Big Bands

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Charles J. Shindo

The Big Band Era (roughly 1935 to 1945) witnessed the emergence of jazz music into the American mainstream at a time, according to Metronome magazine in 1943, "as important to American music as the time of Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman and Hawthorne and Melville was to American literature." Big band music evolved from the various forms of African American music--blues, ragtime, and dixieland jazz--performed by black and white musicians such as Bessie Smith, Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy, and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB). The frenetic, chaotic, and spontaneous nature of 1920s jazz influenced the large orchestras, like Paul Whiteman's, that specialized in dance music. Four-and five-piece Dixieland bands became ten-piece bands such as Fletcher Henderson's, and eventually the twenty piece bands of Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. The music not only marked a synthesis of rural African American music and European light classical music, but its widespread acceptance expressed the larger national search for a uniquely American culture during the Great Depression and World War II.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, popular music was dominated by theatrical music, minstrel shows, and vaudeville, produced primarily in New York City's Tin Pan Alley. The music followed typical European conventions of melody, harmony, tone, and rhythm, with melody receiving priority over all else. Even minstrel shows conformed to these conventions of western music despite their claims to represent African American culture. Emphasis on the melody was reinforced by the preferential status of lyrics in Tin Pan Alley music. Both elements lent themselves well to the fact that this music was primarily sold as sheet music for individual home use. Simple melodies and arrangements with clever and timely lyrics did not depend on a specific type or quality of performance for their appreciation or consumption. As recorded music and radio broadcasts became more widespread and available, emphasis shifted to the specific character and quality of musical performance and to the greater use of popular music in social dancing, which had previously been relegated to the elite realm of ballroom dancing or the folk realm of square dancing and other folk dancing forms.

At the same time that the central characteristic of popular music shifted from composition to performance, African American music gained in exposure and influence on popular music. The first adaptations of black music to European instrumentation and form occurred in New Orleans as black musicians began playing a version of spirituals and field hollers on European band instruments such as trumpets and clarinets. Integrating marches into black music, and emphasizing improvisation over arrangement, jazz music developed into three distinct forms, the blues (the form most closely aligned with traditional African American music), dixieland (marching band instruments performing polyphonic, improvisational music), and ragtime (a more structured version of dixieland for piano). Each of these musical styles did enjoy a measure of popularity, but mainly in watered-down form such as the Tin Pan Alley practice of "ragging" a song, best exemplified by Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911).

With World War I, and the military's forced closure of Storyville, the official red light district of New Orleans where many jazz musicians found employment, jazz music moved to other urban areas such as Kansas City, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. As jazz music spread, the audience for jazz increased, encompassing a young white audience searching for music more dynamic than theatrical music, in addition to a larger black audience. This younger audience also favored music for dancing over home performances or staged performances and therefore appreciated the largely instrumental and rhythmic nature of jazz. With this growing audience, bands grew to include sections of instruments instead of the traditional dixieland arrangement of four or five soloists. Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson pioneered the larger band format by creating multiple trumpet and trombone parts, as well as multiple reeds (clarinet, alto, and tenor saxophones) and rhythm parts. In 1924, Henderson's pathbreaking Roseland Ballroom Orchestra consisted of eleven players, including Coleman Hawkins, Don Redman, and Louis Armstrong. In 1927, the upscale Harlem nightclub, the Cotton Club, hired Duke Ellington and his band; Ellington created an orchestra and jazz style with his own compositions, arrangements, and direction. Ellington's Cotton Club Orchestra reached an avant-garde white audience and sparked the careers of other black bands as well as the creation of white bands playing jazz music, such as Benny Goodman's.

In August of 1935, Benny Goodman ushered in the "Swing Era" when he ended a national tour with his band at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. After receiving only lukewarm responses from audiences across the country, Goodman filled the final show of the tour with "hot" arrangements by Fletcher Henderson, as opposed to the more "acceptable" dance tunes of other orchestras. The young L.A. audience went crazy over the music and by the time Goodman returned to New York in 1936 he had been named "The King of Swing." The early 1930s had been hard times for jazz musicians since many civic leaders, music critics, and clergy cited the "primitive" nature of jazz music as part of the cultural decline responsible for the Great Depression. Selective use of jazz idioms, such as George Gershwin's symphonic piece "Rhapsody in Blue" (1924) and opera "Porgy and Bess" (1935), did gain respectability and praise for creating a uniquely American musical language, but "pure" jazz, even played by white musicians, was unacceptable. This thinking changed with the success of Benny Goodman and several other newly formed bands such as the Dorsey Brothers (with Glenn Miller as trombonist and arranger), Charlie Barnet, Jimmy Lunceford, Chick Webb, and Bob Crosby.