A Short History of Jazz in Chicago

Chicago did not invent jazz, but for a decade it was the place where jazz grew up. The story starts with a train.

The Great Migration

Between 1916 and 1930 hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners moved north, many of them along the Illinois Central line to Chicago. Among them were musicians from New Orleans, including King Oliver, who in 1922 sent for a young cornet player named Louis Armstrong to join his Creole Jazz Band at the Lincoln Gardens on East 31st Street.

The South Side became a district of cabarets, dance halls and after-hours rooms. The Sunset Cafe, the Plantation, the Dreamland Ballroom: these were the places where the New Orleans ensemble style turned into something faster, hotter and built around soloists.

The Chicago sound

A group of young white players from Austin High School on the West Side heard those bands and built their own version of the music. Their take, with its driving four-beat rhythm and punchy ensembles, became known simply as Chicago style and carried the music east to New York.

Meanwhile the city’s recording studios, led by OKeh and Gennett, captured the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions that still define early jazz. Many of the most important records of the 1920s were made within a few miles of our dock.

Why it still matters on the water

Our musicians grew up in the clubs that inherited that tradition. When the band plays a Jelly Roll Morton tune under the Michigan Avenue bridge, they are playing it a short walk from where it was first recorded. That continuity is the quiet thrill of the whole thing.