Big Bands
The Big Band Era (roughly 1935 to 1945) witnessed the emergence of jazz music into the American mainstream at a time, according to Metronome magazine in 1943, "as important to American music as the time of Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman and Hawthorne and Melville was to American literature." Big band music evolved from the various forms of African American music—blues, ragtime, and dixieland jazz—performed by black and white musicians such as Bessie Smith, Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy, and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB). The frenetic, chaotic, and spontaneous nature of 1920s jazz influenced the large orchestras, like Paul Whiteman's, that specialized in dance music. Four-and five-piece Dixieland bands became ten-piece bands such as Fletcher Henderson's, and eventually the twenty piece bands of Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. The music not only marked a synthesis of rural African American music and European light classical music, but its widespread acceptance expressed the larger national search for a uniquely American culture during the Great Depression and World War II.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, popular music was dominated by theatrical music, minstrel shows, and vaudeville, produced primarily in New York City's Tin Pan Alley.
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