Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  In 1936, the American jazz writer Peter Hugh Reed set out to challenge the enemies of swing. His particular target was Compton Mackenzie, whom he quoted thus: ‘Jazz is a surrender12, paradoxically a tired surrender, of the mind to the body.’ For Reed, swing was jazz, and he was prepared to state what made the music so compelling: ‘I surrender unconditionally13 “my mind to my body”. And why should I not do this? After all, why should we not succumb in part or upon occasion to our fundamental animal and primitive heritage, which lies back of the thin veneer of civilised life?’

  Reed was conceding one of the fundamental arguments against swing, jazz and a dozen equally convulsive genres to come. Civilisation, so the guardians of morality claimed, was under threat from the animal, the physical, the erotic, the emotional. The defenders of jazz highlighted its aesthetic appeal, its complex harmonies, its modernity, its life-affirming spontaneity, anything that would remove it from the primitive and impulsive. Reed refused to play the civilisation game: for him, jazz was a physical medium, and he was not ashamed of his physical response.

  The most instinctive reaction to the rhythm of swing was to dance: not with the regimented patterns of the waltz or the foxtrot, but with movements as unrestrained as the music. The godfather of swing dancing was the Lindy Hop, which originated in Harlem almost a decade before the swing boom. From its eight-to-the-bar rhythm (which made it the perfect partner for boogie-woogie piano) to its flamboyant acrobatics, the Lindy Hop was faster, wilder and more daring than any ballroom dance. It had no rules beyond the desire to express how the music sounded, and how it made you feel. But once it was captured on film – for example, in the Marx Brothers’ 1937 movie A Day at the Races, demonstrated by Whitey’s (all black) Lindy Hoppers – it became something to be imitated and mastered, rather than experienced in the moment. Black kids who saw their white peers struggling to match their moves dismissed them as ‘jitterbugs’ – squirming insects, in other words. The name stuck, and was flung constantly at teenagers by adults. Eventually every variant on the Lindy Hop, from the collegiate shag to the truck, the Suzy-Q to the dipso doodle, was subsumed into the single word ‘jive’, which was still being used to describe what adolescents did on the dance floor until the twist became a cultural obsession in the early 1960s.

  Whatever its title, Helen Ward (singer with the Benny Goodman band) ‘thought it was great14, because it was expressing the spirit the guys had in them up on the bandstand … the gals began wearing saddle shoes and the socks and the very full skirts, which was the necessary gear to do all those gyrations … it was very exciting to me’. And also to the dancers, the jitterbuggers or (a self-imposed term) ‘alligators’: so excited did 25,000 of them become during an all-day swing festival at Randall’s Island, New York in May 1938, that (reported the Daily Express) ‘thousands broke from the two-dollar15 area, smashed up seats, and shouted and danced their way to the reserve seats … In this most frenzied of America’s musical carnivals, housewives, office girls and businessmen, intoxicated by the blare of the 25 bands, leaped into the air yelling “Floy, floy”, “Give it, cats”, “Killer Diller”, like mad people.’

  Even the outbreak of war couldn’t calm the delirium. In 1942, a swing session and jitterbug contest was staged in a Washington, DC stadium. ‘When the bands started16 to send,’ Billboard magazine reported, ‘all hell broke loose. The audience jumped all over the place, piling out in the aisles and milling around the bandstand. Those in the upper tier of the stadium complained that they couldn’t hear the rhythm and tossed a few pop bottles. Those that missed were returned … Final score: 13 arrests, 10 injuries, three broken gates, hundreds of tattered zoot suits, and 30,000 hepcats returning to their jukeboxes.’ Moralists began to pine for the innocent days of ragtime and the foxtrot.

  The unwitting catalyst for this confusion was a ferociously talented, emotionally closeted white bandleader named Benny Goodman. Bespectacled, besuited and clean-cut, Goodman might have been a bank manager had he not been leading an orchestra described by the San Francisco Chronicle as bedlam: ‘Gene Krupa17 riding his hi-hat like a dervish. Harry James puffing out his cheeks till surely they must burst, the rhythm always burning and churning and driving you out of your mind, and then, just when you thought nothing could get hotter, Benny’s clarinet rising like a burnished bird out of the tightly controlled maelstrom and soaring to the heavens, outscreaming even the crowd.’

  Like Hoagy Carmichael, Goodman lapped up jazz in his teens; he was only 16 when he was invited to join one of the hottest white bands in America, led by Ben Pollack. In 1934, at 25, he secured a residency for his own band in midtown Manhattan. As Goodman’s biographer explained, their audience was baffled by the ferocity of their sound: ‘The music was too loud18 for them. They couldn’t figure out how to dance to it … the customers just milled around the bandstand or sat at the tables, stomping their feet.’ There they might have remained, had the band not been recruited by the McCann Erickson advertising agency to take part in a networked Saturday night NBC radio show: Let’s Dance. They were booked to represent the ‘hep’ extreme of contemporary dancing taste, alongside a unit offering Latin rhythms and another for close-dancers and smoochers. The National Biscuit Company, which sponsored the show, was appalled by what Goodman was playing, but sales of Ritz biscuits soared, so the band kept their jobs. When the show was forced off the air by a technicians’ strike in summer 1935, however, the Goodman outfit was booked into the prestigious Roosevelt Grill in New York, where diners forced napkins into their ears to escape the din. Goodman’s orchestra were given their cards on opening night.

  Out on the West Coast, they swung at full volume, and the dancers stayed off the floor – until Goodman pulled out a batch of dated arrangements and forced his boys to pretend that they were a ‘sweet’ band at heart. But one night in Oakland, he recalled, ‘there was such a yelling19 and stomping and carrying on in that hall I thought a riot had broken out. When I went into my solo, the noise was even louder. Finally the truth got through to me: we were causing the riot.’ The Palomar ballroom in LA reacted the same way: ‘After travelling 3,000 miles, we finally found people who were up on what we were trying to do.’ Once more, dancing had ceased, but only because everyone was crushed against the stage, hypnotised by the band.

  As the furore of swing spread, the audience for Goodman’s band grew younger: from courting couples in their early 20s, to students and then, by March 1937 when they reached the Paramount in Times Square, to teenagers. Like many film theatres, the Paramount combined a movie with a musical attraction, alternating throughout the day; a band could play five shows between early morning and evening close, before heading to a late-night club for one final blast. The Goodman orchestra arrived for a soundcheck at 7 a.m., to discover hundreds of children already queuing for admission, determined to cut school. By the first show at 10.30 a.m., the kids were primed to explode, responding to the repeated crescendos of the music with a roar that was, said Variety magazine, ‘tradition-shattering20 in its spontaneity, its unanimity, its sincerity, its volume, in the childlike violence of its manifestations’. Most upsetting for the management was that the fans danced in the aisles. The jitterbug was denounced as a teenage hooligan, too young to appreciate the finer points of harmony and rhythm, desperate only to swing.

  In January 1938, swing achieved a measure of respectability when Goodman’s orchestra were booked at Carnegie Hall. The show was picketed by supporters of the Spanish rebel leader General Franco, protesting that Goodman must be a Communist because he had recently played a fundraising benefit for the republican Spanish government. But the only disruption inside came from, as Melody Maker reported, ‘those near-maniacs21 who act like they have St Vitus’ Dance or ants in their pants … their stupid habit of whistling and clapping vociferously each time one of the boys took a hot chorus very soon became objectionable’. One jazz aficionado could eventually take no more, and screamed, ‘Shut up you punks!’ at the miscreants.

  For
Goodman, who that week had performed Mozart’s Quintet for Clarinet and Strings on radio, this adulation was an ambiguous blessing. Ten days after the Carnegie show, he was back at the Paramount, and the fans were even more frenzied than before. His long-time admirer, the critic and producer John Hammond, claimed inside knowledge of his dilemma: ‘The behaviour of his audience22 has set the guy on edge for the last six months … The crowd’s exhibitionism at the earlier performances had so disgusted him that he could not even bring himself to face the well-behaved patrons at the quiet supper show … He genuinely wants the public to appreciate the music, and he hates to see it “fooled” by tricky stunts – even though he has been largely to blame for the public’s gullibility.’

  Certain stage antics were guaranteed to bring down the house: squealing high notes from Goodman’s clarinet or the horns; ensemble riffs, repeated to the point of exhaustion; a drum solo; indeed, any solo that could possibly be designated ‘hot’, regardless of its musical value; and, unfailingly, the technique that the Glenn Miller band would use over and again, whereby they played softer and softer … and then came blasting back at full volume for a final chorus. However much Goodman despised these tricks, he couldn’t avoid them, and his competitors displayed few scruples about exploiting and exhausting them all.

  An early hint of that hysteria was evident on a record which would seem increasingly prophetic. Late in 1929, Louis Armstrong returned to ‘St Louis Blues’, which he had first recorded with Bessie Smith in 1925. Not a man to treat any text as Holy Scripture, he toyed with it like a terrier with a rag doll – playing it as a tango, then a madcap romp, growling the lyrics, accentuating random syllables, and finally hitting repeated accents just as Bill Haley & His Comets would on ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ twenty-five years later. Within its three minutes, ‘St Louis Blues’ held the future of swing, R&B and rock ’n’ roll.

  Something about that song obviously appealed to iconoclasts. The following year, Cab Calloway scatted his way through ‘St Louis Blues’ with surrealist abandon, W. C. Handy’s song barely recognisable through the torrent of verbalised noise. While Louis Armstrong was the master of every mood, Calloway only knew one destination: party town. He billed himself as ‘The King of Hi-Di-Ho’. That was one of his vocal riffs from 1931’s ‘Minnie the Moocher’, a tour de force of jive-speak (he eventually issued several volumes of his Language of Jive dictionary) and vocal antics. By the end of that year, Cab was leading the hottest, fastest band in America, and no matter how shameless his material – ‘Reefer Man’, say, or ‘Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day’ – the party never ended. It was he, not Goodman, who first celebrated the ‘Jitter Bug’ in song, a full eighteen months before Benny’s band conquered California.

  For anyone seeking novelty and energy, the early 1930s was a miraculous era. The Boswell Sisters – leader Connee, Martha and Vet – recruited some of the hottest white musicians in jazz to support their daring rearrangements of popular tunes old and new, each delivered in tight sisterly harmony. (Sisters were in vogue: the Ponce Sisters’ 1932 rendition of ‘Fit as a Fiddle’ encapsulated the charm of this formula.) Their black vocal counterparts were the Mills Brothers, who capped their harmonies with imitations of jazz instruments. Their 1931 recording of ‘Tiger Rag’ (with its refrain of ‘hold that tiger’) showcased their almost preternatural ability to conjure up the sound of horns and upright bass with voices alone. Gene Austin steered pop closer to the boogie-woogie rhythm with his playful ‘Please Don’t Talk About Me’; Fred Astaire, as sure-footed before a microphone as on a ballroom floor, impersonated a German (‘I love her great big bosoms’) on ‘I Love Louisa’ and introduced Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’; Duke Ellington extended the harmonic and structural range of jazz with ‘Creole Rhapsody’ and ‘Limehouse Blues’; and Mae West extended anything she could lay her hands on with 1933’s ‘A Guy What Takes His Time’, arguably the rudest, most lubricious hit record to emerge from the first half of the twentieth century.

  An entirely different taste of the forbidden arrived in New York from Latin America and the Caribbean. Increasing numbers of Puerto Ricans and Cubans had taken up residence in the city, and the daily newspaper La Prensa carried regular ads for visiting bands. In 1930, midtown Manhattan played host to a series of Cuban outfits who expected to play only to their compadres, but Don Justo Azpiazu’s orchestra from Havana, starring vocalist Antonio Machin (‘the Cuban Rudy Vallee’), caught the attention of white journalists. Billboard magazine complained that Machin ‘does two numbers23, one as a peanut vendor, and a waste of good time as far as we were concerned’. But his ‘Peanut Vendor’ song, a familiar piece of showmanship in Cuba, became a national hit, especially once it had been purloined by jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Red Nichols.

  So America was formally introduced to the rumba (often ‘rhumba’ in English) – which was both a Cuban genre involving dance, percussion and topical lyrics; and, adapted for white tastes, another name for the Cuban dance rhythm more accurately known as the bolero-son. ‘Peanut Vendor’ fell into the latter category (even if musicologists might more exactly describe it as a son-pregón). This multiplicity of rhythms reflected the equally rich make-up of Cuban music, which boasted its danzón bands (sweet and hot, like American jazz units) playing four-section compositions and variations on European classical themes; the tango, imported from Argentina; the bolero, a romantic vocal/guitar style; and the son, a working-class, often satirical blend of music and dance which from 1920 onwards started to exhibit a jazz influence. All of this was concentrated into an island much smaller than Florida, which had endured regular occupation by US marines, and was now a holiday destination for rich Americans. Dance bands (white only) regularly played the Havana hotels; in return, Cuban bandleaders set up home in New York, often as illegal immigrants.

  A second Cuban hit, ‘Siboney’, reached America in 1931, albeit sung by Alfredo Brito from the Dominican Republic: such distinctions were too fine for the US audience, and white listeners registered all music from south of its borders as ‘Latin’. The most successful of all the Latin imports to America in the 1930s was Xavier Cugat, a Spanish violinist who led a band in Havana, and offered carefully Americanised versions of Cuban tunes (and vice versa). Cole Porter wrote ‘Begin the Beguine’ in his honour, and Cugat’s tight arrangements offered an orderly pastiche of ‘Latin’ music which any American or European could understand. To complete the circle of influences, Chick Bullock’s white American band concocted a loping rhythm on 1932’s ‘Underneath the Harlem Moon’ which would reappear more than twenty years later in Jamaica’s ska sound. In the musical melange of the 1930s, no style retained its purity for long.

  Amidst this jumble of rhythms, it is not surprising that musicians did not always realise what they had found. In 1931, two of the most successful bandleaders of the swing era, Glenn Miller and Jimmy Dorsey, were learning their trade in Red Nichols’s band when they recorded ‘Fan It’, a twelve-bar blues romp. Banal it may have been, but it was also an uncanny forerunner of both the jump blues style favoured by black musicians in the 1940s, and its direct descendant, big-band rock ’n’ roll. Louis Armstrong came closest to exploring this opened vein, with ‘Hobo You Can’t Ride This Train’, which built on a tune that was already a jazz standard, ‘Tiger Rag’. (By contrast, the Boswell Sisters’ ‘Rock and Roll’ from 1934 was neither a proto-rock tune nor an exploration of sexuality, but merely a novelty dance item.) While Red Nichols pioneered two genres, Duke Ellington christened another with ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’. Suddenly the future was visible everywhere, from the self-referential postmodernism of Louis Armstrong’s ‘I Got Rhythm’ to 1932’s dance medleys from Broadway shows, pre-empting the likes of Stars on 45 and Jive Bunny by half a century.

  Swing delayed its arrival for another year or two, as if anxious for the world to catch up. There was a flurry of riffing at the start of 1934, which must have provoked ensemble dancing across America, to
the sound of Ben Pollack’s ‘Got the Jitters’, Claude Hopkins’s ‘Washington Squabble’ and Benny Goodman’s ‘Riffin’ the Scotch’. The last of these featured a supremely elegant and relaxed vocal debut from the 18-year-old Billie Holiday. Chick Webb contributed an enduring swing anthem later that year with ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy’, his soloists audibly divided between those who liked it hot and those who preferred a more tepid baptism. But it was left to Benny Goodman to pull America irreversibly into the new age with ‘Bugle Call Rag’ – blaring brass riffs, boogie bass runs, a solid backbeat, everything that drove the kids wild in Oakland the following year and set the jitterbuggers on their frenzied passage along the aisles of the Paramount.

  Goodman may have been the pioneer (among the white bands) and populariser of swing, but hundreds of big bands operated across the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The most notable, led by warring brothers Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Glen Gray (fronting the Casa Loma Orchestra) and Artie Shaw, each had loyal and combative followings amongst teenagers – though polls of American students throughout the swing era regularly documented their educated taste for sweeter, more melodic fare. Meanwhile, there were black bands, led by Count Basie (briefly with Billie Holiday as featured vocalist), Chick Webb (with the young Ella Fitzgerald in tow), Erskine Hawkins, and Duke Ellington, for whom swing was already second nature.