920s. It is suggested that this came about by a process of assimilation and acceptance in which the efforts of professional musicians and changes in the production of popular music made cultivated jazz into a less threatening cultural expression. Swing music was more widely embraced and celebrated in America than jazz nearly two decades earlier. "The historians David Stowe (1994) and Lewis A. Erenberg (1998) argue that swing music and swing culture benefited from the more general change in the cultural and political landscape of the New Deal Era." (Lopes, pg. 98) While new patterns of thinking about race and cultural difference emerged during this period, racial segregation