’30s Jazz & Pop Essentials

A whole new musical vocabulary was developing in America in the ‘30s. Jazz was growing out of its Dixieland beginnings thanks to improv-minded innovators like Louis Armstrong. At the same time, the relatively elaborate, orchestrated pop of the period was pushing past the ukulele strummers and vaudeville-schooled singers of the 1920s, with crooners like Bing Crosby adopting an intimacy and subtlety never captured on record before. Pop vocalists really became singers, learning how to use a microphone to connect with their audience. Simultaneously, jazz musicians were becoming true stylists, making personal statements like never before. And sometimes the two streams mixed, creating an elegant, nuanced crop of new standards that would be interpreted for generations to come by jazz, pop, and rock singers alike.