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 The
music Americans call jazz has many origins and many forms.
Music historians have a difficult time fixing the origins of
musical styles with any precision. Many American musicians,
no matter what their backgrounds, have had "big ears"--they
have tended to listen to many forms of music and adapted
them freely. One form of American music, emerging in the
years just before World War One, became known as
"dixieland." Associated primarily with New Orleans, and the
many towns along the Mississippi river as far North as Iowa,
this music derived from ragtime and marching bands.
Typically, it involved group improvisation and a loose,
freewheeling, "swinging" style. The Original Dixieland Jazz
Band, and all-white group, gave the music its name in the
popular markets. But music historians have long known that
the ODJB borrowed heavily from African American musical
forms. Louis
Armstrong and Bix Biederbecke became most famous playing
in this mode of dixieland jazz.
By
the late twenties, musicians had begun modifying the forms
of "jazz." In the 1930s a new form of jazz had emerged,
called "swing." Swing music was characterized by very large
bands, fixed, usually written arrangements, and solos by
individual musicians in turn instead of group improvisation.
Swing bands typically used an upright or double bass instead
of the tuba which had often characterized dixieland, and
played repeated "riffs" to give the music its propulsive
rhythmic force. Swing appears to have emerged from an
adaptation of the commercially successful but bland,
neo-jazz played by show and dance orchestras like Paul
Whiteman's. In the hands of brilliant arrangers like
Fletcher Henderson, however, swing combined harmonic
sophistication with danceable rhythms and compelling
individual improvisations.
Swing
bands ranged from "Kansas City" style groups like Count
Basie's, which emphasized a very bluesy, intensely riff
oriented style, to New York based bands like Duke
Ellington's or Glenn Miller's which experimented with a more
orchestral range of colors. For many students of American
music, "big band" swing represents a pinnacle of American
musical form, combining harmonic sophistication,
improvisational brilliance, and danceable accessibility.
Others have criticized swing as overly commercial,
regimented, and mechanical.
Whatever
its aesthetic merits, swing music characterized the popular
culture of the 1930s. The music played constantly on records
and on radio, and reached virtually every city in America
through swing bands' incessant touring. Historians have seen
in "the swing era" not just music but culture, a
distinctive, generational culture of swing jazz with its own
dances, clothing styles, and most notably, slang. By the
1940s there were several "dictionaries of jive" available to
explain the special language of swing. Much of this slang
grew from drug subculture; much of it seems to have had
little to do with musicians, who often disliked it. But it
made its way across the nation. In the 1930s Lavada Durst,
one of the first African American disk jockeys in Texas,
called himself "Dr. Hepcat." Here,
in an interview conducted by The Discovery Channel in
1995, he recreates the patter that made him locally
famous. Listen to Dr. Hepcat, then take the "hipster's quiz"
included here to test your knowledge of one of the swing
era's most distinctive expressions.
Take the Hepcat
quiz! (you need the "shockwave" plug-in for the quiz to
work)
Equally distinctive, jitterbug dancing also characterized
swing culture. Jitterbugging apparently originated in Harlem
as a variation on the "lindy hop." It placed a high emphasis
on physicality and improvisation, and like swing itself it
put set moves and repeated gestures in tension with moments
of spectacular individual improvisation. Jitterbuggers, with
their "breakouts" and "aerial moves" became as much a part
of the show as the bands themselves. As rock and roll did in
the fifties, swing culture seemed to offer a youthful
alternative to the stultifying conventions and restrictions
of middle class life. By the eve of World War Two, swing
culture had culminated as well in the "zoot suit," an
exaggerated, parodic form of dress favored by Mexican and
African American youth.
Like
much of American popular culture, swing crossed ethnic and
racial lines freely. White, black and Latin musicians
borrowed from each other constantly. But what did this sort
of interchange mean? Benny Goodman, for example, a child of
Jewish immigrants, became known as "the King of Swing." The
title had more to do with his commercial success--and
perhaps the fact that he was white--than his musical
productions. But Goodman earned the respect of white and
black musicians alike when he integrated his band in 1936.
Though this seems unexceptional today, in the 1930s it was
not only innovative but politically explosive. To make his
1944 film Jammin the Blues, the photographer Gjon
Mili had to get special permission from the studio to
include white guitarist Barney Kessel in his band. The
studio first attempted to stain Kessel's arms, hands, and
face with "berry juice," so he would look darker, then
finally relented after Mili agreed to film Kessel only in
shadows. In the final film, Kessel looked much darker than
the African American Lester Young. The singer Billy Holliday
was once forced to darken her face with greasepaint by a
white club owner who feared she looked "too white" to be on
the stage with black men. Despite such idiocies, swing music
brought both white and black audiences and musicians
together in new ways.
But
swing's capacity to unite hardly overcame entrenched
racism.A selection from
Downbeat, the leading magazine of jazz in the
1930s, demonstrates clearly how powerful racial divisions
were even among the music's fans. In this piece the
magazine's editors attempt to stay neutral as they ask
various bandleaders what they think about integrated
bands.Their answers were far more "mixed" than their
bands.
Others
saw swing, and jazz, as the key to building a better
America. John Hammond dominated the jazz community as a
critic and promoter in the 1930s and 40s. As a producer for
Columbia Records, he "discovered" such artists as Bill
Broonzy, Sidney Bechet, Albert Ammons, Count Basie, Billy
Holliday, and Woody Guthrie. Late in his career, he helped
Bob Dylan and rock singer Bruce Springsteen get their start.
He worked against racial prejudice consistently, though he
subscribed to a troubling form of racism himself, insisting
that African American musicians were always better and more
"authentic." An assessment of this
important figure by a contemporary, the jazz critic Otis
Ferguson, is included here.
Hammond's
leftist politics made him suspect to the FBI, while his
inherited wealth, Ivy League accent and autocratic ways led
some musicians to describe him as "the big bringdown." He
exerted a near dictatorial control over recording for a
time, and his career shows how even the best intentioned
cultural brokers can become enmeshed in the contradictions
of American racial politics. It also raises the question of
how American popular culture, its music, its slang, its
fashions and interracila borrowings, changes American
politics.
By
the mid forties swing had begun to decline in popularity.
Younger musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker,
chafing against its more restrictive commercial aspects,
began making a more harmonically challenging music that the
press dubbed "bebop." Bebop, or "bop" severed jazz from its
connections to dance and cast it further into the realm of
"art music." The big bands' economics made them hard to
sustain, and increasingly the popular dance market was
captured by "jump" or "rhythm and blues" acts like Louis
Jordan, Joe Turner, saxophonist King Porter, or vocal teams
like the Ravens. These acts themselves led directly to rock
and roll in the decades that followed.
Historian
David Stowe, in his book Swing Changes, argues for
swing as an important cultural force, an instrument of
social change. Imperfect, hedged in by systematic
inequalities, swing music and culture nevertheless built
bridges between black, white and Hispanic listeners.
American popular culture, famously, is far more pluralistic,
more diverse, more tolerant and more dynamic than American
legal or political culture. Our politics has failed to live
up to our taste in top-forty music. In the 1950s and
sixties, African Americans were able to overturn legal
segregation and the denial of voting rights. Most of this
change can be linked to formal political campaigns against
segregation and the formation of grassroots organizations.
How much can be laid at the feet of the swing bands?
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