THE ARTS | Reshaping ideas, expressing identity
26 July 2008
The King of Swing
The fluid swing jazz of Benny Goodman and others, proved hugely popular
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
Beginning in 1935, a new style of jazz-inspired music called “swing,” initially developed in the late 1920s by black dance bands in New York, Chicago, and Kansas City, transformed American popular music. The word “swing” (like “jazz,” “blues,” and “rock ’n’ roll”) derives from African-American English. First used as a verb for the fluid, “rocking” rhythmic momentum created by well-played music, the term was used by extension to refer to an emotional state characterized by a sense of freedom, vitality, and enjoyment. References to “swing” and “swinging” are common in the titles and lyrics of jazz records made during the 1920s and early 1930s.
Swing music provides us with a window onto the cultural values and social changes of the New Deal era. The basic ethos of swing music was one of unfettered enjoyment, “swinging,” “having a ball.” The audience for swing spanned the social boundaries that separated ethnic groups, natives and immigrants, southerners and northerners, city dwellers and country folk, the working class, the expanding middle class, and progressive members of the educated elite.
For the swing era, the mythic “founding moment” occurred in the summer of 1935, when a dance band led by a young jazz clarinetist named Benny Goodman (1909-1986) embarked on a tour of California. Goodman was not only a skilled jazz improviser but also a strict disciplinarian, insisting that his musicians play their parts with perfect precision. The Goodman band’s appearances on the national Let’s Dance radio broadcasts and its hot syncopated style built a sizable following.
In a seeming echo of the hype surrounding Paul Whiteman’s public image, the press crowned Benny Goodman the “King of Swing.” However, there are several big differences between the so-called kings of jazz and swing. While Whiteman remained a classical musician all his life, Goodman was in fact a fine (if often under-rated) improviser who studied jazz closely. While Whiteman’s band played syncopated ballroom dance music in a style that borrowed its name from jazz, Goodman’s really was a jazz band, performing music closely modeled on the innovations of African-American musicians, composers, and arrangers. And while Paul Whiteman’s dance orchestras of the 1920s never included musicians of color, Goodman was the first prominent white bandleader to hire black players, beginning with the pianist Teddy Wilson in 1936 and followed by the brilliant young electric guitarist Charlie Christian, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and trumpeter Cootie Williams.
Although big bands relied heavily on arrangements of popular Tin Pan Alley songs, the blues – with its 12-bar structure, three-chord pattern, blue notes, and call-and-response patterns – also remained a mainstay of swing music. Of all the big bands, the one most closely associated with the blues tradition was led by the jazz pianist William “Count” Basie (1904-84). Basie, born in New Jersey, gained much of his early experience as a player and bandleader in Kansas City, Missouri. During the 1920s and early 1930s black dance bands in Kansas City had developed their own distinctive approach to playing hot dance music. Kansas City-style was more closely linked to the country blues tradition than the style of the New York bands, and it relied more heavily upon riffs (repeated patterns). One important influence on the rhythmic conception of the K.C. bands was the boogie-woogie blues piano tradition, in which the pianist typically plays a repeated pattern with his left hand, down in the low range of the piano, while improvising polyrhythmic patterns in his right hand.
Another prominent swing era band was the Duke Ellington Orchestra, led by Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974), widely regarded as one of the most important American musicians of the 20th century. Ellington was an experimenter. He devised unusual musical forms, combined instruments in unusual ways, and created complex, distinctive tone colors.
A third leading swing band was that of Glenn Miller (1904-1944). From 1939 until 1942 the Miller Orchestra was the most popular dance band in the world, breaking record sales and concert attendance records. Miller developed a peppy, clean-sounding style that appealed to small-town midwestern people as well as to the big-city, East and West Coast constituency that had previously sustained swing music. In terms of sheer popular success, the Miller band marked the apex of the swing era, racking up 23 Number-One recordings in a little under four years.
Neither jazz nor its far-reaching influence on American music and culture ended in the 1930s, however. Swing, also known as big band music, grew out of and was strongly influenced by jazz. Beyond swing, every succeeding generation of musicians has defined its own style of jazz, responding to and challenging the aural legacy that began in New Orleans. Bebop, cool jazz, fusion jazz, soul jazz, and acid jazz are just a few of the varieties that have grown from the original tree of sound.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
