What happens
This Is Jazz presents a trial preview tracing the origins of American jazz, hosted by Jack McGregor. The program moves through a series of scenes, beginning in New Orleans in 1870 with a street band marching down Rampart Street playing High Society. It then follows the music as ragtime pianists and dance bands develop it through the 1890s and 1910s, carried up the Mississippi by riverboat. By 1922 the story reaches Chicago, where young players adopt the New Orleans style and shape a rougher Chicago sound. The preview closes with a 1925 Broadway number by Fats Waller. The broadcast is a pilot that invites listener feedback on whether a full series should follow, with mail sent to the Mutual Broadcasting System.
New Orleans from 1870 to 1910, the Mississippi river towns, and Chicago in the early 1920s, presented as a radio preview.
Characters: Jack McGregor, Chuck Kuckey, Harry Fromkies, Rudy Bletch, Ernest Kid Punch Miller, Maxie Kaminsky, Albert Nicholas, George Brunis
Listen for: The street band playing High Society in 1870, the ragtime Tiger Rag, and the Chicago numbers of the 1920s, with narration that traces how jazz developed.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.