Comrade Benny, the Swing Era and the Far Left

[Serial_Apologist]

The lack of jazz appeal among the proletariat of the 1920s might have had something to do with the unaffordability of shellac records in that milieu, and the New Deal's assuring better wages and conditions in the following decade widening the sales demographic - recordings being a big popularity transmission medium even back then? Then of course there was the "glamour" factor of big band theatricality, and the audience feeling of participating in a large gathering in a kind of concerto presentation occasion with social cachet, with soloists thrillingly pitted against powerful orchestral backings? I'm just guessing here!

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

The sale of records in the 1920s was incredible and akin to the media explosion with the internet. There was no commercial sensors and practically everything possible was recorded simply because there was a market for it because of the novelty of decent quality, recorded sound. There is an excellent book about the Gennett label which I read several years ago about this which explained that "hot" music was but a small proportion of what was available.

With the Depression, the floor caved in on recorded music and many of the famous "jazz" labels such as Paramount ceased to exist with recording effectively remaining in the hands of about three, much larger companies who were only interested in making a profit and had no altruism towards music as art. The jazz of the 1920s was seen as decadent and, amongst white audiences in New York for example, it was the affluent who were attending night clubs uptown in Harlem. In the period 1930-5 the criteria for records were whether they would sell and how cheap the artists were to record. Erenberg is really good at charting the taste for jazz throughout this period and much of the earlier chapters explain what music people were listening to. His point is that the audience for Swing genuinely saw the music as representing their generation and envisaged it as being a "national musical movement." The fans of the music did appreciate improvisation which they saw as being key to the music and could distinguish between the "authenticity" of Swing which did not deny it's origins in Black musical culture and the likes of Whiteman whose credibility had been lost in the 1930's. Effectively, the point is that the people appreciating "Swing" were doing so for the same kind of reasons certain others would do with Be-bop ten years later. Swing was seen as being no less liberating than Be-bop would have been for the next generation. As Erenberg states, the problem is with looking backwards from the perspective of Be-bop and seeing Swing as out-dated whereas the audience for Swing would have seen their music as the cutting edge of the time and they would have had the same attitude towards the likes of Whiteman. Erenberg is effectively saying that Swing liberate both the audience and music from the morass of sweet music that was the popular music between 1930-5. However, the important difference was that Swing was the first, widespread popular "youth" movement in popular music and, as he was at pains to emphasize in the chapter I read last night, this was especially important because of the level of musicianship necessary to play the music and the expertise with which many arrangements were crafted. Swing was viewed at the time as being a uniquely American response to Western European musical traditions and whereas Be-bop was decidedly "niche", Swing was very much part of the mainstream. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that the music performed by the likes of Goodman, Basie, Webb, Ellington, etc represented perhaps the only time music of high quality had universal popularity and that the audience for this music has never been as informed for any other style of popular music. I think Erenberg is going to demonstrate how this changed through the period 1935-45 but it was certainly the case in the late thirties when Goodman inspired a massive, popular audience for sophisticated jazz. It is also worth remembering that his trio and quartet also enjoyed no less a following - it wasn't just an artistic whim on the part of Goodman but something that had a popular appeal. The audience was there for a lot of jazz in the 1930s which can only be considered as "hardcore" from the perspective of 2018. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks Ian for clarifying a lot of things where my understanding and knowledge of the 1930s Swing scene is wanting in many respects. My omission of the Slump from inclusion in the issues for consideration was wrong. It will be interesting to see what weight Erenberg places on the treatment of black big bands and musicians, and of black musicians featured in white bands such as Goodman's. My understanding has always been that black bands were marginalised by the publicity machine in favour of white bands of often inferior quality. This is leaving aside how black musicians were themselves treated by black bandleaders. Goodman was reputed to be something of a martinet, yet he is widely claimed to have treated the black musicians he was effectively forced to showcase as "guests" as full-time employees of his set-up - not sub-contractees but fully on the payroll. Another issue (for me) is that while the achievement of "the Swing sound" was remarkable in terms of any musical genre in any period, the formalisation of the sound was pretty rapid, taking about 3 years to reach maturity (roughly 1934 to 1937), after which formulaicism allowed little room for interaction; improvisational choice was locked into formulaic blocs with the drive being shaped by arranger skills rather than the other way around, with notable exceptions; but even there if one thinks about Ellington his and Strayhorn's seeking to instill their compositions with the spirit and character of the lead improvisers was always necessarily subject to time lapse in the familiarisation process by virtue of the fact that it takes a score composer longer to come up with the goods than an improviser - while at the same time (obviously) the improviser is going to be hidebound by the scorer's retroactivity! This was what I believe led to the main focus of innovation switching to the small swing groups, and both the facilitatory choice of some standards rather than others, and an increasingly skeletal approach to devising improviser-friendly materials, eg the proto-bebop tune "Avalon", as best suited to taking the music forward. Then we add the way America treated its black servicemen and women in WW2 to the above factors, and bebop as a way of expressing collective self respect, both towards the idiomatic restrictions Swing in the larger picture - notable exceptions apart! - imposed on black musical creativity, and how this had been used by the white-dominated commercial machine to underplay and contain that creativity.

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

This era 1935-45 is amazingly complex and fascinates me because the whole innovations from Swing through to Be-bop were so rapid.


The gist of the book seems to be that your are correct about black bands being marginalised by the people booking hotel residencies and also radio performances which did feature black bands regularly as remote broadcasts but excluded them from long -running radio series. I think that black bands were marginalised because of the anticipated adverse reaction from the Southern states and more up-market establishments which shunned non-whites.

As far as the "listening" audience was concerned, the black bands were more highly valued by white audiences who recognised that the best white bands were those who tried to emulate the likes of Ellington, Basie, Lunceford, Henderson, etc. I have also read a lot about Goodman's awkward character but he was genuinely passionate about the playing of the likes of Hampton and Wilson and allowed them full expression. Such was his admiration for Henderson, he employed him as band pianist in 1939 when Henderson's second attempt at bandleading failed. The quotes given in the book are suggestive that Goodman was 100% genuine in this respect and the implication is that he was by no means unique in this respect.


I understand what you mean by the formalisation of the style yet I think this is a generalisation and by no means are formalised as be-bop had become by about 1950. I was listening to a box set of Gene Ammons material a few weeks ago and it quickly became boring because of the unison passages and the unimaginative use of contrafacts. I like Ammons playing ( a kind of P47 Thunderbolt to Lester Young's lithe Supermarine Spitfire) and his is an exciting soloist but bop has ceased to be interesting by the early 50's. Personally, I find the early 1950s one of the least interesting periods in jazz and pretty conservative in many respects. There are great performances from this era like Monk, Nichols, Shorty Rogers ,etc but the music seemed to lose a lot of it's impetus. The same can be said of Hard Bop which had run it's course by the mid 60's after a period of about 10 years dominance. Unfortunately the 1940s saw the emergence of bands like Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller who were good in their own ways but increasingly has less to do with jazz. Conversely, Ellington's post 40's work is amongst his best and the Basie band hit a vein of form which helped define a lot of jazz up until the mid 60's.

I think it is also worth noting that there was also worth noting that there were people like Eddie Sauter writing "chamber" swing arrangements for quieter bands like Red Norvo's in the 30's and other bands such as Claude Thornhill who hired Gil Evans to considerably broaden the tonal palate of the music. Bands such as Seeger Ellis' experimented with just using brass whereas Bob Crosby's first band sought a faux-Dixieland approach which worked really well. Bands tried extremely hard to be "unique" and if some eventually worked out that you could make more money trying to sound like other orchestras (such as Beneke, Anthony or Spivak) and had little to do with jazz, there were some amazingly unique experiments. the Swing Era must have been one of the most fertile periods in jazz and it was also a time when smaller group jazz similarly had a large audience. It is incredible to think that the likes of Waller, Goodman, Kirby, Raymond, Scott, all had commercial success with small groups. That said, soloists such as Waller, Coleman Hawkins, Bunny Berigan, Jack Teagarden, Teddy Wilson and Cootie Williams all led big bands at some point in their careers - not always with commercial success. I don't think that Swing stagnated or became formulaic in every instance as bands like Hines, Eckstine, Elliot Lawrence, Herman, Krupa, Raeburn, etc.

The weird thing for me is how the public perception of big bands has changed since I first got in to the music in the early 80's. Back then, there were still people who could recall seeing bands like Glenn Miller, Harry James , etc and the likes of Goodman, Herman , Hampton, Basie, etc were still performing. In my mind, the likes of Miller and the Dorseys have tended to fade from popularity whereas the jazz audience is more familiar with the likes of Kirk, Moten, McShann who were relatively obscure when I was discovering jazz. I think the Basie is still influential in 2018 and as Alyn's group showed the other month in Southampton, the whole oeuvre and writers like Buck Clayton still seems fresh and invigorating. I think only Miles Davis' 2nd quintet has had a similar kind of long-lasting influence on the mainstream. Modern Jazz, for me, begins with what Basie started when he had Lester Young in his band.


The weirdest thing about the music of the Swing Era in my opinion is that Duke Ellington's approach to writing has had such a lost lasting relevance. I have been playing the sadly underrated Monk plays Ellington today but you can dig out records by the likes of Stan Tracey, Charlie Mingus, Muhal Richard Abrams and contemporaries like Jason Roebke and still hear the influence of Ellington. Ellington's music still sounds "modern" but as Roebke's "High/Red/Centre" demonstrated a few years back, that particular sound world is as fundamental to jazz as Bach is to classical music even with "outside" musicians such as Josh Berman, Jason Adasiewizc and jeb Bishop on board.

I will let you know what else is in this book is of interest. A lot of what he writes makes sense and maybe "smooths" out the step from swing to bop as more of a transition as opposed to a revolution. I love Be-bop but I never experienced the music first hand and it just seems as historic as swing to my ears. I cannot see why anyone would differentiate between the two styles as both are uniquely different and I would not be without either.

[CGR]

My bet is that like most people most of the time, the musicians spent little time thinking about politics. They were too busy trying to earn a decent living playing their music.

[Ian Thumwood]

My bet is that like most people most of the time, the musicians spent little time thinking about politics. They were too busy trying to earn a decent living playing their music.

CGR

The premise of much of this book would suggest otherwise. The chapter I am reading at the moment explains why Basie became popular and how they came from nowhere to be perhaps the most popular big band amongst Black Americans. There is a suggestion that many of the other black bands had a strong appeal from an aspirational, middle class audience (Ellington is cited as an example) whereas Basie's band originated from playing at a low Kansas City dive called the Reno Club. Frank Digg's book about Kansas City explains the kind of social background Basie's band came from. Basie's music came out of the blues which had a strong appeal amongst Working class black swing fans and this was something of a shock to the system for other black swing bands who found that not only their music started to feel "old-fashioned" but that they did not have the "right on" cache" of Basie's band which was promoted by Left-wing team than included John Hammond. Basie appears to have be aware of the political significance of the music he performed. The Count's involvement in support of political musical events is stressed in this book. I think Basie was politically aware and, as I suggested initially, there was more sympathy for far Left parties amongst jazz musicians that perhaps in the rea of Modern Jazz which coincided with the McCarthy Era.

[Ian Thumwood]

Ploughing on through this book seems to reveal all sorts of revelations regarding both the economic and social elements of the history of the big bands. A lot of the history is familiar to me but the context is totally new.

Yesterday I was reading about the political affiliations with the Popular Front and the fact that so much of the "machinery" around the big bands was associated with either Left Wing or Communist Party support. The book does concentrate a lot of John Hammond and then considers how the Left sought out certain components within the music which it believed represented the American vernacular. Quite interesting to read that there was not 100% consensus but I would seriously recommend this book to SA not only for the political aspect but the more social elements that surround the great, black bands which were considered by white and black fans to be superior. The denial of access to the best hotels, venues and radio broadcasts was precipitated by the attitude within the southern states and not so much by the more liberal ones. However, the sponsors and hotel owners relied a lot of the market below the Mason Dixon line and this made them very conservative I how they engaged bands even though those in the north might have been sympathetic. Some of the experiences of the black bands recounted are truly shocking.



There are some interesting comments about the impact of World War II which goes a long way explaining SA's comments as to why the big bands eventually became formulaic and dull. I had no idea that this was largely caused by the fact that GI's no longer wanted "hot" records or jazz recordings that were breaking the boundaries. They were fed by nostalgia and wanted music which reminded them of home. In a nutshell, the audience taste changed and the music became more predictable. The chapter on Glenn Miller is fascinating because he effectively managed the market for swing far better than any other band leader. The author is really good in this chapter and you sense that Miller was exceptional in what he achieved and probably the greatest band leader of them all yet it was at the expense of the music which even the band members were not enthusiastic about playing. However, the hard work put in to build up his success story is fascinating and how you how driven he was.

[Ian Thumwood]

Finished this book eventually last night and would have to say that I found it really thought-provoking. It was very much a case of looking at jazz through a social, economic and political prism which fascinated me because it made you appreciate what drove the popularity of bands and why the music eventually stagnated. I think that it was fascinating looking at the music I love through the lens of a rigorous historian and seeing that there were factors which drove the kind of music that was being produced.

The closing chapter was quite salutary and intriguing insofar that the evolution of bop was, as SA suggested, a counter-revolution to music which had become stilted but there were economic and social factors which contributed to it's evolution that came from outside music. The big bands and swing was not made irrelevant by Bop rather that the war ensured the music became part of the establishment insofar than the American government considered swing a useful tool for recruitment and propaganda. The significance of Glenn Miller is spelt out but so equally is the hostility many felt towards his music which gave a very white (albeit socially diverse) vision of American life. In going for safe arrangements, moderate tempi and a very homogenised approach to what had been a "black" music, Miller effectively ensure the music's demise through staleness which even the DOwnbeat campaign for the return of big bands for dancing in the early 1950s could not arrest.

I would urge anyone to read this book. As a passionate reader of history, this book ticked all the boxes for me. I would strongly recommend this book to both SA and Bluesnik as it will address some very interesting questions about the politicisation of jazz throughout the Swing Era and how Swing broke down racial barriers more than any other social movement before the outbreak of WW2 for the US in 1941. Even baseball could not compete for racial integration and the author concludes that the music not only opened avenues for black orchestras that had hitherto never existed in the 1920s (even if not to the extent afforded to white bands) but it also prolonged the impact of the Harlem Renaissance. Musicians' involvement in radical causes was never again on the same scale until the 1960's with the emergence of Be-bop being too underground to have the kind of populist appeal that Swing had to campaign for popular change. In addition, the State recognised that the drug culture associated with Modern Jazz was something it was compelled to address due to concerns regarding it's influence on youth culture and this coincided with the era of McCarthy's purges which saw musicians such as Art Hodes come under suspicion. Accordingly, Erenberg demonstrates that in the immediate post-War era and into that early 1950's, Jazz could not longer remain as politicised as it has been in the mid-late 1930's. Even the likes of Goodman withdrew through ill-health and ceased to be a voice for radical dissent. Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that "Middle America" became much more conservative after the unsettling period of the war ensured that the appetite for dissent had diminished. Boppers may have sought musical liberation and sought to challenge the mores of the day yet they did not do this on the same scale as the Swing Movement ten years earlier and never attracted the same level of support that big bands like Goodman and Basie had done ten years earlier.


The thing that is hammered home in Erenberg's book is that the Swing Era was a golden era for jazz and a time when the popular audience was most appreciative and understanding of jazz. Jazz has never enjoyed the same level of popularity since and it was unique insofar that it united white audiences in appreciating black music. Most popular bandleaders are shown to have had Left Wing / Radical views and regularly supported movements associated with racial, social and political advancement. This includes the likes of Goodman, Calloway, Basie, Ellington, Barnet, Wilson, and Shaw. Similarly, the popular music press of the day expounded similar views and this is shown by Erenberg to be mirrored in the views of music fans who wrote remarkably well-informed letters to these publications.


I was intrigued by this book and it is worthwhile seeking it out. It is primarily about jazz and looks down sniffly at the commercial / sweet bands of the era to demonstrate that the dynamics which led to Swing were a consequence of the social and economic factors of the time. The development which Goodman oversaw does need to be seen in the context if the "jazz desert" that existed in the early thirties and, in it's way, what happened between 1935-1941 was no less significant than what Parker and Gillespie achieved ten years later with the added factor that the jazz musicians of the Swing Era were able to take the large proportion of the popular music audience with them in a way that jazz had failed to do prior to this and has never done since. Erenberg has produced a worthy and interesting account in "Swingin' the dream."

[Alyn_Shipton]

Ian this book as been around for ages - and I refer to it quite a bit in my New History of Jazz. But I'd disagree with your conclusion: "Jazz has never enjoyed the same level of popularity since and it was unique insofar that it united white audiences in appreciating black music." Whereas there were jitterbugging crowds etc for the swing bands, the sheer level of commercial success (with audiences both black and white) of the likes of Miles Davis and John Coltrane created far greater revenue, and more widespread (and long-lived) record sales of longer playing material. And that's just (like Erenberg's) a US perspective. Broaden the view, for example in the new book edited by Francesco Martinelli, "The History of European Jazz", and this suggests an entirely new international demographic after WW2 and popularity in areas untouched by the swing era that simply means your assertion cannot hold up.