Swing and Sweet: Big Bands and Their Audience

Sweet and Swing
In the 1930s and 1940s, dance orchestras became the normative for live entertainment, performing music for dancing at upscale clubs.
The earliest "big band" was likely that formed by James Europe, an employee of W.C. Handy's publishing company, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. By the mid 1930s, other bands emerged, and the most important leaders included, besides Europe, Flecther Henderson, Paul Whiteman, and Jean Goldkette. Goldkette, a Frenchman living in the United States, was Bix Beiderdecke's employer and, as such, involved in the promotion of Mid-western music that used very sophisticated harmonic progressions. This is the same music that you read about in the account of the migration of New Orleans-style musicians (King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet) to Chicago and other northern cities.

Big band orchestras differed from the earlier Dixieland band. The rhythm section changed dramatically. The drums were expanded to a configuration more akin to the modern trap set. The string bass (double bass of the classical symphony orchestra) replaced the tuba as the bass melody instrument. The supple guitar replaced the banjo. The “frontline” changed slightly. The clarinet and trumpet (a more agile relative of the cornet) remained as the primary instruments. A brand new instrument, the saxophone, joined the frontline. The numbers of these instruments increased so that each now filled a section. The piano was often featured as a solo instrument with the orchestra, and bowed strings (violins) were often added.

Two tendencies emerged in this music, swing and sweet. “Swing” embodied the African American tendencies and divided the beat into three equal parts instead of two, giving the “swing” feel characteristic of blues (listen to all blues audios). The music retained a harder blues/jazz edge, hard forward drive, and syncopated character. In Swing arrangements “Rifts,” the jazz term for motive, became the building block of Swing melodies. After the “head,” the written portion of music, the frontline soloists each took a turn improvising. Unlike Dixieland jazz, the musicians played in turn, not all at once. The texture, then, became more homophonic and less polyphonic, though secondary melodies were carried in the bass. Another important shift in swing was the move from the “two-step” meter to a four beat one. The shift becomes especially apparent in the “walking” bass.

The tendency to “Sweet” represented a white, European-influenced musical sensibility. First and foremost, the music and often the text bordered on safe and saccharine. The melodies fell on the accented beats rather than be syncopated. The melody and the arrangements possessed a cute and clever quality rather than edginess, and the texts were often simple and sentimental. Sweet catered to popular tastes and, like pop music today, aspired first and foremost to commercial success. Sweet is exemplified on your campanion CDs by Hoagy Carmichael's "Heart and Soul." Carmichael was one of the most successful of the Tin Pan Alley composers and is the author of some very fine music. His best known song is "Georgia on My Mind," which is familiar to most of us in Ray Charles' fine version. Although contained in its entirety on your companion CD, a snippet of "Heart and Soul" is included here for ease of comparison.

It is critical to note that "sweet" exerted its influence on contemporary musical theater, studied later, far more than "swing." The reasons are quite simple. The audience for musical theater was white at the poorest, middle class. The music intended for theater supported the melodrama inherent in the story rather than fulfilling the need for "hot" dance music. Theater music needed to capture immediately the emotions of the character who sang the music, and these emotions were often cloying and intensely sentimental. The music was not intended to stand on its own merit as the result of sophisticated content, though some very fine music resulted nonetheless.

The economic reality for the big bands was that they made background music for dancing, not art music. In order to draw the audiences, Swing bands were forced to play sweet pop tunes and pop-tune dance bands were forced to play swing. Not surprisingly, cross-pollination occurred so that a pop tune could be sung in a jazz style and the aggressive quality of a swing tune could be toned down by a sweeter delivery. The audio exemplify the point. Crosby sings a pop song in a jazz style, and Glenn Miller homogenizes a swing composition. Notice that Miller’s theme consists entirely of rifts. Also notice the two-step in "After You've Gone" and the shfift to four-beat patterns in "In the Mood." The meeting of sweet and swing can be contrasted in the following musical examples by Bing Crosby's "After You've Gone" (heard with Paul Whiteman's big band and contained in its entirety on companion CD) and Glenn Miller's "In the Mood." Note that the melody of "In the Mood" consists of a single three-note idea played repeatedly throughout the stanza. This motive or "lick" is called a "rift." Rifts are crucial components of Swing music and to much of the music of modern jazz. Also note that Carmicheal's "Heart and Soul" starts with a motive that is sounded immediately at a higher pitch. Although not exactly a rift, the cross influences of Sweet and Swing are evident even in the construction of this sweet melody!

As in every other period and style of music, musicians somehow manage to imbue even incidental (i.e. dinner or dance) music with art. The notable examples of the infusion of art in Swing is found in the music of Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. Goodman, the jazz clarinetist of his generation, was equally fluent in jazz and classical styles, and the effect of his classical interests is evident in his jazz. His lines are not particularly syncopated, as in blues or the music of contemporary African American musicians.

Benny Goodman

Ellingtons's music retains the African and jazz elements yet is slick enough Swing to satisfy the pop-oriented listener. More importantly, however, he understood and mastered the implications of European classical theoretical developments found in the music of composers such as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky. The connection between European modern classical composers and American jazzmen does not stop with Ellington. The entire school of modern jazz (bop and cool) bears marks of this influence.

Debussy's contributions include advanced harmony (chord progresssions). Note that, like Swing musicians in America, Debussy also builds his melodies from the same kind of motives that are called "rifts" in jazz. Debussy's use of harmony in "L'Apres midi d'un faune" ("Afternoon of a Faun") does not not follow strict, conventional rules; instead he searches in his chord juxtapositions for new colors and effects.

Ravel's contributions include the use of modal scales. These scales doubtless came into France in Ravel's time through the cultural influence of France's colonial holdings in African and the Middle East, where these scales are to this day still in active use. The origin of the modes is far older, however, and form the bedrock upon which European music is formulated. The modes were first used in chant and remained the important scales until the sixteenth century, when the concepts of major and minor scales finally supplanted them.

You can easily demonstrate the modes for yourself, even if you have no musical training. At the piano, play the white keys only. If you play:

C-C, the mode is Ionian (also our major scale)
D to D, the mode is Dorian
E-E, the mode is Phrygian
F-F, the mode is Lydian
G-G, the mode is Mixolydian
A-A, the mode is Aeolian
B-B, the mode is Locrian

In Ravel's "Bolero," I have extracted the segment of the work that uses the Phrygian mode as the basis for its melody. Ravel's programmatic intent was to capture an "Arabic" or "Arab-African" flavor.

Ellington’s music contains many of the European tonal advances without sacrificing the African voice. His music displays the sophisticated harmonic progressions found as early as the turn-of-the-century music of Debussy. His music also contains more radical approaches delevoped in the first three decades of the twentieth century in the music of composers such as Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky was a Russian immigrant living in Paris and composing music for the Ballet Russe. One of the most prominent features of his music is polytonality, the simultaneous use of two different keys!

Not all the dissonance in Ellington's music derives from European classical advances. Some come froms the the same wellspring as the dissonance of blues, African American harmonic sensibililties. The introduction to Ellington's "Harlem", however, demonstrates the dissonance brought into the music by polytonal thinking. "Caravan" is not as dissonant during Cootie William's trumpet solo, but not that the piano stabs are not in the same key! Like "Harlem," the polytonal influences are more evident in the introduction and sections that feature the full orchestra. "Caravan" was a composition whose arrangement Ellington experiment with his entire life. Unfortunately, the recording available here is one of the more conservative settings. All the arrangements of "Caravan" contain characteristics that must be noted. The trumpet solo is delivered in a style that is deliberately very similar to the way a slave would have sung an arhoolie in the field! Also, the rift is pushed to the background, and the rhythm of the rift creates when contrasted to the solo a polyrhythmic texture. Moreoever, the rhythm of the background rift is one derived directly from Latin rumba (see lecture on Latin influences). Careful listening to "Ko-ko," the Ellington cut on the companion CD reveals many of the same features discussed above.

Duke Ellington

Swing began in the 1930s with the formation of the big bands. The period lasted until the late 1940s, when records and radio made the big bands economically infeasible.