The Jazz Age begins

Chicago held the promise of a new life for the southern black population, which left behind the cotton fields for the blast furnaces, factories and slaughterhouses of the big northern cities. It was also an attractive destination for working jazz musicians , many of whom worked in the gangster-owned speakeasies created in reaction to the Volstead Act of 1919 outlawing the manufacture and sale of alcohol.
What followed was the "Roaring Twenties", a decade marked by a new vitality in the wake of the First Wold War and underscored by a prevailing air of good times, in spite of the repressive era of Prohibition.The Jazz Age was a time when young people sought illegal booze and hot music.

In Chicago, jaz matured at the hands of it's finest composers and practitioners, including, Bechet, Ory, Oliver, Morton, Louis Amstrong and others who held forth on the city's predominantly black jazz lovers could choose between the Lincoln Gardens, Pekin Inn, Dreamland Ballroom, Plantation Cafe, Sunset Cafe and other spots where hot jazz flowed nightly. It was in this black neighbourhoud that the young, white jazz seeking teenagers who attented Austin High School on Chicago's white, middle-class West Side congregated to hear King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, featuring Louis Armstrong and Johnny Dodds (1892- 1940).By the 1923, Chicago had become the centre of the jazz universe.

From crescent City to Windy city

In the 1920s, with many seminal jazz figures migrating north, the music's epicentre shifted from its birthplace in New Orleans to Chicago.One of the events that causes this mass exodus of pioneering musicians from the Crescent City was the official closing of Storyville, the city's red light district, in 1917.

"Chicago was really jumping around that time[1923].The dreamland was in full bloom.the lincon Gardens, of course, wass still in there.The plantation was another hot spot at that time. But the sunset, my boss'place , was the sharpest of them all, believe that" (Louis Armstrong)