© -Steven
Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
It would be unfair
to say that Jazz today is bereft of big bands.
They abound, it
seems, on every college campus that offers a Jazz education program and in a
number of European venues, as well [including – as shared here in a previous JazzProfiles
feature – the island of Sardinia
But there was a
time when big bands were the source
for most popular music in the United States Great Britain Europe .
The predominance
of this big band era is described in the following excerpt from the venerable
Jazz author Gene
Lees ’
chapter on the formation of “… the first true Woody Herman band” in his Leader
of the Band: The Life of Woody Herman [Oxford
© -Gene
Lees /Oxford University Press, copyright
protected; all rights reserved.
“The Swing Era
cannot be dated precisely, since its roots go back to the Paul Whiteman band in
the 1920s. It is generally considered to have lasted from the time of Benny
Goodman's first big success in 1935 through to the late 1940s, a little more
than ten years. Before Goodman, however, there were the Casa Loma orchestra, McKinney
Eventually there
were scores of these bands making records, playing on radio, and touring
North America, among them those of Georgie Auld, Charlie Barnet, Count Basie,
Will Bradley, Les Brown, Benny Carter, Bob Chester, Larry Clinton, Bob Crosby,
Sam Donahue, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Jan Garber, Glen Gray, Erskine Hawkins,
Earl Hines, Hal Kemp, Stan Kenton, Ray McKinley, Lucky Millinder, Teddy Powell,
Boyd Raeburn, Alvino Rey, Jan Savitt, Artie Shaw, Bobby Sherwood, Claude
Thornhill,
Jerry Wald, and
Chick Webb, all of which were of what we might call the jazz persuasion and
featured excellent soloists. Then there were what the hip (in those days hep)
fans called the "sweet" bands, despised by the jazz fans as
"corny," a term reputedly coined by Bix Beiderbecke to suggest the
backward and bucolic. These included Blue Barron, Gray Gordon, Eddy Duchin,
Shep Fields, Freddy Martin, Vaughn Monroe, Dick Stabile, Tommy Tucker, Horace
Heidt, Richard Himber, Art Kassel, Wayne King, Johnny Long, and Lawrence Welk.
Guy Lombardo
repeatedly won the Down Beat readers'
poll in the King of Corn category. This was a little unfair. What the Lombardo
orchestra was until its leader's death was a museum piece, an unaltered 1920s
tuba-bass dance band, quite good at what it did and admired by such unlikely
persons as Louis Armstrong and Gerry Mulligan. Usually included in the corn
category were the orchestras of Kay Kyser, Sammy Kaye, and Ozzie Nelson, though
all three were capable of playing creditable big-band jazz, and the Nelson
orchestra was a very good band, again one that Mulligan admires. Trombonist
Russ Morgan led what was considered one of the corny bands, and few fans
realized he had been a pioneering jazz arranger.
The "big-band
era," probably a better term than "swing era," since a lot of
successful bands not only didn't swing but didn't even aspire to, reached its
peak during World War II, despite the problems bandleaders had in finding
personnel when so many young musicians were in military service. As we have
noted, the fortunes of the bandleaders and their sidemen and singers were
followed avidly in Down Beat and Metronome, but even the lay press got
into it when the sequential polygamy of Artie Shaw and Charlie Barnet made
news, along with the marriages of Harry James to actress Betty Grable and of
Woody's old friend Phil Harris to Alice Faye. These bandleaders were not only
treated as movie stars, but sometimes were movie stars—Tommy Dorsey, Artie
Shaw, Glenn Miller, Harry James, and Woody among them—appearing in feature
films. Almost all of them were at least in short subjects. In some cases, the
movies were about the band business, including Second Chorus, in which Shaw uncomfortably portrayed a bandleader
named Artie Shaw, and Orchestra Wives,
in which the Miller band was prominently featured.
The jazz bands
were substantially supported by dedicated young dancers referred to
condescendingly if not contemptuously as jitterbugs. Shaw, whose aspirations to
high culture were never disguised, particularly despised them, and said so
publicly. Newsreels of the period—the movie theaters each week featured short
news films, precursors of television news broadcasts—from time to time would
show the gyrations of the participants in dance contests. There was a
patronizing tone about these observations, particularly when they showed black
dancers in Harlem , as if the camera and commentator were
examining the rites of a primitive tribe. The inference was inescapable. But
the best of these dancers were remarkable, and their athleticism—the men
spinning the women at arm's length, throwing them into the air and catching
them or slinging them under their legs and over their shoulders, the gyrations
wild but controlled—was imaginative and skilled. Combining elements of
gymnastics and ballet, this kind of dance was also risky, and we can only
imagine how many sprained shoulders and broken ankles were suffered when
dancers botched some of their most hazardous maneuvers. Today only a handful of
trained professional dancers can do what seemingly half the adolescent
populace of North
America did as a
matter of course in the 1940s. …
Nostalgic fans
will tell you that the jazz connoisseurs crowded close to the bandstand to
listen with enraptured concentration to the bands and their soloists, while the
superficial admirers danced in the back of the ballroom, but the division was
not that strict. Some fans alternated the two activities. Nor was the line
clear between the "sweet" and the "swing" bands. All bands
played for dancers, including those of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and Basie,
who probably never gave a thought to whether jazz was an art form, was
considered something of a genius for his anticipation of what dancers desired.
Even some of the "sweet" bands allowed space for improvised solos.
The Les Brown band, generally considered a dance band, featured intelligent and
subtle arrangements by writers such as Ben Homer and Frank Comstock and some
first-rate jazz soloists.
And so they
traveled, platoons of musical gypsies, unpacking their instruments and music
stands and setting up camp in hotel ballrooms in the cities or in the open-air
pavilions of small towns and lakeside and riverside amusement parks, even in
armories, churches, and skating rinks, bringing evenings of glamour,
romanticism, and excitement to audiences, and then packing up and piling into
cars or buses at evening's end to travel the two-lane highways of America for
yet another in a string of jobs. It must have been a lonely life, but I have
never met a musician who regretted having lived it. These men were musical pioneers,
as were a few women, like trumpeter Billie Roger s and the vibraharpist Marjorie Hyams, both
of whom played in the Herman band.
Once upon a time
it was doubted that track athletes would ever run a four-minute mile. Now it is
so routine that one has to be able to do it even to qualify for some events.
Thus it was with brass and saxophone playing in those dance bands. Trumpet and
trombone players, particularly lead players, were called on to play sustained
difficult material and to keep it up for hours on end. No symphony woodwind
players have ever been required to show the kind of endurance a jazz or dance
band demands of saxophone players. This was exploratory music, and Tommy
Dorsey, for one, altered the tessitura of trombone forever; now even some symphony
players have that kind of technique. Louis Armstrong irreversibly altered
trumpet playing, but many symphony players even now cannot do what Harry
James, Dizzy Gillespie, and Maynard Ferguson established as norms for that instrument.
Symphony trumpet players are not called on to produce the sustained
evening-long power of the great lead trumpet players such as the late Conrad
Gozzo, or to play the high notes routinely called for by jazz arrangers, notes
once considered off the top of the instrument. Harry James with Goodman pushed
the instrument higher than it had been before.
The form of the
orchestra by then had been defined. In later years some writers would add
French horns—Claude Thornhill was the first to do this—and expect the saxophone
players to double flutes or other woodwinds. But the basic form had been set,
a classic musical unit, like the string quartet or the symphony orchestra, and
Woody had built the Band That Plays the Blues up to that configuration as it
entered its last days to create the first true Woody Herman big band.”
