Sunday Feature: World War One - Cradle of Jazz

Alyn Shipton examines how jazz emerged from ragtime during World War One, asking if the war itself was the catalyst to launch the jazz age. He asks where the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's 1917 recordings - generally regarded as the first jazz records - came from. Alyn travels across America on the TOBA circuit of African-American Theatres, where vaudeville acts and blues singers pioneered musical change, and to Britain and France, where black entertainers offered light relief to those in the grip of the war. There are also Alyn's historical Radio 3 interviews with big band pioneer Jesse Stone, who formed his first band in 1918, and trumpeter Doc Cheatham, who served his apprenticeship on the wartime theatre circuit, as well as archive interviews with Jelly Roll Morton and Willie 'The Lion' Smith. There is music from Scott Joplin, James P Johnson, James Reese Europe and Ma Rainey, plus European recordings by Dan Kildare and Gordon Stretton among others. Alyn also hears from music historians Paul Oliver, James Lincoln Collier and Howard Rye