Trial access to RIPM Jazz Periodicals

UCL has trial access to RIPM Jazz Periodicals until 18th May 2022.

Jazz permeates many historical, cultural, and sociological aspects of American life and maintains an unchallenged place as an art form that the United States of America contributed to the world. Jazz magazines provide a contemporary view of jazz history by those who lived it; in effect, an almost daily chronicle of jazz history and activities in America from the early 1930s. The periodicals in RIPM Jazz Periodicals cover the period from 1914 to 2006, with the earliest title being Christiensen’s Ragtime Review (1914-1916).

Historical, sociological and geographical factors (e.g., where jazz was born, race relations, its first performance venues and initial audience), did not allow for the creation of genre-specific American jazz magazines in the early years of the twentieth century. While there are some early twentieth-century American periodicals that, on occasion, treat a subject related to jazz, and, several journals dealing with jazz-precursors, [Christensen’s Ragtime Review (1914-16) and The Ragtime Review (1916-1918)], it was not until 1933 that the first fully-fledged jazz periodicals were published in United States. And it is during this period that American jazz magazines begin to flourish, which they have continued to do with varying degrees of success to the present day.

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