[3][4] Jazz is a music genre that originated in the Black-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana,[5][6] in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in blues and ragtime.

[15][16] Louis Armstrong brought the improvisational solo to the forefront of a piece, replacing the original polyphonic ensemble style of New Orleans jazz.

This prohibition was taken advantage of by gangsters such as Al Capone,[17] and approximately $60 million (equivalent to $1,271,666,667 in 2023) in illegal alcohol was smuggled across the borders of Canada and the United States.

By the late 1920s, a new opposition mobilized across the U.S. Anti-prohibitionists, or "wets", attacked prohibition as causing crime, lowering local revenues, and imposing rural Protestant religious values on urban America.

Al Capone, the famous organized crime leader, gave jazz musicians previously living in poverty a steady and professional income.

Charlie Burns, in recalling his ownership of several speakeasies employed these strategies as a way to preserve his and Jack Kriendler's illegal clubs.

Another person famous for organized crime named Johnny Torrio partnered with two other mobsters and legitimate brewer Joseph Stenson to make illegal beer in a total of nine breweries.

Armstrong was a master of his hometown style, but by the time he joined Henderson's band, he was already a trailblazer in a new phase of jazz, with its emphasis on arrangements and soloists.

According to Schuller, by comparison, the solos by Armstrong's bandmates (including a young Coleman Hawkins), sounded "stiff, stodgy," with "jerky rhythms and a grey undistinguished tone quality.

"[36] The following example shows a short excerpt of the straight melody of "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind" by George W. Meyer and Arthur Johnston (top), compared with Armstrong's solo improvisations (below) (recorded 1924).

[38] Jelly Roll Morton recorded with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in an early mixed-race collaboration, then in 1926 formed his Red Hot Peppers.

[39] By the mid-1920s, Whiteman was the most popular bandleader in the U.S. His success was based on a "rhetoric of domestication" according to which he had elevated and rendered valuable a previously inchoate kind of music.

Included in this group was the bandleader Guy Lombardo, who collaborated with his brothers Carmen and Lebert in Canada to form the Royal Canadians Orchestra in the early 1920s.

[50][51][4] Jazz aimed to cultivate empathy by initially challenging established norms and those who adhered to them, before captivating them with its ethereal and enchanting allure.

This era started with the conclusion of World War I, the onset of women's suffrage, and Prohibition, and ultimately crumbled with the Great Crash of 1929.

In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups.

In the 1930s, Kansas City Jazz as exemplified by tenor saxophonist Lester Young marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s.

Radio made it possible for millions to hear music for free — especially people who never attended expensive, distant big city clubs.

This youth rebellion of the 1920s included such things as flapper fashions, women who smoked cigarettes in public, a willingness to talk about sex freely, and radio concerts.

[65] Some urban middle-class African Americans perceived jazz as "devil's music", and believed the improvised rhythms and sounds were promoting promiscuity.

Throughout her musical career she was unapologetically herself, expressing the struggles of the Black working class, addressing issues such as poverty, racism, and sexism alongside themes of love and female sexuality in her lyrics.

[69] Lovie Austin (1887–1972) was a Chicago-based bandleader, session musician (piano), composer, singer, and arranger during the 1920s classic blues era.

It runs from Broadway along Main Street to San Francisco: to the Hawaiian Islands, which it has lyricized to fame; to Japan, where it is hurriedly adopted as some new Western culture; to the Philippines, where it is royally welcomed back as its own; to China where the mandarins and even the coolies look upon it as a helpful sign that the Occident at last knows what is music; to Siam, where the barbaric tunes strike a kindred note and come home to roost; to India, where the natives receive it dubiously, while the colonists seize upon it avidly; to the East Indies, where it holds sway in its elementary form — ragtime; to Egypt, where it sounds so curiously familiar and where it has set Cairo dance mad; to Palestine, where it is looked upon as an inevitable and necessary evil along with liberation; across the Mediterranean, where all ships and all shores have been inoculated with the germ; to Monte Carlo and the Riviera, where the jazz idea has been adopted as its own enfant-chéri; to Paris, which has its special versions of jazz; to London, which long has sworn to shake off the fever, but still is jazzing; and back again to Tinpan Alley, where each day, nay, each hour, adds some new inspiration that will slowly but surely meander along jazz latitude.As only a limited number of American jazz records were released in Europe, European jazz traces many of its roots to American artists such as James Reese Europe, Paul Whiteman, Mike Danzi[81][82] and Lonnie Johnson, who visited Europe during and after World War I.

Very soon, the resulting music craze in the United Kingdom led to a moral panic in which the threat of jazz to society was exemplified by Scottish artist John Bulloch Souter's controversial 1926 painting The Breakdown.

[89] Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt popularized gypsy jazz, a mix of 1930s American swing, French dance hall "musette", and Eastern European folk with a languid, seductive feel; the main instruments were steel-stringed guitar, violin, and double bass.

Some researchers believe Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti pioneered the guitar-violin partnership characteristic of the genre which was brought to France after they had been heard live or on Okeh Records in the late 1920s.

In these slums, shebeens were opened by black women with the purpose of selling home-made, Traditional African beer (locally known as 'Umqombothi') in order to earn an income.

The biggest consumer of jazz music was the newly black urban class in these shebeens based on the slums of South Africa.

[citation needed] In the 1940s, the genre had taken the country by storm, and by the 1950s, another style of South African jazz was formed called Kwela with an addition of the modern or traditional pennywhistle.

The New York Times in the 1920s intimated that jazz was responsible for the decline of Western civilization and of the quality of Italian tenors, a poor trade balance with Hungary, a classical musician's fatal heart attack, and frightening bears in Siberia.