Theoretically Speaking -S5:E10: What Makes Swing Swing ? Part 1

In our last installment, we talked about how Trad Jazz’s popularity was replaced by something else. 

By 1935, Swing was the thing.

As Swing developed through the 1920s and 30s, it became the most commercially successful form of Jazz.

Its popularity overcame the prejudice of jazz’s association with brothels and prohibition-era speakeasies. So the question is, how is Swing different from Trad Jazz? I’m glad you asked.

The most obvious difference is the number of musicians. Trad Jazz combos usually had fewer than eight players.

Where a Trad Jazz band would have a trombone player, a Big Band might have three. Having four or five saxophones was common. In addition to the horns and winds, most rhythm sections had three or four members: bass, drums, and piano, guitar, or banjo.

With so many players, it just wouldn’t work to have everyone improvising all the time. That happened in Trad Jazz when there was, say, one clarinet, one trombone, and one sax.

That one player would stand up, improvise his butt off for one or two times through the chord progression, and sit down again so someone else could have a turn.

Who got to solo? That was up to the bandleader. Very often, he planned it out in advance. But sometimes, he’d just point to a guy. If your bandleader was one of those, you had to be ready to solo – with just a few seconds notice.

This is obvious but I’ll say it:

Swing emphasizes its swing.

A walking bass line is playing the notes of the chords, plus others along the way to the next chord, on strict quarter notes. For example, if a song repeats the chords C Major and F Major, the bass player might play the notes C, E, G and E under the C Major (because those are the three notes in the chord) and then play F, A, A#, and B under the F Major. 

The F and A are in the chord, but the A# and B aren’t. However, they sound good because they “walk” up chromatically in the same direction towards the C on the first beat of the next chord.

Of course, that’s just one example of how to walk from the C to the F and back to the C. There are myriad possibilities. The point is to keep the bottom end moving, a lot like basso continuo from Baroque music.

This sort of walking bass part can be composed. But it’s more likely that the bassist is improvising, keeping the tempo steady while picking notes that outline the current chord and lead the band to the root of the next chord. It’s leading from below.

One more thing about the bass part:

Swing also emphasized call-and-response. This came from the African American spirituals of the post-Civil War 1800s. Trad Jazz incorporated it, though mostly the call part was written and the response was improvised. In Swing, all the parts were written. The saxes might play the call and the brass section would respond, as in Glenn Miller’s famous “In The Mood.”

Even with all its written parts, swing has jazz’s hankering for experimentation.

Whether it’s a bassist’s solid, reliable, and constantly moving foundation or a saxophonist’s creative solo flight of fancy, Swing is every bit as innovative and improvised as any other era of Jazz.

So how did this all happen?

After Storyville was shuttered, many Jazz players moved north. Louis Armstrong was one of the many who landed in Chicago.

His voice became rough and gravely after a severe cold in 1921, and surgeries meant to fix it in 1936 and ‘37 only made it worse. It didn’t stop him from singing though, and that harsh voice became one of his trademarks.

In 1924, bandleader Fletcher Henderson invited him to join his band in New York.

He was a good arranger and hired sax player Don Redman to arrange for his band, too. He also hired Armstrong to, well, be Armstrong. This was the first inkling of Swing as something separate from Trad Jazz.

It was also where the genre gets its name.

Henderson told his band that Armstrong was coming to join the band and that, “This cat can swing.”

Indeed he could. He only stayed in New York for a year, but every player who heard him tried to be more like him. Armstrong, Henderson, and Redman made Swing its own thing, and that helped turn Harlem into the epicenter of black economic, philosophical, and artistic advancement.

It was called the “Harlem Renaissance.”

Duke Ellington moved to New York at about the same time.

He put together a band and, remarkably, some of the members stayed with him for 45 years. They were hired as the house band at the Cotton Club, a Harlem venue that initially catered to white audiences. It sold alcohol during the prohibition but was closed down only once, and not for long. The club’s owner, Owney Madden, was a bootlegger and gangster who knew which palms to grease.

This is something to remember:

Music grows in new directions when allowed to, and the places that allow it to grow are often run by gangsters, shysters, and ne’er do wells.

If you want to hear exciting new music, go somewhere you wouldn’t take your mother.

Cool SON-IN-LAW Bill Bois

Having said that, I did take my mother-in-law to CBGB.

Anyway, while many white audiences expected “jungle music” from the Cotton Club’s black entertainers, Ellington won an enthusiastic audience with sophisticated songs like “Mood Indigo,” “Three Little Words,” and “Take the A Train.”

The Cotton Club had a weekly, nationally broadcast radio show. With Ellington leading the house band, his music earned widespread admiration, and he had charting records from 1927 to 1954.

Swing was the music of black self-expression and was loved by white audiences, and a big part of that crossover appeal was dancing.

Whites danced the Charleston through the 1920s.

Many musicians were put out of work when the Depression hit in 1929. If people were low on cash, they wouldn’t spend what they had at expensive nightclubs. Fletcher Henderson was so broke he had to break up his band and sell his arrangements.

Some of them were purchased by Benny Goodman: A clarinetist who had moved to New York as a session player. He wanted to put his own band together and needed material.

NBC Radio hired Goodman and company to be one of the bands on a national show called Let’s Dance. The other two bands, led by Kel Murray and Xaviar Cugat, were mellower, so Goodman’s Swing got people’s attention.

That left Goodman with little income and a band to pay. A cross country tour was quickly arranged. It didn’t go well.

This has nothing to do with the tour not going well:

It’s worth noting that while Goodman’s band was integrated, he took only white players on the road. He wanted to avoid problems in certain cities. It was the United States in 1935. As we know, Dick Clark’s Caravan Of Stars experienced some of those problems, even 24 years later.

They didn’t have the money to rent a bus so they piled into their own cars and drove themselves. When people saw that a “Dance Band” was coming to play in their town, they expected waltzes, not fast tempos and four on the floor beats.

They were certain their three week booking at the Palomar in Los Angeles would be the end of the band. But when they arrived, there was a crowd waiting outside the venue. The discouraged Goodman was sure the line of people were there for someone else.

So the first set they played was slow waltzes and mellow tunes, like what they had been asked for across the country. The audience didn’t respond.

The Palomar stint saved Goodman’s career. Many of his players, Krupa included, became stars in their own right.

One thing that made the difference was Los Angeles received the Let’s Dance broadcast earlier in the evening, so more people knew Goodman’s music.

New York and Los Angeles loved Swing. It wasn’t long before the rest of the country did, too.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

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