"The big band is a type of musical ensemble associated with jazz, a style of music which became popular during the Swing Era from the early 1930s until the late 1950s. Big Bands evolved with the times and continues to today. A big band typically consists of approximately 12 to 25 musicians and contains saxophones, trumpets, trombones, vibraphone, singers (or vocalists), and a rhythm section. The terms jazz band, jazz ensemble, stage band, jazz orchestra, society band and dance band may be used to describe a specific type of big band."--Wikipedia entry 2011
Here's the first composition, the oddly titled "Dance of the Gremlins" featuring the Count Basie Orchestra from 1941. This is an excellent clip for showing how a great band--which also included Buck Clayton and "Sweets" Edison--cam together in a "hot" number.
Swing music originated in the United States in the 1930's, but by the end of that decade it was all over the world, even in Stalin's Soviet Union! Nazi Germany allowed some swing bands on the radio. As the Second World War dragged on, the music was discouraged as "animalistic" and by 1942 most foreign band music was true swing tunes were banned from the radio and out of music clubs. Kids and adults who still tried to listen to foreign broadcasts or play the music in underground clubs faced ostracism and in many cases jail and labor camps for being non-conformists.
Again, from Wikipedia: At that time, only a relatively small number of people in Germany knew how jazz music sounded in America - at that time, swing - and that it was Jazz. With the pressing wartime effort from 1941–1943, the Nazis accidentally fostered the jazz craze by forcing bands from Nazi-occupied nations in Western Europe to perform, bringing hot swing. Eventually, the Nazi party realized that jazz could not be removed entirely from Germany (WFMU Staff). The Nazis even re-developed and newly produced some pieces, giving them new lyrics, in special studios. One example is the song "Black Bottom", which was presented as "Schwarzer Boden". For some Germans, the banned foreign stations with jazz programs were very popular.
"The Nazis on the one hand would jam transmissions from the Allies' stations, but on the other hand would also copy them. The band Charlie and His Orchestra is considered as a negative example, also called Mr. Goebbels Jazz Band. Several of Germany’s most talented swing musicians, such as saxophonist Lutz Templin and vocalist Karl “Charlie” Schwedler, were active in a Jazz band. Here the Nazis replaced the original texts with their own provocative propaganda texts that were pro-Nazi and anti-American/British. For example, the lyrics for “Little Sir Echo” has anti-American/British appeal with lyrics such as “German U-boats are making you sore, You’re always licked, not a victory came through…You’re nice, little fellow, but by now you should know that you can never win this war!” Goebbels’ propaganda was broadcast over pirated short-wave frequencies into America, Britain, and Canada in order to spread fear and weaken the morale of Germany’s enemies (WFMU Staff).
"The situation intensified in 1942 with the entry of the United States in the war. For diplomats of foreign embassies and Wehrmacht members, a couple of jazz clubs continued to remain open in Berlin. In addition, individual, illegitimate venues and private parties still played jazz. In 1943 jazz record production was stopped.
The Swing-Jugend, or Swing Youth, was a movement among mainly youth from 14–20 years old who dressed, danced, and listened to jazz in defiance of the Nazi regime. The Nazi party acted against this movement by detaining several of the young leaders of the Swing Youth and sending them to concentration camps. However, the Swing Youth continued to resist the Nazi party by participating in prohibited swing and jazz activities (Neuhaus). Charlie and His Orchestra was moved in the still bombproof province.[7] Jazz was also incorporated into musical works such as operas and chamber music through “art-jazz,” which utilized jazz-inspired and ragtime-inspired syncopated rhythms and modes. Famous operas such as Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf! and Boris Blacher’s Concertante Music for Orchestra are examples of art-jazz (Dexter)."
Here's Otto Stenzel's band doing a German jazz hit "Musik, Musik". The seems to be the same music that was used in the 1970's for the theme from "The Muppet Show".
A clip from Wim Wenders' award-winning documentary about 1940-50s-era Cuban musicians reunited to great international success.
From Wikipedia: "The success of both the album and film sparked a revival of international interest in traditional Cuban music and Latin American music in general. Some of the Cuban performers later released well-received solo albums and recorded collaborations with international stars from different musical genres. The "Buena Vista Social Club" name became an umbrella term to describe these performances and releases, and has been likened to a brand label that encapsulates Cuba's "musical golden age" between the 1930s and 1950s. The new success was fleeting for the most recognizable artists in the ensemble: Compay Segundo, Rubén González, and Ibrahim Ferrer, who died at the ages of ninety-five, eighty-four, and seventy-eight respectively; Segundo and González in 2003, then Ferrer in 2005.
"Several surviving members of the Buena Vista Social Club, such as trumpeter Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal, laúd player Barbarito Torres and trombonist and conductor Jesus "Aguaje" Ramos currently tour worldwide, to popular acclaim, with new members such as the singer Carlos Calunga, virtuoso pianist Rolando Luna[1][2] and occasionally the solo singer Omara Portuondo, as part of a 13 member band called Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club."
The recording here is based on a 1899 composition by the "King of the Ragtime Composers", Scott Joplin, born in Marshall, Texas in 1868. Joplin, was underappreciated in his own lifetime. "Maple Leaf Rag" was his biggest hit in his lifetime and it aforded him time to work on other rags and two operas, neither of the latter being a success. The song title came from "The Maple Leaf Club", dubbed " a not -too respectable establishment in the red light district" of Sedalia, Missouri, than a thriving community where Joplin also went to music classes at the local college.
His groundbreaking musical pieces finally got the recognition he deserved--fifty-sixty years too late for Joplin, who died in 1917-- when his work was used in the 1973 Oscar-winning film "The Sting" with Paul Newman and Robert Redford as savvy con-men in the 1930's. (Why music from the turn of the 20th century was used in a film set decades later in Depresion America puzzled me when the film was released.)
But to more important matters:
Scott Joplin bridged the improvised syncopations of ragtime with the composition style of other types of concert and dance music. He traveled all over America as a young man, a prolific piano performer and composer, later making St. Louis his home.
Joplin first composed what was called "jig music" in Taxarkana, Texas and Sedalia. It was called "jig" because the infectious rhythms caused people to break into a jig. It combined the harmonies of black music with the marches and dances of the Old World that white Americans were used to.
Thirty years on, Sidney Bechet's jazzmen took the waltz-y elements out of the tune and made it pure hot jazz. Hope you enjoy!
The Portland, Oregon based eclectic band performs one of their best from a 2007 album, "Hey Eugene". Thomas Lauderdale is the leader of the band at the piano. The lovely vocalist is China Forbes.
Wikipedia entry: "Pink Martini has twelve musicians (and sometimes travels with string sections), and performs its multilingual repertoire on concert stages and with symphony orchestras throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Australia and New Zealand and North America. Pink Martini made its European debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 and its orchestral debut with the Oregon Symphony in 1998 under the direction of Norman Leyden. Since then, the band has gone on to play with over 30 orchestras around the world, including multiple engagements with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the Boston Pops, the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center and the BBC Concert Orchestra in London."
This tune is one of the Big Band standards for its era. Released in the Summer of 1937, it became the signature tune for William "Count" Basie and his band, the purveyors of a new jazz sound that came out of the heartland metropolis of Kansas City, Missouri.
Basie (1904-1984) was already a big local success in night clubs and local radio shows when he was discovered via a late night program by a VIP listener, John Hammond, a producer for Benny Goodman and many other swing greats.
The Basie Band (which originally featured featured jazz legends like Lester Young on tenor sax and Buck Clayton on trumpet) proved popular enough to break out early and stay one of the top bands of the era.
One of Basie's earliest piano teachers was none other than the great "Mayor of Harlem" and piano virtuoso, Fats Waller.
Despite the loss of big band popularity in the early fifties, Count Basie continued to tour with his band and new members right in the 1980's. He recorded and performed with legends like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra in bands and smaller groups in Hollywood, New York and Las Vegas.
This clip is from a wartime B-picture from 1943 called "Reveille With Beverly" featuring future MGM star Ann Miller as the "disc jockey."
Woody Allen's latest feature (and so far his most successful at the box office in 25 years) follows the strange trip of disenchanted American screenwriter and would-be novelist Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) and his fiancee Inez (Rachel Mc Adams) and her family of American provincals as they journey to Paris for a vacation.
Gil has had a lifelong affinity with the City of Light from previous trips there as a younger man but also from reading the books by about the many authors and painters that came there in the 1920's and before. He longs to see Paris as it was in the period of "The Lost Generation" when talented American artists like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the singer-dancer Josephine Baker, the surrealist photographer Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) and the salon gran-de dame Gertrude Stein could and did rub shoulders with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and other charming and witty people who made the area a synthetic cyclone of bohemian energy in their after-hours prowlings.
By a bit of understated magic, Gil gets that chance to travel back in time via an old taxi with a claxon horn. What happens to him when he visits 1920's Montparnasse and other sections of Paris for a few magic nights (exactly as it was over 80 years earlier) both fulfills an impossible dream and also open his eyes to the realities of that time and place. Gil also meets the beautiful Adriane (Marion Cotillard) at a party featuring Cole Porter at the piano. The prospect of them falling in love leaves Gil with achoice: should he go back to his well-paid hack screenwriting work in Hollywood or stay behind in the 20's with a woman more artistically in tune wiith him than Inez and her annoying friends and boorish parents?
The idea of a "golden era" fixation (a nostalgia for an earlier time beyond a person's own lifetime) is fully explored with both its delectable possibilities and bittersweet realities. Woody Allen's insights here on this aspect of the human condition are both sharp and clever as he's ever been.
This is a film that would be interesting to anyone who enjoys romantic comedies (especially ones that emphasize romance over silliness and foul language) and also those who are charmed by seeing celebrated artists like Hemingway and the Fitzgerald's brought to life again with their ideas, passions, wit and perhaps fatal flaws on full display. Whichever one you prefer, this film will not disappoint.
Rachel Mc Adams is very good as the incredulous fiancee and Michael Steen shines as a pedantic twit who gets under Gil's skin with his constant showing off.
I love the way the great Nina Simone blends a superb jazz style of piano with some classical "riffs" in the middle of this 1960 performance.
From Wikipedia: "Love Me or Leave Me" was first recorded by Ruth Etting in 1928 and the song made it to Number Two on the charts the following year. Dozens of popular singing stars have recorded this one, the last major cover being Rod Stewart in 2010.
The music was written by Walter Donaldson and the lyrics by Gus Kahn. The song was introduced in the Broadway play, Whoopee!, which opened in December 1928. Ruth Etting's performance of the song was so popular that she was also given the song to sing in the play "Simple Simon", which opened in February 1930."
I've decided to share some of my favorite upbeat musical selections, starting here with a rendition by the famous Ferdinand Joseph "Jelly Roll" Morton, whose band, The Red Hot Peppers, was one of the major hot jazz bands of the 1920's. They toured all over the country.
F.J. "Jelly Roll" Morton (1885 or 1890 -1941) grew up in New Orleans like Louis Armstrong. He played his piano in "sporting houses" (brothels) in the Storyville District. He claimed later to have invented jazz piano himself around 1902, which is generally considered a bit of a stretch.
He likely was one of the first to transition from the ragtime style to something close to jazz.
He was also one of the great jazz composers, and a 1915 song he wrote and arranged might have been the first jazz tune published. (A jazz band itself was not recorded until the folowing year, players like King Oliver and WC Handy being afraid that other bands would copy their music note for note if it went to records.)
It is true that Morton wrote "Wolverine Blues", "King Porter Stomp", "New Orleans Bump" and other major standards of the early "hot" and "swing" eras. He never got any royalties for these compositions however.
Allen Lomax, a music pioneer as far as finding and recording these great artists, did record Jelly Roll in his later years for a collection that was issued by the Library of Congress later on. By the late '30's his style of music was considere passe.
Morton ran a saloon near Washington, DC in his later years. He was in an altercation in 1939 with a robber where he suffered stab wounds. His wife got him to leave the business and move out to California in his final years.
His was such a major influence on all types of American music that he was named to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And how he could play piano!
2010 is probably not going to go down as one of the all-time great years, but there is hopefully reason all there for all of my friends here on Multiply to celebrate tomorrow night.
Allow me to share a great song by one of the smoothest jazz players and vocalists of all time. I think Mr. Nat King Cole is timeless,and the message of this song never grows obsolete! Happy New Year to all!
Bessie Smith (1894-1937) is called "The Empress of the Blues" for many good reasons.
She voice epitomized the blues and its facility to encompass songs of pain and regret. She also could celebrate the joys of pure passion as in tunes like "I'm Wild About That Thing" and "Do Your Duty"
She started out as a street singer in Chattanooga Tennessee at age 12 and in the 1920's her songs sold in the hundreds of thousands. Here's some info on Ms. Smith's career from The New York State University Women's Biography website:
"The major breakthrough for Bessie, and for the recording industry, came in 1923. Mamie Smith in 1920 had recorded "Crazy Blues" in 1920, which sold so well (against all expectations) that Columbia set up a separate division for "race" records. Frank Walker, in charge of the division, had been so impressed years earlier by Bessie’s singing, that he sent the pianist Clarence Williams to bring her to New York .As she arrived, Columbia was on the verge of bankruptcy. Her debut record, "Downhearted Blues" and "Gulf Coast Blues" , sold 780,000 copies in the six months after she recorded the pieces, and helped save Columbia. Over the years she made 160 recordings. At that stage Bessie was receiving an outright $125 per recording; at her height a few years later, she was receiving $2,000/week, and owned her own travelling railway car. During the following ten years she was the foremost recording artist in the world.
"The decline in Bessie’s fortunes from such heights was inevitable at the time. The advent of talking pictures and the radio, on the one hand, severely set back the recording industry, and gave her audience other sources of entertainment. The depression, on the other, struck her industry as well, and reduced the wherewithal of her potential customers.
"In fact, not only her personal but her professional life seemed on the way to a comeback in the years 1936-37. There apparently were major recording sessions and joint appearances in the works with the upcoming leaders of the musical world (Bennie Goodman, the Basie band), perhaps a film was being planned. In addition to this, a critic of the time observed that the "Empress of the Blues" had gone far beyond such limitations, and was "the greatest artist American jazz ever produced", perhaps transcending even the term "jazz".
This is one of her most famous hits, recorded in 1923 near the start of her professional recording career. Her influence is still being celebrated today by the likes of Eric Clapton, Tom Waits, Norah Jones and other gifted musicians.
This Lounge/Swing Revival band from Durham, North Carolina, has put out some fine songs in the last fifteen years. Here's one of their best, "Put A Lid on It", from 1997, featuring the amazing Katherine Whalen on vocals. The group was dormant for the last few years but came out with a new album last year and is touring again. (Why they never play spots like my neck of the woods is a mystery.)
James "Jimbo" Mathus — vocals, Guitar, Slide Guitar, Tenor Banjo, Trombone, Piano Katharine Whalen — Vocals, Banjo, Ukulele Stuart Cole — Bass Chris Phillips — Percussion, Contraption Kit, drums Je Widenhouse — Trumpet, Cornet Will Dawson — Alto Saxophone Henry Westmoreland — Baritone Saxophone Robert "Griffanzo" Griffin - Piano(Roland Keyboards)
From a recording of the famous January 16, 1938 concert by the Benny Goodman Band at Carnegie Hall. This was a revolutionary moment in jazz history as the most famous symphony hall in America hosted a genuine 100 percent jazz band playing a "gig" in this most august arena of symphonic music in America.
From the PBS website on the documentary "Jazz", directed by Ken Burns:
"On January 16, 1938, Goodman brought a new level of recognition to jazz with a concert in Carnegie Hall, presenting Harry James, Ziggy Elman, Jess Stacy, Hampton, Krupa, and Wilson from his own entourage, as well as guest soloists from the bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie.
"In the same period, Goodman became the first famous jazz musician to achieve success performing classical repertory. His early training with Schoepp had prepared him for this dual career by laying the foundation for a "legitimate" clarinet technique, which he continued to improve in later study with Reginald Kell. In 1935, he performed Mozart's Clarinet Quintet before an invited audience in the home of John Hammond, and three years later he recorded the work with the Budapest String Quartet. He appeared in his first public recital at Town Hall in New York in November 1938. That year he also commissioned the work Contrasts from Bartok and gave its premiere at Carnegie Hall in January 1939. He later commissioned clarinet concertos from Copland and Hindemith in 1947. Goodman appeared with all the leading American orchestras, performing and recording works by Leonard Bernstein, Debussy, Morton Gould, Darius Milhaud, Carl Nielsen, Poulenc, Stravinsky, and Carl Maria von Weber."
How appropriate to bring a pastiche of the great Johann Sebastian Bach to the performance.
Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke (1903-1931) was cornet player, pianist and composer who ranks along with Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Sidney Bechet as one of the great pioneers of pre-big band American Jazz. He died all too soon, at twenty-seven, from pneumonia brought on by an advanced case of physical deterioration caused by the alcoholism that plagued him all his adult life.
His parents Bismarck and Agnes were solid middle-class German-Americans and wanted nothing to do with the new jazz music that was slowly seeping into the Middle West from Chicago and St. Louis. There would be no "jazzers" in the Beiderbecke household! They sent Bix away to the Lake Forest Preparatory School where he excelled in team sports and the student band but little else. He was expelled after being caught sneaking out of his dorm room late one night to keep a band date. After that, he was pushed into his father's prosperous lumber and brick import business, but Bix never had any interest in that. Eventually his parents relented and off he went to Chicago with a second-hand cornet and began to play in any band that would let him sit in.
From the Jazz Encyclopedia Website:
One of the leading names in 1920s jazz, Beiderbecke's career was cut short by chronic poor health, exacerbated by alcoholism. Critic Scott Yanow describes Beiderbecke as the "[p]ossessor of a beautiful, distinctive tone and a strikingly original improvising style. Beiderbecke's chief competitor among cornetists in the '20s was Louis Armstrong, but (due to their different sounds and styles) one really could not compare them.
Beiderbecke was one of the great musicians of the 1920s. Beiderbecke first recorded with his band the Wolverine Orchestra in 1924. They were usually called the Wolverines, named for "Wolverine Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton because they played it so often. He became a sought-after musician in Chicago and New York City. He made innovative and influential recordings with Frankie Trumbauer ("Tram") and the Jean Goldkette Orchestra. When the Goldkette Orchestra disbanded after their last recording ("Clementine (From New Orleans)"), in September 1927, Bix and Trumbauer, a 'C' melody and alto saxophone player, briefly joined Adrian Rollini's band at the Club New Yorker, New York. Beiderbecke then moved on to the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, the most popular and highest paid band of the day.
It was a teenager that he first meet Louis Armstrong who at the time was also a cornet player three years older than Bix and a light years ahead of him as a developing talent. Armstrong had some up river from New Orleans to Iowa as part of a riverboat band. Later on they managed to get together in after hours jazz sessions and play improvisation with other members of their respective bands. (Jazz bands remained segregated throughout the twenties so the two men never shared their brilliance together in front of an an audience.) Armstrong later said of the younger man:
'Bix was the only name I ever called the dear boy...ain't nobody played like him since!"
Much of Beiderbecke's life has become the stuff of romantic legends, much of it centering around a "young man with a horn" persona that was more the imaginations of authors and screenwriters trying to capitalize on the backdrop of "The Roaring Twenties" than truth. The veneer of his life was dramatic fodder for a tale of youth laid low by Prohibition or a single-minded pursuit of a perfect note of music or a dream differed or whatever. Beiderbecke's more sober critics have used the record of remarks left behind from those who actually knew him-- as a fellow band member and friend. They show a relatively happy man who made few if any enemies and was if anything, a polite and genial young man---at least when sober.
Since the 40th Anniversary of his death, the city of Davenport, Iowa has had a four-day Bix Beiderbecke Annual Celebration which has brought together professional and amateur jazz bands in tribute tot their famous native son. The house he grew up in is registered as a national landmark.
Two of his most important non-jazz influences were the recordings he heard of the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Beiderbecke, after some prodding from fellow band-members, actually got to meet and chat with the composer of "Bolero". Legend has it that Mr. Ravel later dropped by Bix's apartment in New York toward the end of his life to hear him play one of his piano compositions, and I can only hope that particular story, never confirmed, is true.
Here's my favorite Bix recording. It is from his work with the Jean Goldkette Group from 1927. The work is "Clementine (From New Orleans)":
Bix also performed with such well known jazz personalities as the Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman, Hoagy Carmichael, Bing Crosby, Red Nichols, Jack Teagarden. Carmichael's great song 'Stardust" is said to have been inspired in great part by the cornet solo Bix plays in the middle of the following recording of 'Singin' the Blues" (1927) in a recording session with his friends Frank Trambauer (saxophone) and Eddie Lang (guitar).
Django Reinhardt (1910-1953) featured on Limehouse Blues.
The band is the The Quintet of the Hot Club of France. Stephane Grappelli plays the violin, Louis Vola plays the double-bass. Reinhardt brother Joseph also performs on this recording.
Django is one of the great legends in jazz guitar of course. A very colorful and popular figure, he continues to draw fans to his music. The Woody Allen film "Sweet and Lowdown" from 1995 with Sean Penn as an American guitarist so enamoured of Rinehardt's magic with the instrument that he falls over in a dead faint when given the chance to meet him.
I was surprised to discover the Belgian-born Rinehardt badly burned two fingers of his right hand in a fire at eighteen and relearned how to play the instrument. After teaming up with Grappelli in 1937, Reinhardt went back to France from London in 1940 (despite the German occupation) to reunite with his wife. Despite the severe deportations polices of the Nazis toward ethnic Rom ai (Gypsies), he survived the war owing reportedly to the protection of a Luftwaffe officer in Paris who was a great jazz fan.
After the war, Reinhardt and Grappelli went to the United States, where he met and performed with Duke Ellington. His popularity was somewhat undercut by his inability to show up on time for his concerts, often opting instead to go fishing, or walk along the beach. He was a major fan of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and played with Gillespie, but as far as I know never got to record with him. Although he did work with other American jazz artists who came to France in the late 1940's.
Jazz critic Fred Sharp had this to say about Rinehardt in this 1972 article:
"Overcoming the handicap of his disabled hand, Django could play impeccably at an incredible speed, and he included in his playing, musical forms and figures that were totally of his own creation, such as lightning fast glissandos executed usually with one finger on one string without the slighted alteration of dynamics between the notes. No one has ever been able to replicate the quality of that artistic achievement.
"With considerable effort, a guitarist might be able to copy some of Django's playing, but no one can replicate his musical conceptions. Beyond simply improvising, Django was, in the final analysis, a composer. The ideas he played on his guitar reveal more of the composer than the jazz improviser, thus if you transcribe one of his choruses and have it analyzed by an individual trained in musical composition, it appears that his music is indeed "constructed" in the manner of a complex compostion and is not simply the product of improvisation."
He retired from touring altogether in 1951 and died of a brain hemorrhage far too young two years later. His recordings still astound, as I think you'll agree.
(Below) A good summation article on Django from a website dedicated to his memory and his music.
By 1938, Artie Shaw began to compete for the top spot with Benny Goodman as far as U.S. Swing Band supremacy. Shaw was a mercurial personality, an intellectual and aloof man repelled at times from his massive fame and the trappings that went with it.
When he was dubbed "King of the Clarinet" (in deference to Goodman's 'King of Swing' title) he told interviewers that the titles should be reversed.
"Benny just plays the clarinet," Shaw retorted. "I play music."
Well, that's a bit over the top in my opinion, but he said it.
He broke up his band at the height of its popularity in 1939, and went into personal hiding in Mexico to try to escape the riogors of fame. It was no surprise, therefore, that the title of his band's theme song was called "Nightmare".
From Wikipedia: "His first interregnum, at the height of his success, was met with disbelief by booking agents. They predicted that Shaw would not only be abandoning a million-dollar enterprise but that nightclub and theater owners would sue him for breach of contract. Shaw's offhand response was, "Tell 'em I'm insane. A nice, young American boy walking away from a million dollars, wouldn't you call that insane?"
But he came back to the clarinet and the orchestra to entertain soldiers and sailors shortly after America's entry into the world war. He joined the Navy and his band played in the Pacific Theater in hot spots like Guadalcanal. After 18 months of non-stop performing, he had a nervous collapse and was released from active duty. For most of the rest of his life Shaw pursued many other interests than music (higher mathematics, target shooting, writing novels, undergoing and studying psychoanalysis, marrying and divorcing seven or eight attractive women, mostly movie actresses and so on and so on.)
He was compelled to testify in 1953 before the US House Committee on UnAmerican Activities for his activity in something called "The World Peace Congress", and later went into voluntary exile in Europe. (I'm sure many paranoid Americans breathed sigh of relief knowing the "menacing" Mr. Shaw and his "commie" clarinet were over in Paris.)
In 1982 he reformed a big band and became its conductor. He continued to lecture on big band music at universities and spoke to documentarians about his career, including Ken Burns for his influential multi-part "Jazz" series. He also was the first white jazz orchestra leader leader to feature a black singer (Billie Holliday) on tour. This was in 1938, and hostility to Holliday from white bigots during a swing through the South led to his having to replace her with a white female singer.
He had a great array of musicians, and here's his group doing "Concerto for Clarinet" in the 1940 independent film, "Second Chorus". You'll be able to catch the lovely Paulette Goddard and Fred Astaire (the stars of the film) in the beginning of the clip. Shaw's arrangement starts out melancholy and shifts into high gear when the horn section breaks loose:
Swing music came into prominence during the Great Depression, and became the most popular jazz form in the 20th Century. It's impact as the major popular musical art form spanned just a little over a decade. To me, Swing represents the High Renaissance of band music in America. It had a major impact on racial culture as well, as the first integrated dance halls in the United States were in New York City's Harlem section in the mid-1930's. This was made possible by the popularity of Swing .
When many white fans of this driving form of music think of Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw when they think of Swing, the music grew out of the African-American bands of the 1920's. The most important swing pioneer was Fletcher Henderson. Henderson was a bandleader in the early 1920's and was also a genius at arrangements. HIs popularity with his own band grew in part from his great talent with bringing major jazz stars like Louis Armstrong to New York City to play in his orchestra. Here's a sample of Fletcher's band:
Henderson's had to abandon his own big band due to the hardships of the Depression and the loss of top talent to other orchestras. In 1931, he became an arranger for other bands. In 1934, he sold many of his arrangements to Benny Goodman (1906-1984), who was doing a radio dance band show called "Let's Dance" in New York. The next year Goodman "broke through" in a big way, thanks to a ground-breaking moment at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles in August 1935, that is one of the most famous in Swing Music history.
From the official Benny Goodman website:
Then Benny heard that NBC was looking for three bands to rotate on a new Saturday night broadcast to be called "Let's Dance," a phrase that has been associated with the Goodman band ever since. One band on the show was to be sweet, one Latin, and the third hot. The Goodman band was hot enough to get the job, but not hot enough to satisfy Benny. He brought in Gene Krupa on drums. Fletcher Henderson began writing the arrangements - arrangements that still sound fresh more than a half century later. And the band rehearsed endlessly to achieve the precise tempos, section playing and phrasing that ushered in a new era in American music. There was only one word that could describe this band's style adequately: Swing.
After six months of broadcasting coast to coast the band was ready for a cross-country tour. The band was ready but the country was not. The tour was a disaster until its last date in August, 1935, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. The only plausible explanation for what happened there is that "Let's Dance" was aired three hours earlier on the west coast than in the east. The kids in Los Angeles had been listening, and thousands of them turned out to hear the band in person at the Palomar. They hadn't even come to dance; instead they crowded around the bandstand just to listen. It was a new kind of music with a new kind of audience, and their meeting at the Palomar made national headlines.
...with a high-energy swing sound that set him and his musicians apart from the "sweet bands" that had previously been favored by white audiences.
The video below features the Count Basie Band doing his own variation on the new sound. Basie's Kansas City sound was the next major break-out band, starting in 1938 with the success of "Oone O'Clock Jump". Here's the Count doing his first major hit in a 1950 performance.
"Recorded at the Herrang Dance Camp in 2004. Nikolas "Lloyd" Lloyd and Mindi "Mindi" Lundqvist demonstrate some dance moves that sank, perhaps undeservedly, into obscurity in the swing era."
My favorite is the ape walk. Can't understand why this didn't catch on.
"He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was."--The Great Gatsby
This is a novel I find myself going back to every so often. I first read it at fifteen. I had seen the film with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow as Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, respectively, two one-time sweethearts from the time of World War One who are reunited briefly and not coincidentally seven years or so later in an affluent part of the suburbs of New York City, along the green glades and postcard-pretty little private harbors and estates of Long Island.
The movie was okay. I didn't understand the hullaballo about it actually. Then I read the book on my own. It was like a light going on in my head. I could imagine how great the movie SHOULD have been but somehow wasn't.
Jay Gatsby is a war hero, a newly-rich provocative shadow of the Long Island party set, and an apparent shady background as to how he acquired his money. (I love how Fitzgerald slowly brings the reader details of the the real Jay Gatsby and slowly dis-spells the various legends about him that the guests at his lavish parties have of him.) Only one man gets to know the real man--Nick Carroway, the narrator of the book. At the end of Gatsby's life, he is also Jay's only friend. Jay Gatz (his real last name) is trying to get back the one thing that money and medals and social popularity can't buy for him--the love of Daisy. She is married to the more patrician Tom Buchanan, a polo-playing former college football hero with decidedly backward views on race and snobbish views of social position. He is also a violent cad of the first water,and his own mistress is just a doormat to him, or she better behave that way if she knows what's good for her. By the end of the book it is clear that Daisy has fallen in love again with Gatsby, who has bought an estate near hers and gives lavish parties for the sole reason perhaps of attracting her away from Tom and into his life. But is Daisy really in love enough to leave Tom for Jay? She says she is at one point in the novel, but I wonder...
In between Jay and Daisy--besides Tom--is Nick, a Middle Westerner (like Fitzgerald himself) who is Daisy's cousin and the one person who Gatsby trusts to arrange a private tea with her at Nick's bungalow. (Nick is no millionaire--he's a bond salesman on Wall Street in the heady pre-Depression stock market.)
Many critics have commented on the "tragedy" of Jay Gatsby. I'm not sure he really is a tragic character, but he is a romantic. I think this self-made man truly believes he can reassemble his past and get a second chance with the person he believes is his soul-mate. What he can't see---and what rereading this novel again recently shows to me, is that he is chasing after a mirage, a idealized view of his beloved that Daisy--or perhaps no woman--could ever hope to sustain as a real flesh-and-blood human being. There is a short passage where Nick sums it up:
"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion."
Scott Fitzgerald knew something about creative passions, and his own life took some near-tragic twists with alcohol, professional failure and his wife's madnes. But he was a great writer, and he proves it in his early short stories and in this novel. His dialogue here and in other works is always some of the best I've ever read. Those who have read this short novel even once probably already know that. It's one novel I'd take with me to a desert island. Perhaps you too have a similar feeling about a novel or a collected group of stories you'd like to share.
One of the great American music groups came together to record at Chicago Okeh Records in Chicago several times between 1925 and 1928. Louis Armstrong's "Hot Five" and "Hot Seven" recordings were some of the most popular jazz recordings in their time and continue to inspire music lovers.
Armstrong (at the center of the photo below) is credited with being the first great jazz improviser; his stunning trumpet solos seems to be timeless. He got his start in New Orleans of course, growing up in a section of "The Crescent City" so bad it was known as "The Battlefield." Eventually he played the riverboats that came up and down the Mississippi River with friend and mentor King Oliver .King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band also played river boats along the Ohio.
It was in the heartland of America--Richmond, Indiana--that "Satchmo" di his first recordings with the King Oliver Band in 1922-3. Ironically, and dangerously, those first recordings were made in a part of Indiana that was the epicenter of the racist Klu Klux Klan. As it was the only recording studio available to the group they had to sneak into the town and get out by nightfall, with Armstrong and the other group members relying on local friends for their accommodations in that rural section of the state.
Not all whites, of course, were bigots. It was also in nearby Iowa that Armstrong met and befriended a German-American horn man named Bismarck "Bix" Biederbecke. He was also a great improviser, his instrument being the coronet, and their relationship and respect for one another continued until Bix's early death from alcohol poisoning and pneumonia in 1931.
The recordings done by the "Hot Five" group--which also included "West End Blues", "Gut Bucket Blues", "I'm Gonna Get Ya", "Heebie Jeebies", "Basin Street Blues", et al, included the pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, (Louis' second wife) , on piano, with the legendary Johnny Dodds on clarinet and Kid Ory on trombone. This recording was made by the "Hot Seven" group, which added two extra horn men, on May 10, 1927.
Two points of interest about the "blues" song: The flamboyant stage and screen actress Tallulah Bankhead said that "she played it in her dressing room every day during intermission while she appeared on Broadway for the invigorating effect it gave her."
"In Woody Allen's 1979 film, Manhattan, the Allen character lists Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues" as one of the reasons that life is worth living."
It certainly is to me also.
For more info and music by this group, see the link below:
