ABSTRACT
During the early 1920s, jazz became phenomenally popular in such a way that it provided the fundamental basis, in musical and evolutionary terms, for the formulation of later popular music genres. However, as John Lucas states, 'when in the twenties people spoke of jazz music they very rarely had in mind the real thing' (1997:126). This premise is clearly over-simplified and essentialist with respect to the notion of 'real' jazz, but this is nevertheless an important point. Certainly, the popularity and appeal of jazz in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s was balanced by the correspondingly strong outrage and antipathy that it provoked, often from people that had never actually experienced the music for themselves. It is not necessarily the precise musical characteristics of the presence of jazz in Britain, which may have been heard only by a limited number of people, but the representations and perceptions of the music and the function of the idea of jazz within contemporary society that are under scrutiny here. This is complemented by studies of the aural presentation of jazz in Part II.
