(2-CD set) The 1920s was the Jazz Age, when white Americans discovered the syncopated rhythm that African-American musicians had been improvising for some time in New Orleans and on Chicago's South Side. Some New Yorkers ventured up to Harlem to listen to jazz as it was meant to be performed. Tin Pan Alley was never more productive. The ragtime of the teens gave way to the jazz of the 1920s. And while the sound might not have been pure in form, it was often made by musicians who were later to become some of the biggest jazz names of the 1930s and 1940s.