Jazz?

In 1924, New York was the center of American popular music, but it was far from the creative sources of jazz, the deep south, New Orleans, Kansas City and Chicago. Although music called jazz was heard in New York as early as 1915, most jazz histories see the arrival of authentic New Orleans music, and its developments in Chicago, as beginning late in 1924 when Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson Band. Bix Beiderbecke and his Wolverines also brought a Chicago version of jazz to New York late in 1924. Recordings by King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, now considered the greatest exemplar of the New Orleans style, appeared in the summer of 1923, but Oliver did not play in New York until 1927; Jelly Roll Morton similarly did not perform in New York until 1926, after he had made his recordings for Victor.

New York had its own traditions of pre-jazz African-American music largely based in the worlds of social dancing and musical theater.