The Swing Book

by Degen Pener

  THE SOLO STEPS FORWARD

  Before Armstrong, the New Orleans bands were small groups that sought to hone a collective sound. As Ted Gioia writes, “The New Orleans pioneers created a music in which the group was primary, in which each instrument was expected to play a certain role, not assert its independence.” But as anyone who’s ever heard Armstrong knows, keeping a lid on this individual would have been impossible. With his hugely resonant warm voice, clarion trumpet calls, and larger-than-life personality, Armstrong was poised to dominate the American musical landscape as perhaps the most important singer and musician of the twentieth century.

  While he was never a major bandleader, Armstrong deserves to be called the true father of swing music. After leaving New Orleans for Chicago in 1922—his journey was part of a great migration of musicians and blacks in general who left the South for better job opportunities in the North—Armstrong began to assert a new role for jazz musicians. On a series of legendary recordings begun in 1925 with groups known as the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, he overthrew the ensemble ethos of New Orleans by blowing and improvising the hottest solos ever. These records, considered the most historically significant in jazz, show Armstrong at his most wildly inventive. On such songs as “Potato Head Blues” and “Wild Man Blues” he broke free of jazz conventions, letting loose a panoply of new melodies and rhythmic ideas. But his genius wasn’t only at creating breathtakingly elaborate riffs. There was logic and strength and structure behind his every flight. On one song, “Heebie Jeebies,” recorded in 1926, Armstrong scats for the first time on record, giving to voice the same improvisational space enjoyed by a musical instrument.

  None of this is to say that Armstrong was the only one making the solo supreme. Such jazz greats as cornetist Bix Biederbecke, clarinetists Frank Teschemacher and Pee Wee Russell, and trombonist Jack Teagarden were also working magic in Chicago at the same time. But Armstrong’s influence on swing would prove the most decisive. Every solo you’ll ever hear, on anything from Benny Goodman to Count Basie to Louis Jordan, owes a debt to the man that music writer Albert Murray has called the Prometheus of jazz.

  Once the solo had come into its own, all that needed to happen was for it to find a home. The final step in the birth of swing was the creation of the big band.

  THE BIGGER, BETTER BAND

  Fletcher Henderson, the man credited with putting together the first swing big band, got his first gig in 1923 at a spot in New York called the Club Alabam, and within a year he had hired Armstrong. While the New Orleans trumpeter wasn’t a favorite of Henderson’s, Armstrong and his already magnificent solo skills had a profound effect on others in the band, most notably saxophonist Coleman Hawkins (who would turn the then-lowly sax into a star player) and arranger Don Redman. Where Redman excelled was in adapting the call-and-response of jazz to a full orchestra. He would set entire sections against each other, a regiment of reeds giving a shout-out and a platoon of brass answering back. The band music became richer, denser, and more textured, a sea of sound that was no mere backdrop for the new hot solo. Redman, living in New York, was also attuned to the popular music of the Big Apple, bringing in more influences from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley than had previously been present in jazz. (However, it should be noted that recent scholarship is challenging Henderson’s primacy in this area. Richard Sudhalter in his 1999 book Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz 1915–1945 argues that the Henderson band was only one of a number of bands effecting these changes during the twenties. White bands such as those of Jean Goldkette, which included Bix Biederbecke as a soloist, and Ben Pollack, which had Benny Goodman, were evolving in similar ways.)

  Whoever deserves the most honor, one thing is clear: the melding of the improvised solo with the richly orchestrated dance band was the key to making swing happen. And not only did the sound surpass anything that had come before it but also the new swing bands began to be seen as a representation of the country’s political ideals. Hot soloists within big bands: here was an artistic model for individual freedom of expression within the context of a larger group. As Goodman once said, swing “has the spirit of American democracy in it.”

  THE SWING OF HARLEM

  While this late-twenties jazz sounded like what we now recognize as swing, it still wasn’t called swing. It was jazz, plain and simple. In fact, the swing era itself had yet to be ushered in. During the early thirties, before swing reached its mass mainstream level, it flourished in smaller pockets around the country while the so-called sweeter and less musically challenging bands like those of Guy Lombardo and Wayne King were tops nationwide. Important bands keeping the flame of hot jazz alive included the Earl Hines Orchestra in Chicago; the Casa Loma Orchestra, a collective of white musicians that built a following on college campuses; and Kansas City’s Bennie Moten band (Count Basie’s early home), which recorded the seminal tune “Moten Swing” in 1932.

  But the hardest-swinging jazz bands were concentrated in one place above all others. Harlem at this time was a hothouse of creative activity and musical one-upmanship. Chick Webb held court at the Savoy, where he first introduced Ella Fitzgerald to the world as a professional singer. His competition included the outrageous Cab Calloway and the powerful ensembles of Jimmie Lunceford and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, featuring the arrangements of Don Redman. In tandem with the intellectual and literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, jazz in Harlem was evolving fast and furiously. This was where the showy piano playing known as Harlem stride had flowered in the early twenties, with innovators such as James P. Johnson and the larger-than-life Fats Waller creating a bridge from the more jagged ragtime piano into the more fluid keyboard style of swing. It was a place of rent parties (music shindigs held near the end of the month to help pay the rent), all-night cutting contests (in which musicians would go at it for hours trying to top each other), and the achievement of a new level of sophistication both in the music and in the presentation of jazz.

  No one put jazz in a tuxedo, both literally and figuratively, quite like Duke Ellington. Urbane, brilliant, the poet laureate of swing, Ellington rose to prominence after securing a long-term gig at the segregated Cotton Club in 1927. “Black people entertained at the Cotton Club, but you could not go into the Cotton Club. It was in the heart of Harlem and we couldn’t go in,” says Lindy Hop pioneer Norma Miller. At the club, however, Ellington was one part of an amazing floor show, complete with tap dancing, burlesque-style dancing (one move was called the Harlem River Quiver), and vaudeville numbers. Ellington’s exotic music—known as “jungle music” at the time—fit perfectly into the high-energy environment. But in addition to honing his skills as a great entertainer, Ellington was also creating some of his most enduring classics, songs like “Creole Love Call,” “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Solitude,” and “In a Sentimental Mood,” which reached the soul through new and unexpected ways. In these early days, Ellington began creating jazz that could be appreciated as high art. Oh, and he also created a little number during this period called “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” The movement never had an anthem that said it so well.

  Duke Ellington mixes it up with Lionel Hampton.

  (ARCHIVE PHOTOS/METRONOME)

  THE BIRTH OF THE LINDY HOP

  In addition to the Cotton Club, Harlem in the early thirties was literally crawling with raging night spots. There was the Apollo, with its hard-fought amateur contests; Minton’s, an after-hours joint; and Connie’s Inn, where Waller first staged his famous Hot Chocolates show featuring the song “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” But no place compared to the one and only Savoy Ballroom. What was said of New York City was doubly true at the Savoy: If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere.

  Opened on March 12, 1926, and situated just a block from the Cotton Club, the Savoy will go down in history for making the Lindy Hop the most famous, cherished, wildest, and enjoyable dance in America. Those who were t
here at the time still get deliriously misty remembering it. What was the Savoy like? Enormous and elegant, it took up an entire city block on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets in Harlem. There were two bandstands set up, so when the house band took a break, a visiting orchestra was ready to start blowing—that way the dancing never let up. Decorated in gold and blue with multicolored spotlights, it had an enormous 50-by-250-foot hardwood dance floor that had to be replaced every three years because of sheer wear and tear. Significantly, it was also perhaps the first integrated dance hall in the country. “The Savoy was practically half white and half black,” recalls premier Savoy Lindy Hopper Frankie Manning. “The only thing they wanted to do at the Savoy was dance. They didn’t care what color you were, all they wanted to know was, ‘Can you dance?’”

  The Lindy, of course, wasn’t discovered at the Savoy. It was danced throughout Harlem in the twenties and soon began spreading around the country—despite overwrought concerns that the dance was too sexual. But fueled by the sounds of the Savoy’s fast and furious Chick Webb band, the dancers there engaged in all-out competitions that pushed the Lindy to ever greater heights of creativity and energy. The dance developed out of several other popular dances, such as the Charleston, the two-step, and the Texas Tommy. The Lindy’s innovation, however, was the swingout, or breakaway, in which dance partners would temporarily drop arm contact and create their own moves. The breakaway gave the dancers as much room to improvise as the musicians now had. No other previous dance had provided such space for personal expression. And early Lindy fanatics at the Savoy took the new style and ran with it. Led by such dancers as Shorty George Snowden, Big Bea, Leroy “Stretch” Jones, Little Bea, and George “Twistmouth” Ganaway, they began both refining and pushing the limits of the Lindy. The five-foot two-inch Snowden invented a bent-knee, low-to-the-ground move that became so famous that Count Basie immortalized it in the song “Shorty George.” Jones created the twist steps for followers as the alternative to the Lindy’s back step. And the dance began to take on its characteristic African-American style. Loose in the legs and knees, the Lindy Hoppers flowed across the floor with an unstoppable horizontal momentum.

  It was also at the Savoy that the dance was christened, in fittingly improvised fashion. Not long after Charles Lindbergh completed his inspiring solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927—making the once formidable distance seem just a hop over the ocean in the popular imagination—a reporter at the ballroom asked Snowden what he was doing. Not having a name for the dance yet, Snowden made one up, dubbing it “the Lindy Hop.” One reason the name stuck was that a new generation of dancers was on the rise. This younger group, soon to be dubbed Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, would take their brand of Lindy out of the Savoy and around the world.

  The youngsters, who took over as the club’s premier dancers in the early thirties, drew their inspiration, and a fair share of moves, from the older innovators. “We copied what we saw them do,” recalls Norma Miller, who started her dancing career at the Savoy. Miller was one of a group, reaching eighty people at its peak, who were scouted, hand-picked, and pushed to excel by Herbert White, known as Whitey for the streak in his hair. A former bouncer at the Savoy, White started choosing the best dancers he saw on the floor—the pros congregated in a part of the club called the Cat’s Corner—and forming them into a troupe. Today the names of these swing-dance pioneers—Frankie Manning, Willamae and Billy Ricker, Naomi Wallace, Leon James, Al Minns, and Norma Miller, among others—are repeated from dancer to dancer with awed reverence. But back then, Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers were just a bunch of kids out to make their names, have a ball, and simply see what they had in ’em. “Those were the beginning days of the Lindy Hop, everything that was created was new. There were no rules. We made it up. The only rule was: If it looks good, do it. If it don’t, throw it out,” says Manning. (For the story of Manning’s rediscovery by swing revivalists, see chapter 2.)

  Back in the thirties, Manning was the chief choreographer of the group, and the smoothest cat at the Savoy. “When he’s just standing still, Frankie is swinging. He doesn’t have to do one thing with his muscles and you know he’s feeling it,” says jazz singer Ann Hampton Callaway, star of the new musical The Original Broadway Swing. But Frankie’s contribution involved much more than just standing around. He was the first to choreograph ensemble Lindy numbers. And sometime around 1936 he made his lasting mark on the dance, creating the aerial, the move that turned the Lindy Hop into a showstopper. Never before had anyone thought to throw his partner in the air, twirl her around, and catch her again. And on top of that do it all in time to the music as a true dance step. “The idea came to me because of a famous step that Shorty Snowden and his partner Big Bea used to do,” recalls Manning. “Now, she was six feet tall and she would take Shorty on her back and walk off the stage, and it always tore the house up. So I got the idea that I wanted to make a step out of it, not just a lift. I went to my partner Frieda Washington and told her. And she said, ‘I ain’t picking you up on my back. Forget that!’ And I said, ‘That’s not what I want. What I want to do is pick you up on my back, and not just for you to lay there, but to roll over and come down in front of me. We’ll do it to the music.’ Just picture this: something you’ve never seen, you don’t know how to do, your partner doesn’t know how to do it either. She said, ‘Yeah, OK.’”

  With Manning leading the way, Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers brought the dance and their wildly distinctive way of doing it to an ever expanding and thoroughly wowed public. White, according to Norma Miller, “wanted to be the man to make the Lindy Hop a famous and accepted art form.” The first step on the road to the Lindy’s greatness began in 1935 when White entered his dancers in New York’s first annual Harvest Moon Championship, a city-wide competition that put the Lindy side by side with such traditional dances as the fox trot, rhumba, waltz, and tango. “It was the biggest dance contest ever held in America and of course it was important to us,” wrote Miller in her memoir, Swingin’ at the Savoy. “It was the first time the Lindy Hop was in a dance competition. It was the only black entry in the contest and we were very proud of that.” The Savoy dancers took first, second, and third prizes in the Lindy section. “When we got up on the dance floor, we kicked ass and it became such a popular dance it couldn’t be denied,” recalled Miller. From there, Whitey’s troupe traveled around the world, touring Europe and South America, performing at the New York World’s Fair and on Broadway, at the Cotton Club and the Moulin Rouge. They even met the queen of England. Most important, they were in movies, an important record of the dance that would live to inspire a new generation of dancers in the eighties and nineties. Even to this day, people say that the troupe’s performance in the film Hellzapoppin’ has never been topped.

  In 1943 the Lindy was honored by its own cover story in Life magazine, which called it “a true national folk dance.” But if Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, and the rest of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers had ever been given the full acknowledgment they deserve for helping make that happen, they’d be as famous today as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Unfortunately, at the spot where the Savoy once stood (it closed in 1958), there’s not even a plaque mentioning the wellspring of dancing genius that was unleashed there.

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE SWING ERA

  While you wouldn’t know it from all the activity in Harlem in the early thirties, jazz enthusiasts at the time were terribly worried that the music was in decline. With the Depression gripping the nation, record sales fell from precrash totals of 104 million a year to just 6 million 78s sold in 1932. According to David Erenberg’s incisive Swingin’ the Dream, sales of record players plummeted 90 percent after 1929. The cash-strapped public also began to feel that the music itself was perhaps too decadent during such a period of nationwide want. As one critic wrote at the time, “The public was in no mood for the reckless promptings of jazz.” In late 1934 Fletcher Henderson went bankrupt. Saxophonist Sidney Bechet opened a dry-cleaning establishment
to help ride out the dry spell. It was sweet crooners like Bing Crosby who ruled the airwaves.

  As the country’s economic prospects began to rise under the policies of the New Deal, though, the stage was set for swing’s breakthrough into the mainstream of America. And the man who would bring it to mass popularity was Benny Goodman.

  In some ways, Goodman was an unlikely man for the role. He wasn’t a showman. He looked like a square. As portrayed in The Benny Goodman Story by Steve Allen, he was always fumbling for words. But even before his rise to fame, Goodman played the clarinet with a passionate excitement and clear brightness that marked him as a one-of-a-kind talent. Born to a poor Jewish family in Chicago, and developing an early love of jazz, Goodman toured with the prominent Ben Pollack band during the late 1920s. But despite some early success after moving to New York, by 1933 he was reduced to one low-paying radio gig. According to Erenberg, Goodman no longer saw a “future for jazz and contemplated forming a society orchestra.” What drew Goodman back to playing real jazz? Credit the influence of his good friend and supporter John Hammond, an Upper East Side political leftist who was the most influential behind-the-scenes man in swing. In addition to promoting the careers of Count Basie, Billie Holiday, saxophonist Benny Carter, and Lionel Hampton, among others, Hammond pushed Goodman to work with black musicians and singers, a step that helped reinvigorate the clarinetist. Beginning in 1933 Goodman recorded with Bessie Smith (it was her last studio session), Holiday (it was her first), and pianist Teddy Wilson, who would soon join Goodman’s path-breaking trio, the first high-profile integrated group in jazz. Said Goodman singer Helen Ward of these early years: “They were playing a brand of music nobody else had attempted with a white band at that time.”