Teach Yourself Jazz - online guidebook

For the beginning player, with sheet music samples

Share page

Visit Us On FB

	CHAPTER SEVEN CHICAGO AND THE JAZZ AGE MUSIC AND BULLETS Chicago is the city specially associated with "The Jazz Age"—the hard-living, hard-drinking free-for-all that forms the background to some of the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby') and John Dos Passos ('U.S.A.'). It is the age of a great financial boom, of bootleggers, gang warfare and mixed drinking. Al Capone In New Orleans, jazz had had a colourful enough background, but the violences had been of a primitive and happy-go-lucky kind. The Jazz Age in Chicago ran to a carefully-organised 'civilised' type of violence that was something very different. It was anathema to Mr. Al Capone's tidy mind to have any loose threads about in the plots he wove. At one period, Capone was issuing regular weekly bribes of some $50 a go to members of Chicago's police force. He found to his disgust that the news of this pay-parade had spread around, and that more and more bogus cops were lining up in the queue to get their 42