Black Geniuses.

Another musician remarked that no trumpet player could do anything that Louis Armstrong had not already done. Armstrong's contemporaries included pianist-composer Jelly Roll Morton, blues singer Bessie Smith, and orchestra leader-composer Duke Ellington. The innovations and achievements of these and other black musicians in the 1920s proved to be the first widespread fulfillment of black American talent and genius. There were no doubt mute black geniuses in the arts before then who were deprived of the opportunity to utilize their genius. Art requires an audience, an interaction between the maker and the perceiver by means of the work; and artists, however compelling their creative urges, require incomes. Jazz provided black musicians with an art and a cross-racial public during the 1920s. The bootleggers functioned as patrons of American musical culture. The speakeasies were concert halls. The phonograph extended...