Skip to main content

Groove Armada - Highway 101

During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend, and spend it they did, on movies, fashion and consumer goods such as ready to wear clothing and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios.

Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. Some pundits called them bedrooms on wheels. What many young people wanted to do was dance, the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom and the flea hop were popular dances of the era.

Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago, radio stations and phonograph records, 100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone, carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music’s vulgarity and depravity, and the moral disasters it supposedly inspired, but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.


Groove Armada - Highway 101
  • Produced by: Groove Armada
  • Released on: Jul 10, 2015
  • Genre: Electronic

Groove Armada formed after Andy Cato and Tom Findlay had been introduced by a mutual friend and soon started their own club night in London. The duo have released nine studio albums, four of which have charted in the UK Albums Chart top 50.

See previous Song of the Day

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Jackson Browne - Kisses Sweeter than Wine

Europe has a rich history of embracing blues and jazz music. In the early 20th century, American jazz musicians began touring Europe, introducing the continent to a new sound that was unlike anything they had ever heard before. Jazz became an instant hit among European audiences, and many European musicians began incorporating jazz elements into their music. Today, jazz festivals are held all over Europe, attracting thousands of fans from all over the world. In addition, many European cities have thriving blues scenes, with local bands and musicians performing regularly. Blues and jazz have also made their way to Asia, where they have found a devoted fan base. Japan, in particular, has a thriving jazz scene, with many Japanese musicians achieving international recognition. In addition, China has also seen a rise in the popularity of jazz music in recent years. Jazz festivals are now held in major Asian cities such as Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, attracting jazz lovers from all over ...

Veronica Swift - A Little Taste

There has always been an uncomfortable tension between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, a cyclical influence that vacillates between inspiration, appropriation and separation. Popular music has broken off into categories of rock, pop, country, and R&B, each with their own origin stories. But R&B and rock, usually codified as vastly different, Black and white styles, have long been intertwined in ways our historical memory may have us forget.  Despite the innovation that comes from separation, rock and R&B always find their way back to each other. In recent years, rock veterans have turned to the genre’s classics for inspiration. Queens of the Stone Age veered from their typical hard rock with 2017’s Villains, a dance y album inspired by frontman Josh Homme’s love of 1920s jazz and swing, other Black genres that laid the groundwork for the popular music of today. The whitewashing of rock’s history has oversimplified music’s malleability and silenced the voices of Amer...

Cannonball Adderley - Willow Weep for Me

The positivity and uplifting effect of the musical product is more likely to mean the musician is cheering themselves and everybody up rather than that the musician is telling us they are happy. This can largely be applied to attitudes to the performance of jazz and other Black cultures in the Western world. Whilst some of the aforementioned jazz pioneers, like Ella Fitzgerald, stayed clean, several had a history of drug abuse... which often resulted in premature deaths. Louis Armstrong, who used the infinitely safer drug marijuana throughout his 69 years... Whilst drug use was not uncommon among musicians in general, this pattern that many of the greats of jazz died young due to addictions speaks of a consistent level of turmoil, and alludes to their common experience of racism as a depressive factor in 20th Century America. Source: A Soft Reminder of Where Jazz Came From by Tom Platts Cannonball Adderley - Willow Weep for Me Released in: September 1955 Genre: Jazz Label: Savoy "...