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9780195060829

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""I am deeply moved by Arnold Shaw's The Jazz Age.""--Quincy Jones, Grammy Award winner ""A unique portrayal of the 1920s.""--Library Journal ""As one who grew up in the 1920s, and has been reading Arnold Shaw with admiration for some twenty-odd years, I read The Jazz Age not only nostalgically, but also with gratitude to one who tells us so much, and so knowledgeably, about what lay behind the music that I and many others of our generation simply took--at the time--for granted.""--Henry Pleasants ""Vastly detailed, all-inclusive.""--Kirkus Reviews ""[Shaw opens] a Pandora's box of musical memories, dispelling present ambiguities and inviting the reader to a nostalgic backward journey when life seemed less complex and more carefree.""--America ""I am deeply moved by Arnold Shaw's The Jazz Age.""--Quincy Jones, Grammy Award winner ""A unique portrayal of the 1920s.""--Library Journal ""As one who grew up in the 1920s, and has been reading Arnold Shaw with admiration for some twenty-odd years, I read The Jazz Age not only nostalgically, but also with gratitude to one who tells us so much, and so knowledgeably, about what lay behind the music that I and many others of our generation simply took--at the time--for granted.""--Henry Pleasants ""Vastly detailed, all-inclusive.""--Kirkus Reviews ""[Shaw opens] a Pandora's box of musical memories, dispelling present ambiguities and inviting the reader to a nostalgic backward journey when life seemed less complex and more carefree.""--America ""Shaw has written a series of lively chronicles of the songs, dances, musicals, operettas, records, road shows, night clubs, publishing houses, and the persons behind them....[Shaw opens] a Pandora's box of musical memories, dispelling present ambiguities and inviting the reader to a nostalgic backward journey when life seemed less complex and more carefree.""--America ""A lively volume.""--New York City Tribune ""Shaw documents [the jazz age] accurately and...in great detail.""--Grammy Pulse ""Shaw's history of the 1920s is first-rate in that it incorporates ""Popular Music of the 1920s"" as the subtitle says, [and] gives us atmosphere and quite a lot of peripheral things which went on and affected the United States during the period. This is fun reading; a joy that shouldn't be missed.""--West Coast Review of Books ""First-rate....A joy that shouldn't be missed.""--West Coast Review of Books ""For everyone with an insatiable appetite for the choice anecdote and the savory fact....There is information on nearly a thousand tunes....It reminds the reader of contemporaneous events, from prohibition and bathtub gin to 'talkies,' and relates them to the musical scene. After all, as Fitzgerald's appelation has always claimed, everything moved to the music.""--Borders Review of Books

Vastly detailed, all-inclusive, but largely superficial and awkwardly organized: a survey of all the popular music in the 1920's, when elements of black and white music first achieved a rich and permanent fusion. After a brief introduction that recycles familiar generalizations about the period, Shaw (Honkers and Shouters, Fifty-Second Street) profiles the major jazz innovators - from the New Orleans dixieland bands to King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Bix Beiderbecke, along with nods to influential bandleaders Pops Whiteman and Fletcher Henderson. Then comes a short section on the Harlem Renaissance ( there was enchantment in the very air of Harlem ) - touching on Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, the Cotton Club, and stride piano, but emphasizing the proliferation of the blues while saluting both famous and little-known black songwriters. (One of Shaw's few interpretive notions - an iffy one - surfaces here: That there was something desperate in the prolonged binge of the twenties was made most evident, I submit, by the vogue of the blues. ) The bulk (nearly half) of the book, however, is devoted to a year-by-year Tin Pan Alley chronicle, 1920-1929, which details the top songs of each year, along with notable concerts, vaudeville shows, musicals and revues, radio/recording developments, plus thumbnail-sketches (rather arbitrarily inserted) of composers and performers. The result, though certainly informative, is chaotic, wildly repetitious, and occasionally even misleading. (Al Jolson, though a superstar from about 1918 on, isn't profiled until the chapter on 1928.) And more repetition follows - in a chapter on The Musical Theatre, which somewhat oddly singles out Cole Porter (who may have had a 1920's sensibility but whose major work didn't come till the 1930's). Throughout, Shaw - whose own prose is sturdily pleasant at best - quotes extensively from such reliable sources as James Lincoln Collier, Alec Wilder, and David Ewen; also from memoirs and biographies (lots of familiar anecdotes). So there's little that's fresh or stimulating here. But, with a strong bibliography and a generous discography, it's a serviceable compendium in the Ewen tradition. (Kirkus 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

I am deeply moved by Arnold Shaw's The Jazz Age. --Quincy Jones, Grammy Award winner<br> A unique portrayal of the 1920s. --Library Journal<br> As one who grew up in the 1920s, and has been reading Arnold Shaw with admiration for some twenty-odd years, I read The Jazz Age not only nostalgically, but also with gratitude to one who tells us so much, and so knowledgeably, about what lay behind the music that I and many others of our generation simply took--at the time--for granted. --Henry Pleasants<br> Vastly detailed, all-inclusive. --Kirkus Reviews<br> [Shaw opens] a Pandora's box of musical memories, dispelling present ambiguities and inviting the reader to a nostalgic backward journey when life seemed less complex and more carefree. --America<br>

Author Information

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.

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