The Swing Book (2 page)

Now let’s swing this all up a bit. Swing, of course, is hardly just a musical concept. It was also a sweeping, complex movement
that enchanted and entertained America during two of the country’s periods of greatest trial, the Depression and World War
II. Looked at historically, swing
was
jazz music played by big bands primarily for dancing. At its peak in the late thirties, it was a readily identifiable kind
of music, with such glorious standards as Count Basie’s “One O’clock Jump,” Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and Goodman’s
“Sing, Sing, Sing” coming as close as possible to a pure concept of swing. It was at once some of the hottest, most amazing
jazz ever created and also the first and only form of jazz to be embraced by a mass audience. At the heart of it was the close
relationship between the music and the dancing. This wasn’t music played in a concert hall to be passively appreciated. Every
night, from coast to coast, thousands of deliriously transported couples swung and jitterbugged and swayed the evening away.

The phenomenon of swing took on deeper meanings as well. Swing was as important for its cultural resonance as it was for its
musical achievement. In a time of brutal racism, swing was a model, if never perfect in practice, of harmony and equality
between black and white musicians. To some observers, it was the melting pot in action; to others, it was America’s singular
contribution to world culture. While it soared to artistic heights, it also remained profoundly populist. The average Jack
and Jill felt included in its expansive energy. The Lindy Hop, the dance that went hand in partner’s hand with the music,
was proclaimed an American folk dance. A product of the New Deal years, it was even seen as a model of the pluralistic democratic
ideas of the decade. When America went to war, the already strong symbolism of swing became magnified; it came to be seen
as representative of the best things the country had to offer. For the boys overseas, it was a major force in defining what
they were fighting for.

So how did a bunch of three-minute songs end up with so much cultural weight attached to them? To find out, you need to start
all the way at the beginning. The roots of swing go back to the very birth of jazz.

Although early innovator Jelly Roll Morton once claimed to have created jazz, no one person can take credit for inventing
this music. But one city, New Orleans, does deserve that distinction. During the 1800s, this overheated city on the Mississippi
was by all accounts a sort of mosh pit of cultures, from French and Spanish to African and Caribbean to English and Irish.
And in the midst of this modern-day Babel, the city’s black population began to forge a new language that would unite two
great musical traditions. At the time, the sounds of Africa and of Europe couldn’t have seemed more antithetical. But the
child of the two—at first a bastard in the eyes of white America, but later, during the swing era, a favorite son—would grow
up to be many times the sum of its parts.

According to Ted Gioia’s insightful
History of Jazz,
African music, though itself varied, is built on a number of shared characteristics, all of which would shape jazz and in
turn swing. These include call-and-response patterns, in which a leader sings or plays a line and is answered back by the
group; the playing of instruments in a style that resembles the sound of human voices; emphasis on improvisation; and most
important, an astonishing array of complex rhythm patterns that were often layered one on top of another. To this mix were
added strong European elements. Blacks in America began composing and writing down music that had only been played by ear.
They began fitting their music into the Western form of the short popular song and taking inspiration from the rich melodic
heritage of Europe.

How these two forms of music actually came together in nineteenth-century New Orleans isn’t documented. There are no written
and certainly no recorded examples of their creations. What is known is that New Orleans, unlike the rest of America, took
a much more tolerant attitude toward African music. In most other places, it wasn’t allowed to be played at all, but in pre-Civil
War New Orleans slaves regularly held dances in the city’s Congo Square. These were “an actual transfer of totally African
ritual,” writes Gioia, “to the native soil of the New World.”

When Congo Square met Giuseppe Verdi (New Orleans had the first opera house in America), the results were potent. As Lionel
Hampton concludes, “The plantation bosses would bring musicians over to perform from England and France, and the slaves would
listen to what they played from outside the window. They changed it from the opera. When you hear a famous song like ‘High
Society,’ it’s a good copy of
Rigoletto.
Black workers heard these songs and they were putting it in swing time. And it came from the plantations up through the streets
of New Orleans to the cafés of New Orleans.”

By the turn of the century, jazz—even if it wasn’t yet called jazz—had coalesced into a distinct sound in the Big Easy. Inventing
outside of musical academies, the small New Orleans combos celebrated freedom of expression and spontaneous creativity. Taking
a cue from the new and closely related music of ragtime, the rhythm of jazz became “ragged” or syncopated, giving emphasis
to beats that were not traditionally stressed. Even the way that such early jazz musicians as Buddy Bolden, Kid Ory, King
Oliver, Nick LaRocca, and Jelly Roll Morton played their instruments was original. They put an emotionalism and edge into
the very sound of the notes themselves. Classical European musicians had generally attempted to produce the purest tones possible
with their instruments. Instead, as musician Richard Hadlock remembered, New Orleans clarinetist and sax giant Sidney Bechet
exhorted him to play one note in as many ways as he could. Bechet, according to Hadlock, told him to “growl it, smear it,
flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. That’s how you express your feelings in this music. It’s like talking.”

In turn, jazz inspired people to sing differently. Like instruments, voices also began to sound more like they were talking.
Instead of vocalizing right on the beat, singers got hep to the new rhythmic devices of jazz and started to play around with
how they phrased lyrics.

And then there was the blues. Developing around the same time as jazz and reaching an early popular peak in the twenties with
such singers as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, this powerful music exerted an immeasurable influence on jazz. Named for the music’s
blue notes, which don’t fit into the more precise European conceptions of do-re-mi, the blues contributed its wonderfully
nuanced tone and distinctive attitude of strength in the face of adversity to jazz. Meanwhile, jazz provided a new avenue
for the blues, working it into more complex and up-tempo arrangements. These myriad influences and developments first came
to national attention after 1917, when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a group of white musicians, made the first jazz recording.
They were soon followed by influential records from the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band, which introduced the man who would effect
a cataclysmic change in jazz,
Louis Armstrong.
(For more detailed biographical information on Armstrong and other major jazz artists whose names are in bold print, see
chapter 4.)

Before Armstrong, the New Orleans bands were small groups that sought to hone a collective sound. As Ted Gioia writes, “The
New Orleans pioneers created a music in which the group was primary, in which each instrument was expected to play a certain
role, not assert its independence.” But as anyone who’s ever heard Armstrong knows, keeping a lid on this individual would
have been impossible. With his hugely resonant warm voice, clarion trumpet calls, and larger-than-life personality, Armstrong
was poised to dominate the American musical landscape as perhaps the most important singer and musician of the twentieth century.

While he was never a major bandleader, Armstrong deserves to be called the true father of swing music. After leaving New Orleans
for Chicago in 1922—his journey was part of a great migration of musicians and blacks in general who left the South for better
job opportunities in the North—Armstrong began to assert a new role for jazz musicians. On a series of legendary recordings
begun in 1925 with groups known as the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, he overthrew the ensemble ethos of New Orleans by blowing
and improvising the hottest solos ever. These records, considered the most historically significant in jazz, show Armstrong
at his most wildly inventive. On such songs as “Potato Head Blues” and “Wild Man Blues” he broke free of jazz conventions,
letting loose a panoply of new melodies and rhythmic ideas. But his genius wasn’t only at creating breathtakingly elaborate
riffs. There was logic and strength and structure behind his every flight. On one song, “Heebie Jeebies,” recorded in 1926,
Armstrong scats for the first time on record, giving to voice the same improvisational space enjoyed by a musical instrument.

None of this is to say that Armstrong was the only one making the solo supreme. Such jazz greats as cornetist Bix Biederbecke,
clarinetists Frank Teschemacher and Pee Wee Russell, and trombonist Jack Teagarden were also working magic in Chicago at the
same time. But Armstrong’s influence on swing would prove the most decisive. Every solo you’ll ever hear, on anything from
Benny Goodman to Count Basie to Louis Jordan, owes a debt to the man that music writer Albert Murray has called the Prometheus
of jazz.

Once the solo had come into its own, all that needed to happen was for it to find a home. The final step in the birth of swing
was the creation of the big band.

Fletcher Henderson,
the man credited with putting together the first swing big band, got his first gig in 1923 at a spot in New York called the
Club Alabam, and within a year he had hired Armstrong. While the New Orleans trumpeter wasn’t a favorite of Henderson’s, Armstrong
and his already magnificent solo skills had a profound effect on others in the band, most notably saxophonist
Coleman Hawkins
(who would turn the then-lowly sax into a star player) and arranger Don Redman. Where Redman excelled was in adapting the
call-and-response of jazz to a full orchestra. He would set entire sections against each other, a regiment of reeds giving
a shout-out and a platoon of brass answering back. The band music became richer, denser, and more textured, a sea of sound
that was no mere backdrop for the new hot solo. Redman, living in New York, was also attuned to the popular music of the Big
Apple, bringing in more influences from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley than had previously been present in jazz. (However, it
should be noted that recent scholarship is challenging Henderson’s primacy in this area. Richard Sudhalter in his 1999 book
Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz 1915–1945
argues that the Henderson band was only one of a number of bands effecting these changes during the twenties. White bands
such as those of Jean Goldkette, which included Bix Biederbecke as a soloist, and Ben Pollack, which had Benny Goodman, were
evolving in similar ways.)

Whoever deserves the most honor, one thing is clear: the melding of the improvised solo with the richly orchestrated dance
band was the key to making swing happen. And not only did the sound surpass anything that had come before it but also the
new swing bands began to be seen as a representation of the country’s political ideals. Hot soloists within big bands: here
was an artistic model for individual freedom of expression within the context of a larger group. As Goodman once said, swing
“has the spirit of American democracy in it.”

While this late-twenties jazz sounded like what we now recognize as swing, it still wasn’t called swing. It was jazz, plain
and simple. In fact, the swing era itself had yet to be ushered in. During the early thirties, before swing reached its mass
mainstream level, it flourished in smaller pockets around the country while the so-called sweeter and less musically challenging
bands like those of Guy Lombardo and Wayne King were tops nationwide. Important bands keeping the flame of hot jazz alive
included the
Earl Hines
Orchestra in Chicago; the
Casa Loma Orchestra,
a collective of white musicians that built a following on college campuses; and Kansas City’s Bennie Moten band (Count Basie’s
early home), which recorded the seminal tune “Moten Swing” in 1932.

But the hardest-swinging jazz bands were concentrated in one place above all others. Harlem at this time was a hothouse of
creative activity and musical one-upmanship.
Chick Webb
held court at the Savoy, where he first introduced
Ella Fitzgerald
to the world as a professional singer. His competition included the outrageous
Cab Calloway
and the powerful ensembles of
Jimmie Lunceford
and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, featuring the arrangements of Don Redman. In tandem with the intellectual and literary movement
known as the Harlem Renaissance, jazz in Harlem was evolving fast and furiously. This was where the showy piano playing known
as Harlem stride had flowered in the early twenties, with innovators such as James P. Johnson and the larger-than-life
Fats Waller
creating a bridge from the more jagged ragtime piano into the more fluid keyboard style of swing. It was a place of rent
parties (music shindigs held near the end of the month to help pay the rent), all-night cutting contests (in which musicians
would go at it for hours trying to top each other), and the achievement of a new level of sophistication both in the music
and in the presentation of jazz.

No one put jazz in a tuxedo, both literally and figuratively, quite like
Duke Ellington.
Urbane, brilliant, the poet laureate of swing, Ellington rose to prominence after securing a long-term gig at the segregated
Cotton Club in 1927. “Black people entertained at the Cotton Club, but you could not go into the Cotton Club. It was in the
heart of Harlem and we couldn’t go in,” says Lindy Hop pioneer Norma Miller. At the club, however, Ellington was one part
of an amazing floor show, complete with tap dancing, burlesque-style dancing (one move was called the Harlem River Quiver),
and vaudeville numbers. Ellington’s exotic music—known as “jungle music” at the time—fit perfectly into the high-energy environment.
But in addition to honing his skills as a great entertainer, Ellington was also creating some of his most enduring classics,
songs like “Creole Love Call,” “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Solitude,” and “In a Sentimental
Mood,” which reached the soul through new and unexpected ways. In these early days, Ellington began creating jazz that could
be appreciated as high art. Oh, and he also created a little number during this period called “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It
Ain’t Got That Swing).” The movement never had an anthem that said it so well.