JAZZ

When Joseph "King" Oliver died in the spring of 1938, his protégé, Louis Armstrong, and other bandleaders, such as Cab Calloway and Earl Hines, claimed at his funeral that Oliver was the true "king of swing." Others who wore the title, and swing musicians in general, they insinuated, owed a great debt to the leader of the Creole Jazz Band. This was a way of suggesting that the music of the big band era, known as swing since the 1930s, was an out-growth of early forms of jazz. This idea contrasts with the fans' notion that swing music, like New Orleans jazz or Dixieland, is a discrete and separate entity from bebop.

Scholars disagree on how to define jazz and swing, but many assert that the earlier bands of James Reese Europe, Fletcher Henderson, and Duke Ellington, as well as Oliver, were fundamental to swing's evolution. On the eve of World War I, James Europe's orchestra performed at New York City's Carnegie Hall—one full decade before Paul Whiteman and a generation before the jazz concerts of the late 1930s were staged in this hall. James Europe's music grew out of ragtime and popular dance music, as did Henderson's and Ellington's. Don Redman, Henderson's arranger, is often credited with having the reed or brass sections perform passages in call-and-response sequences, but Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton also used this distinctive voicing and organization. Besides employing the rhythms of ragtime and the harmonies of blues and popular dance music, Ellington's compositions and arrangements contained unusual harmonies and unique combinations of instruments.

These outfits, and southwestern orchestras such as those of Alphonso Trent, Bennie Moten, and the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, grew in size from six to eight to twelve and thirteen or more musicians in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the rhythm section, the string bass replaced the tuba and the guitar was used instead of banjo, and lighter more flexible rhythms were played in 4/4 instead of 2/4. Swing bands also alternated ensemble passages with improvised sections by "hot" soloists, while other band members "riffed" or played highly rhythmic motifs in the background. These exciting new sounds buoyed dancers and musicians alike, sending them into climactic moments when music, musicians, and dancers melded for an evening into a symphony of sound and movement. New jitterbug dances, such as the Lindy Hop and the Big Apple, illustrated these distinctive rhythms with not only new steps, but also highly acrobatic moves in which one partner propelled the other up and away from the floor in what were known as air steps.

These changes occurred gradually, however, and in the 1930s, there were still many bands, African-American and white swing orchestras, that included New Orleans styles, songs, and collective improvisation. Nonetheless, as evident from the 1932 recordings by Fletcher Henderson and Bennie Moten, as well as others, musicians perfected the swing idiom and arrangements in songs such as "King Porter Stomp" and "Moten Swing." By the mid and late 1930s, bands led by Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and the Dorsey brothers also thrilled jitterbug dancers, as well as radio listeners from coast to coast. The white bands often utilized African-American arrangers—Fletcher Henderson, Sy Oliver, and Eddie Durham—to write the more soulful aspects of swing arrangements.

In several respects, swing bands contained within them the seeds of future developments in music and culture for decades to come. Most if not all of the contemporary dance music in the United States stemmed from this tradition. The enhanced role of the drummers, of long drum solos, of melodies that were basically riffs, and of the incessant dance beat foreshadowed the rhythm and blues of the 1940s, which came to be known as rock and roll in the 1950s. Drummers who were leaders also contributed to these developments; Chick Webb in the 1930s was one of the first to bring drums front and center, a role popularized by Gene Krupa and leading to Max Roach and Art Blakey, among others. In another respect, the small combos within the big bands, Count Basie's Kansas City combos, for example, or Goodman's Quartet, presaged bebop bands, such as those led by Charlie "Bird" Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and progressive jazz ensembles, such as the Modern Jazz Quartet. Even the fusion of European classical music with jazz, as in the compositions, arrangements, and playing of band leaders Artie Shaw and Eddie South, were comparable to Third Stream developments in the 1950s.

In the midst of the Depression, U.S. workers and unemployed men and women danced, socialized, and wooed to hits of the swing era—"One O'Clock Jump," "Mood Indigo," and "In the Mood." Notably during the swing decade, blues moved to the forefront—not the country blues of Blind Lemon Johnson or city blues of Ma Rainey, but the urban versions of this music played by Ellington, Henderson, Basie, and Jimmy Lunceford. By the late 1930s, guitarists Eddie Durham, Charlie Christian, and T-Bone Walker electrified the instrument and amplified the sound, integrating the guitar with large orchestras and using it to solo like a saxophone or trumpet. Their efforts and the combos of Nat "King" Cole, Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart, Stuff Smith, and Louis Jordan led to rock and roll and the music of Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and eventually Elvis Presley and the British rock bands. Electrification of the guitar in the 1930s also presaged fusion with the electric piano, bass, and other instruments in the 1970s.

Along with blues and jazz dancing, a distinctive way of speaking, swing slang or jive talk, accompanied the music and was even adopted in articles about the music and musicians. Some attributed this slang to Louis Armstrong's influence, but the jazz world, the underworld, and entertainment circles have always had their distinctive argots. These merged in the swing band milieu, and expressions such as "Hit that jive, jack" and "Let's get racy with Count Basie" punctuated the repartee and banter of not only musicians, but dancers, listeners, writers, and others in the "hip" crowd and became part of common parlance. Even the humor of, for example, "Nagasaki," "Flat Foot Floogie," and "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?" was to be found in rock and roll songs of subsequent decades.

The social aspects of swing bands were as important as the music, as they provided staging grounds for assaults on racial segregation. In jam sessions, white musicians and black musicians performed together on the bandstand, a practice that was illegal in the South because it meant racial integration. Bandleaders such as Benny Carter hired white musicians, and Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw hired black musicians, a practice that was a frontal assault on segregation. Integrated bands traveling in the South encountered threats of arrest or violence when they defied the law by demanding equal rights for all band members. Up north, Billie Holiday, Oran "Hot Lips" Page, and others fought back in nightclubs and bars when whites attacked them. Thus, in a social sense as well as in the music, dance, and language, swing prepared the ground for future developments in subsequent decades of the twentieth century.

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