The Swing Book

by Degen Pener

  Lionel Hampton

  Pounding his mallets and sweating up a storm, Hampton is a thrilling improviser and wildly inventive rhythmist, the longest-running swing band leader in history, and an important harbinger of rock and R&B. Born in 1908 in Louisville, he grew up on Chicago’s South Side, meeting everyone from Jelly Roll Morton to Bessie Smith through his uncle, who made and sold moonshine for Al Capone. After moving to Los Angeles, he discovered his fortune-making instrument, the then-unknown vibraphone (it’s similar to a xylophone but has rotating fans that create a vibrato sound), during a recording session with Louis Armstrong in 1930. “Louis asked me if I could play that instrument and I was a brazen young guy and I said, ‘Yeah,’” recalls Hampton, who had in fact never touched it before. Six years later he joined the Benny Goodman Orchestra, playing in the band’s color-barrier-smashing quartet with Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa. His most influential musical contributions came, however, once he started his own band in 1940. Two years later he recorded “Flying Home.” The hit song featured a honking tenor sax solo by Illinois Jacquet that presaged the balls-out sax approach of late forties rhythm and blues. Hamp, as he’s known, has continued performing into his nineties, celebrating his ninety-first birthday in early 1999.

  Classic Songs: The rocking call-and-response tune “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop,” plus the signature “Hamp’s Boogie Woogie.”

  Swing Trivia: Perhaps the first stage dive in music history occurred during a Hampton concert. According to Jazz Anecdotes, the band members were always known for their leaping and dancing, but during one gig an alto player began to walk the edge of the stage during his solo. At one point, he fell and was caught by the crowd, playing all the way through.

  CD Pick: The two-CD set Hamp: The Legendary Decca Recordings (Decca) includes all the hits. Listen for the contributions of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and singer Dinah Washington, both of whom were with Hampton early in their careers. Especially amusing is the song “Blow Top Blues,” a trippy song about a girl losing her marbles.

  THE CLASSIC BIG BANDS

  How many orchestras were there at the height of the swing craze? The Big Bands Database Web site lists more than 550 of ’em, from the most candy-assed sweet outfits to the hottest barn burners and everything in between. Hell, even Chico Marx had a shortlived band. So take this short list of the most important bands as just what it is: a critical sampling and the barest of introductions.

  The Dorsey Brothers

  Think disputes about dance tempos are a problem today? Well, back in 1934, just such an argument helped break up Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. The pair, sons of a Pennsylvania coal miner, had formed their own band together earlier that year. But simmering disagreements came to a head onstage one night when they couldn’t agree how fast to take a song. Tommy walked off the stage and started his own band, and a long-standing rivalry ensued. While reedman Jimmy’s Orchestra was known as a more jazzy outfit, Tommy’s more commercial big band — he was known as the “sentimental king of swing” — earned its place as the best all-around dance band of its era. Both orchestras boasted highly popular singers. Helen O’Connell and Bob Eberly warbled for Jimmy, while Tommy’s knockout pair was Jo Stafford and Frank Sinatra (who consciously modeled his singing on Tommy’s melodic and perfectly phrased trombone playing). By the fifties, however, the Dorseys reunited, only to meet early death. Tommy choked to death in 1956; Jimmy died of cancer a year later.

  Classic Songs: Tommy’s biggest songs include the harmonizing “Marie” (with a thrilling solo by trumpeter Bunny Berigan) and Sinatra’s crooner’s delight “I’ll Never Smile Again.” Jimmy’s biggest charter was “Tangerine.”

  Swing Trivia: How intense was their rivalry? After Jimmy hired trombonist Frank Rehak, according to Jazz Anecdotes, he told the musician to let loose on his solos with abandon. “Anything you can do to make Tommy mad, go ahead and do it,” Rehak recalls Jimmy saying.

  CD Pick:The Dorsey Brothers: The Best of the Big Bands (Sony) documents the pair’s music before the split, while The Best of Tommy Dorsey (RCA) features Tommy’s many hits, including three cuts with Sinatra.

  Glenn Miller

  The swing era’s equivalent of warm milk before bedtime, Miller’s orchestra is still the most nostalgically remembered band of the 1940s. With a knack for turning jazz inspiration into catchy pop, Miller, who grew up in Iowa, Nebraska, and Colorado, was a so-so trombonist but an exceptional businessman. He chased radio play relentlessly, emphasized synthesized sound over individual solos, imposed strict rules on his musicians (down to telling them what color socks to wear), and chose sweet-style songs with such an eye toward their commercial value that he’s been accused of hastening the end of the big bands. But Miller unapologetically revelled in popular approval. “The majority of the people like to hear pretty tunes,” he once said. Indeed, even today Miller has more well-known hits — “In the Mood,” “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” “Pennsylvania 6-5000” (named after the telephone number of the famous Hotel Pennsylvania in New York), “Moonlight Serenade”—than any other bandleader. During the war, Miller formed a cherished military orchestra called the Army Air Forces Training Command Band, rallying servicemen and civilians alike. His band, wrote Metronome’s George Simon, was “a living symbol of what America meant to them, of what they were fighting for.” After a small plane carrying him from England to France disappeared in late 1944, the forty-year-old Miller was declared missing.

  Classic Songs: “Little Brown Jug,” Miller’s first swing success, and “Tuxedo Junction,” a song first recorded (with less chart success) by black bandleader Erskine Hawkins.

  Swing Trivia: According to MusicHound Jazz, Miller found his first instrument, an old trombone lying in the basement, while working as an errand boy for a butcher’s shop.

  CD Picks: The music of Miller’s army band is collected on Glenn Miller: The Best of the Lost Recordings and the Secret Broadcasts (RCA/Victor). And while it lacks the singing of fave Miller vocalist Tex Beneke, it includes all the great chestnuts. “That was a fantastic band and much better for my money than [his earlier one],” says bandleader Bill Elliott.

  Jimmie Lunceford

  As popular as the bands of either Basie or Ellington in its time, the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra was one of the most powerful, dependable, and stylishly dressed senders in the business for more than a decade. Lunceford formed his orchestra from a group of players he met while in college at Nashville’s Fisk University. Launched by a six-month engagement at the Cotton Club in 1934, the band rolled out its fair share of sweet ballads, but its fast dance tunes—many set down by master arranger Sy Oliver—flew with the best of them. Lunceford’s swing, wrote one reviewer, “carries a tremendous ‘sock,’ … the music parallel of Joe Louis’ gloved fist.” Part of the band’s punch also came from the tremendous show it put on: the musicians created synchronized routines, waving, pointing, and sometimes throwing their instruments in the air, all in perfect unison.

  Classic Songs: The wailin’ and chargin’ “White Heat,” the sweet-as-pie “For Dancers Only,” and a song that should be required listening for Lindy Hoppers everywhere, “Tain’t What You Do (But the Way That Cha Do It).”

  Swing Trivia: Guitarist, trombonist, and arranger Eddie Durham maintained that he devised music’s first electric guitar in 1935 while he was a member of Lunceford’s orchestra.

  CD Pick: A hard choice between Classic Tracks (Kaz Records), which includes every major hit, and For Dancers Only (Decca), a critical fave of the editors of MusicHound that unfortunately does not feature “White Heat” or “Tain’t What You Do.”

  Artie Shaw

  One of the last surviving leaders of the big bands, Shaw is as opinionated and curmudgeonly today as he was years ago. He frequently went into highly public “retirements,” saw eight marriages go bust, including betrothals to Ava Gardner and Lana Turner, and often lashed out at his audience, once calling jitter-buggers “morons.” (He’s also fond of taking a swipe at dancers’ obsession with
tempos. “You can dance to a windshield wiper,” he’s often said.) But all the headline-grabbing actions didn’t get in the way of making some of the most exciting music of the swing era. Shaw played clarinet with such an alluring smoothness that a long-running fan argument broke out over who was the better player, he or Goodman. The debate goes on to this day. Shaw “was the greatest jazz clarinet player that ever lived,” says bandleader and Shaw partisan Eddie Reed, who’s styled his big band on Shaw’s. “He did things on the clarinet that have never been duplicated. Period.” Shaw is also known for challenging the color barrier when he hired Billie Holiday to sing for his orchestra.

  Classic Songs: “Begin the Beguine,” his hugely successful redo of Cole Porter’s original, the Mexican-inspired “Frenesi,” the novelty number “Indian Love Call,” and “Nightmare,” his dark, moody theme song.

  Swing Trivia: During his many retirements, Shaw has worked as a farmer, translator, theater producer, and writer. He published a novel in 1965 titled I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead!

  CD Pick:Begin the Beguine (Classic Jazz) offers all of the above-mentioned hits, plus Helen Forrest giving in to the inevitable on “Comes Love.”

  Chick Webb

  As the house bandleader for the famed Savoy Ballroom, this human beatbox drove the music through the wall and around the block every night of the week throughout the 1930s. Sophisticated and tightly arranged, his music had a propulsive power that continually inspired the club’s Lindy Hoppers, sending them to ever wilder extremes. Born in 1909 to a poor Baltimore family, Webb suffered from a spinal problem that left him short and hunchbacked. Despite these obstacles, he formed his own band in 1926 at age seventeen, eventually signing on at the Savoy. There Webb presciently hired Ella Fitzgerald when she was just a kid, established his reputation as one of the greatest drummers in swing, and took on all comers in a series of famous battles of the bands. His career ended suddenly in 1939 when he died of tuberculosis at age thirty.

  Classic Songs: “A Tisket A Tasket” with Ella Fitzgerald, “Undecided,” and “Stompin’ at the Savoy.”

  Swing Trivia: At one of the most famous Savoy battles, Goodman’s orchestra came to Harlem to challenge Webb. Four thousand dancers packed the house, five thousand were turned away, and by the end of the night, Webb’s band had sent Goodman’s packing. “I was never carved by a better player,” said Gene Krupa afterward.

  CD Pick: The greatest-hits package Chick Webb and his Orchestra (Best of Jazz) offers up early Ella and some of his hardest-driving numbers. The album includes his first recorded cut, “Dog Bottom,” a thrilling nail-biter of a ride.

  Gene Krupa

  With his sticks a-twirling and his hair a-flying, Krupa created a lasting archetype: the slightly mad, flashy percussionist who won’t ever slow down. As a member of the Goodman orchestra, he’s credited with taking drums beyond their lowly status as mere timekeepers and making them a true solo instrument for the first time. In 1938 he formed his own band, having hits with famous trumpet soloist Roy Eldridge and singer Anita O’Day. A high-profile arrest and imprisonment in 1943 on a suspect marijuana-possession charge (he was later cleared) seriously damaged his career, at the same time that Buddy Rich was giving Krupa a serious run-for-the-money as a skinbeater. But his legacy is secure. Every modern rock drummer should never forget that it all started with Krupa.

  Classic Songs: “Wire Brush Stomp,” “After You’ve Gone,” “Rockin’ Chair,” “Bolero at the Savoy,” and “Drum Boogie.”

  Swing Trivia: Krupa didn’t spend time in jail just once. According to David Stowe’s Swing Changes, he was once jailed for throwing a punch at a restaurant owner who refused admission to Eldridge.

  CD Pick: Listen to him do his stuff on Goodman’s classic song “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Or check out one of his two aptly titled hits collections, Drummer Man and Drum Boogie.

  THE GREAT SINGERS

  Frank Sinatra

  The definitive male swing singer, Sinatra is ironically also credited with hastening the end of the big band era. In 1939 a slender, fresh-faced Frank got his start with the Harry James Orchestra and later joined Tommy Dorsey’s group, singing such tender ballads as “Imagination” and “All or Nothing at All.” Influenced greatly by Billie Holiday, Sinatra crooned his way to a stardom that no band singer had ever possessed before. Performing at a now-famous engagement at New York’s Paramount Theater in the early forties, he turned bobby-soxers into love-struck fans and left the orchestra jealous for attention. That was the beginning of a revolution that ushered in such solo vocalists as Patti Page, Frankie Laine, and Perry Como. It was Sinatra who set the standard for them all, not just with his perfect phrasing but also for the way in which he could take a composer’s lyrics and turn every word into his own intimate revelation. But for as much pop success as Sinatra ultimately achieved, he never left behind his jazz roots. At the height of his Rat Pack days—when he transformed himself into an icon of swaggering, womanizing, and ever stylish manhood—Sinatra recorded highly praised albums with both Basie and Ellington. And when he died in 1998 at age eighty-two, the indomitable Chairman of the Board had survived to see his music catch on once again with a hip, young audience.

  Classic Songs: “Fly Me to the Moon,” “My Way,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” and the Dorsey-era hit “I’ll Never Smile Again.”

  Swing Trivia: During the 1950s, according to David W. Stowe’s Swing Changes, Sinatra railed against rock music as “the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” Little more than a decade before, his own music had been cited by the New York Philharmonic’s leader as a prime cause of juvenile delinquency.

  CD Picks: You could buy a dozen and not go wrong, but here are three to get you started. I’ll Be Seeing You (RCA) collects the best of his work with Tommy Dorsey. The Best of the Capitol Years (Capitol) pinpoints Sinatra’s pinnacle, with masterful arrangements by Nelson Riddle and featuring such songs as “I’ve Got You under My Skin” and “You Make Me Feel So Young.” And to hear Ol’ Blue Eyes swingin’ with the great Count, check out Sinatra/Basie (Reprise).

  Ella Fitzgerald

  “The First Lady of Song.” “Lady Time.” That’s the Ella we all know and cherish. But did you know that she was also the only woman to lead a major swing band? After winning amateur contests at the Apollo Theater, Fitzgerald got her start at age seventeen singing in the Chick Webb Orchestra and soon found fame with such hits as 1936’s “You’ll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)” and the even bigger 1938 song “A Tisket A Tasket” (based on an 1879 nursery rhyme). But when Webb died in 1939, Fitzgerald took over the leadership of his band for two years before going solo in 1942. Establishing herself as the best scat singer of all time, Fitzgerald effortlessly swung, bopped, and went pop, famously dueting with Louis Armstrong and recording album after classic album. But the most important were her so-called songbook LPs, a massive project begun in 1955 that married her brilliant jazz artistry with the work of the best American composers—Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Ellington, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, and George and Ira Gershwin. Called by some the greatest singer in history, Fitzgerald, who died in 1996, may sit atop the mountain of twentieth-century music, but her clear voice, her glad, warm way, and her impeccable sense of swing make her accessible to every listener.

  Classic Songs: “Undecided,” “Flying Home,” and “Mack the Knife.”

  Swing Trivia: Louis Jordan, who recorded a 1945 calypso hit with Fitzgerald, “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” also romanced the singer back when both were in Webb’s band. According to John Chilton’s Jordan biography, Let the Good Times Roll, Louis had an ulterior motive. He was planning on starting his own band and hoped, without success it turned out, that Fitzgerald would come with him.

  CD Pick:The Best of the Songbooks (Verve), drawn from the 16-CD Complete Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks, is a wonderful if relatively skimpy starting point with such standards as “’S Wonderfu
l,” “Midnight Sun,” and “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.” But to hear her in her early swing incarnation, buy The Early Years, Part 2 (Decca), which covers her stint as leader of Webb’s orchestra. It’s a bit of a shock. Fitzgerald, not yet the full-fledged singer she later became, sounds positively girlish on such songs as “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and the novelty number “Chew Chew Chew (Your Bubble Gum).”

  Billie Holiday

  Her life was anything but a holiday. Today Holiday’s difficult forty-four years of triumph, decline, and more decline have been strangely romanticized. She’s become the poster child for tortured, self-destructive artists the world over. And indeed, the list of her travails is exceedingly long. Born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, she was raped as a child and was put away in a home for wayward girls. She worked in a brothel as a teenager (which she forth-rightly discussed in her 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues). After being discovered by legendary promoter John Hammond in a Harlem club, she made her first recording in 1933 with Benny Goodman. The successes and troubles followed in equal measure. She was arrested three times on drug-possession charges, spent a year in jail after the first bust, and was thereafter prevented from working in New York nightclubs because of a law forbidding felons from holding “cabaret cards.” A lifetime of substance abuse—heroin, marijuana, opium, alcohol, and cigarettes—ravaged her voice and ultimately brought on her death. When she passed away in 1959 at age forty-four, she had 70¢ in her bank account and $750 taped to her leg. While it’s tempting to try to approach her music apart from her life, that would be impossible. Holiday’s heartache infused everything she sang. Even in her most distinctly stylized vocals, she never worked on the surface; she laid down her soul’s blue pain on vinyl with an intensity and strength that are far from tragic.