1922: The Birth of Now - Ten programmes in which Matthew Sweet investigates objects and events from 1922, the crucial year for modernism, that have an impact today.

5. Louis Armstrong leaves New Orleans for Chicago in 1922, and works with King Oliver, a move that leads to him forming the Hot Five. Armstrong becomes the major figure as Jazz develops as an art and becomes the foremost cultural expression of African Americans, with profound influence, on the Harlem Renaissance and the poet Langston Hughes. When F. Scott Fitzgerald was searching for the definitive year of the jazz age, he said ‘may one offer in exhibit the year 1922!’ Matthew Sweet talks to jazz journalist Kevin Legendre who likens Armstrong’s journey from New Orleans to Chicago to James Joyce’s from Dublin to Paris. Satchmo hits High Cs and almost splits your ears. There is scat singing, wordless sounds that suggest the breakdown of speech, but also something new, akin to Eliot’s the Waste Land or the work of Edith Sitwell - godmother of rap? Critic Lisa Mullen cites Claude McKay’s book Harlem Shadows,published in 1922, which deals explicitly and powerfully with the shadow-side of modernity, the hard-edged urban modernity which his African American subjects haunt like unquiet spirits or raging ghosts. Can we speak of a distinctly Black Modernism?

Producer: Julian May Show less