The Big Bands

Rip It Up, Issue 23, 1 June 1979, Page 16

The Big Bands

A BEGINNER'S JAZZ HISTORY PART II BY JOHN DIX

By the time the Thirties rolled around jazz had a foothold in eveTy major American metropolis. Admittedly most of it was of a rather insipid variety but at least the music was being brought to the attention of a larger audience. The rise of jazz ran parallel with another social phenomena the dance craze. As Victorian standards were deemed archaic teenagers took to dancing hitherto a rather sombre activity as a popular form of recreation. The bands that catered for these young foxtrotters relied mainly on Tin Pan Alley scores but eventually a semblance to jazz, a semi-jazz if you like, developed. Dance Band leaders like Paul Whiteman and Jean Goldkette actually carved a name for themselves in jazz history by featuring such notable white jazzmen as Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman and the Dorsey Brothers. But naturally it was the Negro dance bands who, in those segregated bandstand days, made the most formidable forays into a new hybrid jazz. Fletcher Henderson, a middle class negro with musical training, was undoubtedly the most influential of these band leaders.

By the mid-Twenties Henderson realised that many of his musicians were out-of-work jazzmen who'd come along for the regular paycheck. Henderson understood that the main difficulty in a dance band attempting to play jazz was on the differing line-ups. The clarinet, a major instrument in jazz, had no real place in the dance hall where the emphasis was on volume, just as the lush mellow tones of the saxophone section were inappropriate to jazz. What Henderson did was utilise the saxophones in much the same manner that the jazzmen used the clarinet, but rather than have the two sections (brass and reeds) play simultaneously he had them play antiphonally. That is, one section played the melody, the other punched out stops and riffs during the pauses. It was a formula that would be widely imitated ten years later. Then were was Duke Ellington. In the lateTwenties Ellington gained popularity with a series of recordings aimed at the commercial market. Virtually gimmick records the result was dubbed ‘jungle music’ due to the emphasis on Bubber Miley’s growling trumpet and Sonny Greer’s powerhouse drumming. Ironically, Ellington, despite setting a high standard through the Thirties, was almost ignored during the Swing Era, and it wasn’t until the early Forties when the Swing Boom was at its peak that Ellington released a series of records with a starstudded band that established him as one of jazz’s greatest-ever arranger-composers. Composing with his personnel rather than his instrumentation is mind, Ellington gave his sidemen the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities on tailor-made compositions. Ellington transcended the limitations of Tin Pan Alley and the blues (the two main inspirations) to establish himself as a ’serious’ composer. Right up to his death in 1974 he was still issuing such notable recordings as Far East Suite and he proved his adaptability by recording an album in the Sixties with John Coltrane. The Swing Era was born in 1935, in typical Hollywood fashion, when the Benny Goodman Band won over the teenage audiences at Los Angeles’ Palovar Ballroom following a disastrous national tour during which the band vowed to call it a day after the California gig. There are several reasons why a specific time and place can be ascertained to the birth of Swing. The Chicago-based Goodman band had been broadcasting across the country via the novetly of the radio. Their ‘new’ music (Fletcher Henderson arrangements incidentally) had little response back east but in California, with its time difference, a much younger audience had been listening. An audience seeking something a little more inspiring than the standard schmaltz of the day. Within a year there were literally hundreds of bands, most of them easily forgettable, playing in the Goodman/Henderson vein. The record companies, quiet during the depression, snapped up as many bands as they could but only Goodman deserves a special mention here, (for Count Basie see below). There is much snobbery in jazz circles about the worth of white jazzmen but Goodman is almost unanimously recognised, along with Bechet, as being one of the greatest clarinetists. Although his big bands were aimed at the mass market his combos provided some of the finest jazz of the Thirties and it must be pointed out that Goodman laid his career on the line by employing black musicians, virtually unheard of at the time. There were maybe a dozen band leaders worthy of a mention but let's leave it with Earl 'Fatha' Hines. Hines had been around since the Twenties, was one of jazz's leading pianists and had been leading big bands with relative success since 1929. But he'd failed to capture the mass audience of the Swing bands and in 1942 he decided on a complete personnel change and try once again to crack the market. He was too late. The Big Band era was winding down, the younger musicians were bored with

its limitations and stayed only for the money their real playing was in the after-hours jam sessions. A new music was fermenting and Hines unwittingly brought the pot to the boil when he employed two men who together were to drastically change the course of jazz; Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. RECOMMENDED LISTENING Count Basie The Best of (MCA-4050) Duke Ellington The Complete Vol. 3 1930-32 (CBS S2VI 88000) Duke Ellington The Duke 1889-1974 (CBS 88077) Duke Ellington & John Coltrane Duke & Trane (Impulse A3O) Benny Goodman Trio, Quartet, Quintet (RCA LPMI226) Fletcher Henderson Earl Hines A Monday Date: 1928 (Milestone MLP 2012) Various Artists This Is The Big Bands (RCA DPS 2019) NEXT MONTH : BE BOP