by Degen Pener
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 1999 by Degen Pener
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Hachette Book Group
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First eBook Edition: June 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-07667-8
Contents
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1: The Golden Era of Swing
CHAPTER 2: The Rebirth of Swing
CHAPTER 3: What makes the Lindy Really Hop
CHAPTER 4: The Legends of Swing
CHAPTER 5: The Most Swinging New Bands
CHAPTER 6: From the Andrews Sisters to Zoot Suits: The Guy’ and Dolls’ to Guide to Retro Style
CHAPTER 7: A night on the Town: The City-by-City Guide
APPENDIX: Further Information
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To the memory of my own Louis,
my grandfather Herman Louis Dammerman,
and for Richard Anderson
FOREWORD
What do I love about swing? I love the music, the history, and the legacy the legends have left for us to learn from. It’s romantic, it’s powerful, and no other music I know of can move so many people. The bottom line is that it’s American music and it’s our heritage. It’s not hype or a fashion statement, it’s jazz music. It’s as much Satchmo, Duke, and Krupa as it is Dizzy, Bird, and Miles, and all I know is that when it’s done right, IT SWINGS.
With the rebirth of, or newfound interest in, swing music, you have a new batch of lions trying to make their mark on this music. I know my influences range from the aforementioned, but also everything since, from the Beatles to Black Flag. In my opinion, no great musical experience repeats itself, it moves on. It’s about the music and the moment. Everything else is secondary.
What’s exciting about this moment right now is that all types of people are being turned on to this music. Bands like us, and a handful of others, did it the old-fashioned way by building a nationwide following from the grassroots level. We decided we would go out and win over every person, one at a time. We put on high-energy shows and toured relentlessly: the fans, they appreciate that. They also know these bands aren’t a bunch of prefabbed groups that have been put together by some entertainment company creating the next best thing.
Because the music is connected to dancing, each city has its own interesting scene. I love to watch the dancers from night to night wherever we go; they are incredible. In some cities swing has just gotten going and it’s wild, there’s so much new uninhibited energy. In cities that have been doing it for a while, you see some of the best, most intense dancing anywhere. That is one thing that this music has brought back. Couples are dancing together and actually working off each other again. It’s been over twenty-five years since people have gotten together like this.
I also like to see that people are now dressing up for these events. Women are wearing beautiful dresses, and guys are taking pride in what they are wearing. It’s very romantic, and it’s all just a part of the show. If you come to dance, you’ll be swinging to some of the best live music that’s out there today. If you come to be entertained, it’s one hundred percent. Watch the dancers and they will blow your mind. Watch the band and you’ll be tapping your toes and singing along for a week.
When Big Bad Voodoo Daddy emerged almost a decade ago, people didn’t know what to think of us. All they knew was they were having a great time and the music was exciting and fun. Well, not much has changed since then, and in the next couple of years the new bands are going to prove what they are really made of. I think people will fall in love with this music more now than ever before.
—SCOTTY MORRIS, lead singer, songwriter, and founder of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
INTRODUCTION
At a remarkable event held on May 26, 1999, thousands of dancers, musicians, and lovers of all things swing gathered at New York’s Roseland Ballroom to celebrate the birthday of a living legend. On that night, Frankie Manning—the original choreographer of the most famous and thrilling troupe of swing dancers of all time, Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers—turned eighty-five years old. Friends and strangers from around the world partnered up and hopped and spun to the music of the veteran Count Basie Orchestra and the neoswing George Gee Orchestra. Brilliant zoot suits, sharp fedoras, classy rayon dresses, and sweet gardenias dotted the crowd. From teenage Lindy Hoppers to longtime fans such as Bette Midler, they all came to fete Manning, the man who invented the Lindy Hop’s outrageous air steps all the way back in the thirties. The dancer who blew away the room night after night at Harlem’s famous Savoy Ballroom. And an entertainer who once traveled the world turning people on to the Lindy. Manning—whose dance card was filled that night (eighty-five women danced with him, one for every year of his life)—seemed more vibrant and alive than many people half his age as he soft-shoed the night away. For a few magical hours, it felt as though the swing era had never ended.
Of course, it had. After most of the big bands disbanded in the late forties and partner dancing later fell by the wayside, Manning’s career faded too. For thirty years he worked at the post office in New York. But Manning, like swing, was merely dormant. In the 1980s and 1990s, dancers and musicians discovered swing all over again. People from Sweden to London and from New York to California, caught up in an inexplicable wave of synchronicity, began learning how to dance the Lindy as it was done back at the Savoy. Musicians started reviving the sounds of Louis Jordan, Louis Prima, and Basie. And these new swing lovers tracked down Manning and gave him a beautiful gift: a second career as a dancer. Now he travels nonstop once again, teaching the Lindy Hop, inspiring crowds wherever he goes, and living and breathing the music that keeps him so young.
Today, whether it’s a party as grand as Manning’s birthday do or a dance at the local club, swing nights are back everywhere. Classes at dance studios are filled beyond capacity. Longing for a dash of glamour in their lives, people are dressing up in the timeless looks of the forties. Guys and dolls are touching each other on the dance floor. Most important, swing music is once again what it was created for: songs to dance to and not just listen to.
This book is meant as an introduction to the world of swing and its incredible rebirth. Inside you’ll discover how the music and dance originally came to be and who the people were that brought it back. You’ll learn all about the Lindy, from its moves to what makes it so much fun. You’ll meet the singers and musicians, both old and new, who swing the smoothest, croon the sweetest, and even rock the hardest, plus find out what each artist’s best albums are. There’s an extensive guide to shopping for the most stylin’ fashions of the thirties and forties. Finally, there’s a city-by-city listing of the top dance spots, the best dance instructors, and the most up-to-date on-line events calendars across the country and even abroad. Whether you’ve always loved this music and dance but felt you didn’t quite fit in or you’re finding out about swing for the first time, you’ll find that there are now hundreds of places to enjoy it and meet like-minded fans, from Singapore to Dayton and from Saskatchewan to Dallas.
While writing this book, the question I was constantly asked was why did swing come back? The answer is quite simple. Swing ended prematurely. The peak years of the original era lasted from 1935 to 1945, just ten years. As a friend of mine, musician Michael Kroll, observed recently, there have been so many musical
movements in the twentieth century, and we’ve moved on so quickly from one to another, that not all of them have been completely explored. “Did swing really have its full chance to expand upon itself before rock ’n’ roll took it somewhere else? Maybe it just wasn’t finished,” says Max Young, co-owner of San Francisco’s Hi-Ball Lounge. After years of being considered old-fashioned, even schmaltzy, swing has been rescued from the nostalgia dustbin. “It’s about affirming what has come before,” says Rob Gibson, executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. “We’re saying that was good, let’s build on that.”
With the swing revival, the music and the dance that have been called America’s most important contributions to the world are taking their proper place in our culture. We are owning our heritage. In the process, we are also discovering that the real roots of swing are as fresh and compelling and full of life as ever, and that the music and dance can grow and inspire new artistic creation. “The question isn’t why did it come back. The anomaly is that it ever went away,” says Bill Elliott, founder of the neoswing Bill Elliott Orchestra. But that’s the beauty of swing. It’s always capable of swinging back.
The marquee of the elegant Savoy Ballroom, also known as the “Home of Happy Feet.” (ARCHIVE PHOTOS)
CHAPTER 1
The Golden Era of Swing
Trying to define the term swing is as difficult as attempting to do an air step at your first dance class. Even the great Louis Armstrong was silent on the subject. “They asked him, ‘What is swing?’ and he thought for a while and said, ‘If you don’t know, don’t mess with it,’“ recalls jazz legend Lionel Hampton, who first played with Armstrong back in 1930. Another swing innovator, Benny Goodman, the so-called King of Swing, admitted that describing the music left him just as flummoxed. Swing, he once said, “is as difficult to explain as the Mona Lisa’s smile or the nutty hats women wear—but just as stimulating. It remains something you take 5,000 words to explain then leaves you wondering what it is.” Now, more than fifty years after the movement first started, swing is more of a muddled concept than ever. Does swing equal jazz? Is swing the same as big band music? Is swing exclusively a dance music? And is there any such thing as pure swing? Contrary to many people’s assumptions, the most accurate answer to each of those questions is no.
In true technical terms, swing isn’t a particular type of music at all. It’s a way of playing music, the manner in which a beat moves, something you can hear and feel and, best of all, do. As bandleader Artie Shaw has said, “Swing is a verb, not an adjective.… All jazz music swings. It has to. If it doesn’t swing, it’s nothing.” Unlike the finality expressed in a pounding rock beat, each pulse of truly swinging music contains in it an open, joyous space of possibility, even if the song is a hard-luck blues tune. “Jazz or swing—it’s all the same as long as it has that beat,” Ella Fitzgerald once said. “Just about any kind of music can swing,” says Johnny Coppola, a trumpeter once in the bands of swingers Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman, and Stan Kenton. “A good marching band can swing. Bach played right can swing.”
Now let’s swing this all up a bit. Swing, of course, is hardly just a musical concept. It was also a sweeping, complex movement that enchanted and entertained America during two of the country’s periods of greatest trial, the Depression and World War II. Looked at historically, swing was jazz music played by big bands primarily for dancing. At its peak in the late thirties, it was a readily identifiable kind of music, with such glorious standards as Count Basie’s “One O’clock Jump,” Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” coming as close as possible to a pure concept of swing. It was at once some of the hottest, most amazing jazz ever created and also the first and only form of jazz to be embraced by a mass audience. At the heart of it was the close relationship between the music and the dancing. This wasn’t music played in a concert hall to be passively appreciated. Every night, from coast to coast, thousands of deliriously transported couples swung and jitterbugged and swayed the evening away.
The phenomenon of swing took on deeper meanings as well. Swing was as important for its cultural resonance as it was for its musical achievement. In a time of brutal racism, swing was a model, if never perfect in practice, of harmony and equality between black and white musicians. To some observers, it was the melting pot in action; to others, it was America’s singular contribution to world culture. While it soared to artistic heights, it also remained profoundly populist. The average Jack and Jill felt included in its expansive energy. The Lindy Hop, the dance that went hand in partner’s hand with the music, was proclaimed an American folk dance. A product of the New Deal years, it was even seen as a model of the pluralistic democratic ideas of the decade. When America went to war, the already strong symbolism of swing became magnified; it came to be seen as representative of the best things the country had to offer. For the boys overseas, it was a major force in defining what they were fighting for.
So how did a bunch of three-minute songs end up with so much cultural weight attached to them? To find out, you need to start all the way at the beginning. The roots of swing go back to the very birth of jazz.
STIRRING THE POT IN NEW ORLEANS
Although early innovator Jelly Roll Morton once claimed to have created jazz, no one person can take credit for inventing this music. But one city, New Orleans, does deserve that distinction. During the 1800s, this overheated city on the Mississippi was by all accounts a sort of mosh pit of cultures, from French and Spanish to African and Caribbean to English and Irish. And in the midst of this modern-day Babel, the city’s black population began to forge a new language that would unite two great musical traditions. At the time, the sounds of Africa and of Europe couldn’t have seemed more antithetical. But the child of the two—at first a bastard in the eyes of white America, but later, during the swing era, a favorite son—would grow up to be many times the sum of its parts.
According to Ted Gioia’s insightful History of Jazz, African music, though itself varied, is built on a number of shared characteristics, all of which would shape jazz and in turn swing. These include call-and-response patterns, in which a leader sings or plays a line and is answered back by the group; the playing of instruments in a style that resembles the sound of human voices; emphasis on improvisation; and most important, an astonishing array of complex rhythm patterns that were often layered one on top of another. To this mix were added strong European elements. Blacks in America began composing and writing down music that had only been played by ear. They began fitting their music into the Western form of the short popular song and taking inspiration from the rich melodic heritage of Europe.
How these two forms of music actually came together in nineteenth-century New Orleans isn’t documented. There are no written and certainly no recorded examples of their creations. What is known is that New Orleans, unlike the rest of America, took a much more tolerant attitude toward African music. In most other places, it wasn’t allowed to be played at all, but in pre-Civil War New Orleans slaves regularly held dances in the city’s Congo Square. These were “an actual transfer of totally African ritual,” writes Gioia, “to the native soil of the New World.”
When Congo Square met Giuseppe Verdi (New Orleans had the first opera house in America), the results were potent. As Lionel Hampton concludes, “The plantation bosses would bring musicians over to perform from England and France, and the slaves would listen to what they played from outside the window. They changed it from the opera. When you hear a famous song like ‘High Society,’ it’s a good copy of Rigoletto. Black workers heard these songs and they were putting it in swing time. And it came from the plantations up through the streets of New Orleans to the cafés of New Orleans.”
By the turn of the century, jazz—even if it wasn’t yet called jazz—had coalesced into a distinct sound in the Big Easy. Inventing outside of musical academies, the small New Orleans combos celebrated freedom of expression and spontaneous creativity. Taking a
cue from the new and closely related music of ragtime, the rhythm of jazz became “ragged” or syncopated, giving emphasis to beats that were not traditionally stressed. Even the way that such early jazz musicians as Buddy Bolden, Kid Ory, King Oliver, Nick LaRocca, and Jelly Roll Morton played their instruments was original. They put an emotionalism and edge into the very sound of the notes themselves. Classical European musicians had generally attempted to produce the purest tones possible with their instruments. Instead, as musician Richard Hadlock remembered, New Orleans clarinetist and sax giant Sidney Bechet exhorted him to play one note in as many ways as he could. Bechet, according to Hadlock, told him to “growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. That’s how you express your feelings in this music. It’s like talking.”
In turn, jazz inspired people to sing differently. Like instruments, voices also began to sound more like they were talking. Instead of vocalizing right on the beat, singers got hep to the new rhythmic devices of jazz and started to play around with how they phrased lyrics.
And then there was the blues. Developing around the same time as jazz and reaching an early popular peak in the twenties with such singers as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, this powerful music exerted an immeasurable influence on jazz. Named for the music’s blue notes, which don’t fit into the more precise European conceptions of do-re-mi, the blues contributed its wonderfully nuanced tone and distinctive attitude of strength in the face of adversity to jazz. Meanwhile, jazz provided a new avenue for the blues, working it into more complex and up-tempo arrangements. These myriad influences and developments first came to national attention after 1917, when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a group of white musicians, made the first jazz recording. They were soon followed by influential records from the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band, which introduced the man who would effect a cataclysmic change in jazz, Louis Armstrong. (For more detailed biographical information on Armstrong and other major jazz artists whose names are in bold print, see chapter 4.)