eole Jazz Band traveled to Chicago, bringing Jazz with them. Louis Armstrong joined the Creole Jazz Band in 1922 as a young trumpet player. Armstrong is famous for his remarkable sense of rhythm and his abilities to improvise. Jazz quickly spread from Chicago to Kansas City, Los Angeles, and New York City. Jazz soon became the most popular music for dancing in the 1920s. Harlem produced the sounds of jazz, which attracted swarms of whites to the gaudy, exotic nightclubs, including the famous Cotton Club. In the late 1920s, the jazz pianist and composer, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington led his ten-piece orchestra at the Cotton Club. The Jazz Age was among one of the most important times during the 1920s for Americans. It changed attitudes, behavior, and ideas of life greatly. When they were out dancing on the dance floor at a club, they felt free of all the suffering they were going through. Even though it didn’t look like it Americans were suffering a great deal, they turned to alcohol and materialism to help soothe their pain. Many American writers were ignored by the lifestyles of the 1920s. They had nothing to do with things they felt were from the stern culture of small towns and the superficial and rudeness of business cultures. Most of the literature writers produced was critical of a society with few morals to their personal fulfillment. Although writers struggled at first, the 1920s became one of the richest eras in American literary history. F. Scott Fitzgerald was known as the representative of the Jazz Age. He revealed the negative side of the 1920s, which was more realistic than the way others described the era. In This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, he depicted wealthy people, describing how they led hopelessly empty lives in their rich surroundings. Some writers were so upset about American culture that they lived in Paris. They wanted to have nothing to do with shallow people. ...
