The Swing Book (4 page)

Benny Goodman and drummer Gene Krupa get their licks in.
(C
ORBIS
-B
ETTMANN
)

When the Benny Goodman Orchestra arrived in California, however, it was a different story. On August 21, 1935, Goodman and
his exemplary sidemen, including drummer
Gene Krupa
and trumpeter Bunny Berrigan, wrote the book on overnight success. Opening at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, the band
started by playing its safer, sweet material. When that failed to excite the crowd, Goodman decided, as he later wrote in
his autobiography,
The Kingdom of Swing,
“The hell with it, if we’re going to sink we may as well go down swinging.” The band pulled out its most charged Harlem-style
arrangements and let themselves go, improvising and blowing with a passion. The dancers, many of whom had been turned on to
hotter swing music by listening to the
Let’s Dance
show, went wild beyond expectation. (Californians would later be the ones responsible for reviving swing too—see the next
chapter.) The next day, the engagement at the Palomar was the talk of the music world. The entertainment paper
Variety
soon began a column titled “Swing Stuff.” And Goodman started calling his orchestra a swing band. At the tender age of twenty-six,
Goodman could rightfully lay claim to the title the King of Swing.

Goodman’s triumph in California was the catalyst for a revolution in music and dance in America. During the late thirties,
hundreds of new swing bands formed all across the country. In response to the demand, at least five of Goodman’s own sidemen—Krupa,
Berrigan, Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and
Harry James
—were able to go out and start their own orchestras. Established bands such as those led by
Jimmy
and
Tommy Dorsey,
Jimmie Lunceford, and
Charlie Barnet
rode the groundswell of enthusiasm, while Bing’s brother
Bob Crosby; Woody Herman,
with his hit song “Woodchopper’s Ball”; and
Artie Shaw,
with “Begin the Beguine,” became household names. Swing fans eagerly awaited each issue of
Downbeat
and
Metronome
magazines to see how their favorite band rated in the latest readers poll, or which star soloist had been snatched up by
another band. As pianist Ralph Burns put it, “If you were a jazz musician playing with Woody Herman, you were almost like
a movie star.” Ellington, as quoted in David W. Stowe’s
Swing Changes,
noticed a huge increase in attention from fans. “Audiences, today, invariably crowd around the bandstand, eager to grasp
every solo note and orchestral trick.” Enormous new ballrooms were constructed across the country—breathtaking dance palaces
like the Hollywood Palladium that could hold thousands of couples. The bandleaders even had the gumption to start a practice
known as swinging the classics. Tommy Dorsey jazzed up Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Song of India,” while Maxine Sullivan had a hit
with a tweaked version of the Scottish folk tune “Loch Lomond.” Opponents argued that Ravel, Strauss, Mozart, and Debussy
were rolling in their graves from receiving similar treatment.

Swing was boffo business. According to Stowe, the recording industry, which had grossed just $2.5 million in 1932, was hauling
in $36 million by 1939. Bands fought for lucrative hotel contracts, a slice of the exploding jukebox market, the attention
of bookers who controlled national tours, and commercially sponsored radio programs. The relatively new radio business, in
fact, was one of the most important factors in promoting swing. Fans would listen to live recordings from such famous ballrooms
as the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York and the Meadowbrook Club in New Jersey. Even Hollywood fell hard for swing, producing
scores of movies featuring bandleaders (see “Swing on Film” in the appendix for a list of great swing flicks). How popular
was swing? One Saturday in March 1937, the Goodman orchestra played at 8:30
A.M.
before the showing of a movie at the Paramount Theater in New York. According to awestruck accounts, hundreds of kids showed
up before sunrise to wait in line. Three thousand swingers in all turned out, many of them jumping out of their seats and
dancing in the aisles during the performance. Suddenly jazz was being played everywhere, from the big city to the small town,
all under the guise of a new name, swing. As blues popularizer W. C. Handy, writer of “St. Louis Blues,” once said: “Swing
is the latest term for ragtime, jazz, and blues. You white folks just have a new word for our old-fashioned hot music.”

More than just popular music, swing became an entire lifestyle. Indeed, it was considered the first real youth culture in
American entertainment, the beginning of a series of musical uprisings that would continue from rock in the fifties through
grunge in the nineties. “It was like when the Beatles came along. The kids were listening to what they considered their music
and theirs alone,” says trumpeter Tommy Smith, who played with bandleader Ray Anthony. Swing had its own slang, popularized
by Calloway in his
Hepster’s Dictionary,
and its own styles of dress—just think of the bobby-soxers and zoot-suiters. (For more on swing’s fashion and lingo, see
chapter 6.) What really propelled swing, however, was jitterbugging, the new name that the Lindy Hop acquired as it was embraced
by an increasing number of white dancers. Back in the thirties, the jitterbug could scare the establishment just as much as
Elvis’s pelvis did two decades later. Newspaper accounts used words such as
frenzy, pandemonium,
and
ecstasy
to describe the phenomenon. And one psychologist ominously warned of the “dangerously hypnotic influence of swing, cunningly
devised to a tempo faster than seventy-two bars to the minute—faster than the human pulse.” In 1938 the swing era even had
its own Woodstock, a swing jamboree in Chicago featuring Jimmy Dorsey and Earl Hines that drew 100,000 fans. It was described
by the
Chicago Daily Times
as “the most hysterical orgy of joyous emotions by multitudes ever witnessed on the American continent.” But let the observers
make their pronouncements. For the dancers themselves, there was an unparalleled connection being made between themselves
and their fave bands. “Really, as a musician you did it as much for the dancing as you did for the music,” said Count Basie
singer
Joe Williams
in Norma Miller’s
Swingin’ at the Savoy.
“All of that was together at one time, it was one great communication …; the dancers inspired the musicians and vice versa.”

Swing also began to be taken much more seriously as an art form. In the twenties Paul Whiteman, the leader of one of the most
popular dance bands, attempted to put jazz on the same level as European classical music, labeling his endeavor “symphonic
jazz.” Yet even in the thirties, jazz still was considered a more lowly form of music. “In those days people thought if you
were playing jazz, you were stepping down,” Artie Shaw told writer Fred Hall in
Dialogues in Swing.
But the pioneers of swing demanded to be accepted on their own terms. And the pinnacle of this push occurred on January 16,
1938, when Goodman’s orchestra made a landmark appearance at Carnegie Hall. On that historic night, tension was high. The
band members were a bit overawed by the grand symphony space and got off to a tepid start. But soon they began to play in
the same way they would let loose in the most informal dance hall. Drummer Gene Krupa beat the drums like a dervish, his hair
flying, sweat dripping. Members of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras made guest appearances. And Goodman’s integrated
quartet played the most well-received numbers of the night, with Lionel Hampton’s rhythmic masterpieces on the vibraphones
thrilling the crowd. By the time the band went into its closing number, “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the crowd was crying out and applauding
in a state of near delirium. It was an epochal success. “Carnegie Hall was always known as the holy of the holiest,” recalls
Hampton. “No jazz had ever come near there.”

That concert was only the first half of what was easily the most magical night ever witnessed in swing. As soon as the Carnegie
Hall show ended, members of the Goodman band raced uptown to Harlem to catch another singular event. Count Basie, the newcomer
from Kansas City, was taking on Chick Webb, the king of the Savoy, in a battle of the bands. Basie’s sound represented a new
approach to swing. Injecting the blues of the Southwest into the big band format and perfecting a propulsive four-beats-to-the-bar
rhythm that moved the music along like never before, Basie’s band was a direct challenge to the sounds of Harlem. Compared
with the complex arrangements of bands like Webb’s, Basie’s songs were stripped to their essential elements, touching the
simple beating heart as much as the head. The crowd—which included Ellington; vibraphonist Red Norvo and his wife, singer
Mildred Bailey; and Goodman—was relishing the face-off. If that wasn’t enough, Ella Fitzgerald, Webb’s singer, and Billie
Holiday, Basie’s vocalist, also squared off against each other that night. According to electrified accounts of the evening,
the bands blew so hard at each other, it seemed as if the walls of the Savoy were about to fall down. While battles of the
bands weren’t actually judged competitions, the audience would often clearly clap more for one orchestra than another. But
the crowd’s reactions to Webb and Basie were so close that the debate over who had triumphed lasted long after the night was
over.

Despite these scenes of black and white musicians playing and socializing together at the Savoy and Carnegie Hall, there were
still serious inequities that even the most famous African-American bandleaders suffered because of their color. White bands
enjoyed a number of advantages, getting lucrative hotel bookings and radio shows that few black bands could nail down. If
a white group and a black group recorded the same song, as with Goodman’s and Basie’s versions of “One O’Clock Jump,” the
white band’s version stood a much greater chance of being a hit. And without long-term hotel contracts, black bands were forced
to take endless tours made up mostly of one-night gigs. Traveling, especially in the South, was often a series of painful
humiliations and difficulties. Black musicians couldn’t stay at most hotels, even the ones at which they were performing.
In some cities they sometimes couldn’t even find a restaurant that would serve them. Cab Calloway was beaten in Kansas City
when he tried to enter the Pla-Mor Ballroom, where his friend Lionel Hampton was playing. In another unconscionable incident,
a theater manager in Detroit forced Billie Holiday to wear greasepaint onstage during an appearance of the Count Basie Orchestra.
His reasoning? He worried that the light-skinned Holiday might look white under the stage lighting and that the audience would
be offended. As Holiday once said about the racism she encountered as an entertainer, “You can be up to your boobies in white
satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.”

In other ways, however, the swing movement was a model of pluralism and racial equality. Many bands, arguing that they wanted
to play the best music possible, fought for integration. In addition to Goodman’s quartet, other breakthroughs included white
bandleader Artie Shaw’s hiring of Billie Holiday, and black trumpeter Roy Eldridge’s addition to Gene Krupa’s orchestra. A
number of black bands, including those of Lucky Millinder and Earl Hines, began to include white members as well. “The arts
led the way in breaking down the discrimination against our people,” says Norma Miller. “It was the arts that opened the door
for black people to go through.” The sentiment expressed at the time was that song (and also dance at places like the Savoy)
was a common meeting ground. “Audiences don’t draw color lines when they’re listening to music,” said Goodman pianist Teddy
Wilson. (Women, on the other hand, were pointedly not given equal status in the swing world. While most bands had female singers,
few orchestras, white or black, would consider hiring anything but male instrumentalists.)

Was it this newfound harmony that fueled the success of swing? The late thirties, a moment when cross-fertilization between
black and white musicians was at its greatest peak, is often considered the high point of the swing era. Duke Ellington was
then moving into a period of enormously inspired activity. Spurred by the arrival of composer Billy Strayhorn, bassist Jimmy
Blanton, and saxophonist Ben Webster to the band, Ellington began creating such classics as “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Cotton
Tail.” The integrated nightclub Café Society opened in 1938 in Greenwich Village. The boogie-woogie piano style of Kansas
City caught on as a national craze. From Basie to Goodman, from Lunceford to Barnet, swing brought together blacks and whites
as never before. It was a golden age in American music. As James Lincoln Collier wrote in his biography,
Benny Goodman and the Swing Era,
“Swing was better—more sophisticated, more genuinely musical—than virtually any popular music before or since.” No wonder
that today, when pop music is dumbed down to such desultory levels, the swing era is drawing us back.

During World War II, swing became even more popular than ever, but did it still really swing? That’s the question that arises
with the arrival of
Glenn Miller
in jazz. Miller was the most famous bandleader of the early forties. On a mainstream level, his songs, including “In the
Mood” and “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” are still the most well-remembered tunes of the swing era. But Miller’s rise to prominence
signaled a new development in swing. His music, more catchy than ambitious, got further and further away from its roots in
jazz and its ties to African-Americans. While swing’s lyrics had previously reflected the urban experience, Miller’s subject
matter tended more toward nostalgic images of small-town America. The “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” didn’t stop in Harlem.