Episode # 2016
This show takes listeners back to the early days of jazz and Tin Pan Alley when songwriters and performers were shaping a new and distinctively American popular music. It's starting points include African-American syncopation borrowed from jazz, and lead on to the phenomenon of Charles Harris' "After the Ball," so successful that it convinced its composer that he could make a lot of money writing and selling songs in New York. It culminates with Paul Whiteman's program of so-called jazz in NYC's Aeolian Hall, including the premier of a new work, "Rhapsody in Blue."
