Composed in 1922, the year before the young composer/pianist from New Jersey took Paris by storm, George Antheil's Jazz Sonata is a comical and frenetic series of vignettes cobbled together in a wonderfully fragmentary manner. The title is somewhat misleading, since the work does its best to undermine the tonal scheme that had long characterized the sonata.

Each of the numerous themes in the Jazz Sonata caricaturizes familiar ragtime and dance hall clichés, exaggerating the most prominent elements into outlandish gestures. The plodding stride bass line now and then overshoots its expected span, outlining a devilish tritone instead of the expected perfect fifth; catchy hemiola in the melody seems unable to reorient itself to the original meter; the final ascent leads dramatically up to a cadence which never appears. While similar elements can be found in the contemporaneous music of Les Six, the Jazz Sonata is infused with acerbic wit rather than flippant charm. The harmonic language of Milhaud or Poulenc is a few shades less dissonant than Antheil's; while the former two frequently employ polytonally—that is, more than one key simultaneously—Antheil's harmonic palette borders on polyatonality, the right hand just beyond the enclosure of one key, the left straining the envelope of another. None of the fragmentary ideas Antheil presents in this work are carried to fruition; like gestures are juxtaposed with highly contrasting ones, creating an endearingly schizophrenic collage of sound.

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