The Swing Book

by Degen Pener

  Classic Songs: “Strange Fruit,” her politically charged 1939 antilynching song; “God Bless the Child,” her own composition; “I Must Have That Man” and “Summertime,” great pairings with pianist Teddy Wilson; and, of course, the unlucky-in-love singer’s signature lament, “Lover Man.”

  Swing Trivia: How did Holiday become known as “Lady Day”? As a teenager she worked in a sleazy Harlem club where waitresses often had to use their labia to pick up tip money. Holiday, to her credit, wouldn’t do it, so her coworkers began to mockingly call her “Lady.” Later, Lester Young, picking up on her last name, added “Day.”

  Lady Day sings the blues.(FRANK DRIGGS/CORBIS-BETTMANN)

  CD Pick: If you can’t afford the nine-CD collection, The Quintessential Billie Holiday (Columbia), buy the two-CD set, The Complete Decca Recording (GRP), an easy introduction. With material recorded from the mid- to late forties, it catches Holiday at the peak of her powers. By contrast, her later recordings, done with great sidemen but wrecked pipes, have been described by Rolling Stone as “acid splashed against velvet.”

  Nat King Cole

  He seemed just like the “stardust” of one of his signature hits, pure and brilliant and like a gift from another galaxy. In fact, Cole’s genius was that his voice could inhabit so much space and yet at the same time never lose a bit of its warmth. But before he became known worldwide as a singer of jazz-inflected pop, Cole was one of the greatest piano players in swing. In 1937 he formed the Nat King Cole Trio, with original members Oscar Moore on guitar and Wesley Prince on bass, as purely “an instrumental group,” he once said. Putting his all into his exciting keyboard work, he considered singing completely secondary. He was, in fact, rather insecure about his vocal ability. But by the fifties the trio had broken up and the astounding rise of Cole as one of music’s most beloved vocalists continued until his untimely death, from lung cancer, at age forty-seven in 1965. Twenty-six years later his starry magic shone through once again on his daughter Nathalie’s uncanny duet with him, “Unforgettable.” Classic Songs: His first big hit, 1946’s “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” “Unforgettable,” “The Christmas Song,” “Mona Lisa,” and the novelty “Mr. Cole Won’t Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

  Swing Trivia: The trio was originally intended as a quartet. At one of their early gigs, they sat around waiting for their drummer to show up. According to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, he never did, and they decided to just do without.

  CD Pick: Now that Cole is once again appreciated for his instrumental prowess, Hit That Jive, Jack (MCA/Decca) is a must-have. By turns lightsome, then bluesy, it’s a great presentation of the trio’s work in the early forties.

  SIDEMEN FRONT AND CENTER

  To a degree that’s hard to imagine today, it was the sidemen, not the singers, who were the real focus of the true jazz fan’s admiration. Debates raged over who played the alto better. Were you a partisan of Johnny Hodges? Or of Benny Carter? What were your opinions of the relative merits of trumpeters Roy Eldridge, Bunny Berigan, Erskine Hawkins, and Harry “Sweets” Edison? And could you pick out a Jack Teagarden solo on trombone or a Barney Bigard riff on clarinet in an instant? Indeed, the swing era owes its greatness to the contributions of hundreds, even thousands, of instrumentalists, from the most obscure sideman in a territory band to the likes of pianists Teddy Wilson and Mary Lou Williams, drummer Louis Bellson, violinist Stuff Smith, bassist Milt Hinton, and vibraharpist Red Norvo, to name just a few. But there are three men who seem to stand above them all—this trio made the world think of the saxophone when it thinks of jazz. Just call them the three tenors.

  Coleman Hawkins

  The tenor sax was a plodding, clumsy bird of an instrument before the Hawk gave it new wings. Influenced by Louis Armstrong’s trumpet playing, Hawkins is credited with turning the tenor into a star with his passionate, aggressive style. A master of harmony, he joined Fletcher Henderson’s band way back in 1923 and stayed with the orchestra until 1934, but his greatest triumph came five years later. In a stunning 1939 performance, he recorded “Body and Soul,” taking listeners on a richly emotive three-minute journey. Hawkins, while embracing bop in the forties, set the swinging standard for every tenor sax player to come after him.

  Ben Webster

  While Webster’s warm, almost airy tone meshed seamlessly with the Duke’s tone-poem compositions, it took Ellington’s star soloist a long time to find his perfect match. Beginning in the late twenties, Webster jumped from band to band, playing for Andy Kirk, Benny Carter, Teddy Wilson, Fletcher Henderson, Bennie Moten, and both Cab and his sister Blanche Calloway. It wasn’t until 1940 that he joined Ellington’s orchestra full-time, but he quickly became the first star tenor player the band had ever had. In fact, his influence, along with that of bassist Jimmy Blanton, was so profound that Ellington’s group from this time is sometimes referred as the Blanton-Webster band. Excelling on ballads, Webster can best be heard on “Cotton Tail,” where his spirited tones flow like the sweetest honey.

  Lester Young

  Standing in cool contrast to the bolder and ballsier style of Hawkins, Young was a shining light in the Basie band from 1937 to 1940. With his high, nimble playing—some said he made the tenor sax sound almost like an alto—he left his mark on such classics as “Taxi War Dance” and “Lester Leaps In.” Without being a showman, Young was one of the heppest cats out there. Inventing his own slang, wearing his signature porkpie hat, and affecting an all-around mellow air, he became an early inspiration to the bebop players. He also displayed a particular affinity with singers, especially Billie Holiday, with whom he recorded such great songs as “All of Me” and “He’s Funny That Way.” After Young nicknamed her “Lady Day” (see Holiday’s bio above), she dubbed him “Prez,” short for President. His death inspired Charles Mingus to write the gut-wrenching elegy “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”

  EARLY R & B AND ROCK

  Neoswing’s post-big band era influences aren’t limited to Louis Jordan and Louis Prima. Swingers love to listen to original rockabilly and rock stars like Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins (who did “Blue Suede Shoes” before Elvis’s cover took off), “Be-Bop-A-Lula” heartthrob Gene Vincent, and even Bill Haley, the man behind “Rock Around the Clock.” “There’s been this really broad redefinition of swing,” says Lavay Smith pianist and arranger Chris Seibert, “so that it includes rockabilly and early rock ’n’ roll like Bill Haley and the Comets.” By the way, Haley, earlier in his career, played Western swing, another huge influence on the swing revival. Check out a greatest hits collection of Western swing giant Bob Wills’s work for an introduction to this smoothly swinging music. But the dominant force behind the swing revival remains the jump blues and early R&B sound, everything from Atlantic Records’ powerhouse Ruth Brown and “Good Rocking Tonight”’s Roy Brown to Ray Charles and Ike Turner (at least his stuff from before he met Tina). In addition to Jordan, here are three of the greatest in the genre.

  Wynonie Harris

  Working as a bartender and almost forgotten at the time of his death in 1969, Harris was one of the best-selling blues shouters of the postswing era. First a singer in Lucky Millinder’s band (an important swing-to-R&B transitional orchestra), Harris went solo in 1945, recording a string of R&B hits for such “race music” labels as Aladdin and King. Harris—who by all accounts lived as wildly as he sang—wasn’t afraid of taking double entrendre to the limit, singing about liquor, sex, and more sex. For an example, check out “Keep on Churnin’,” in which he exhorts his baby to do it til “the butter comes!”

  Classic Songs: The comic “Good Morning Judge” and “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well?” his big hit for Millinder.

  Swing Trivia: A prodigal spendthrift, Harris was known for entering bars and declaring, “Mr. Blues is back in town, and I have enough money to air-condition hell.”

  CD Pick: Rhino’s Bloodshot Eyes: The Best of Wynonie Harris includes eighteen of his best down-and-dirty numbers, plus
a shout-out duet with Big Joe Turner. Guaranteed to make you blush.

  The Treniers

  Founded by twin brothers Claude and Cliff Trenier, the Treniers are a hard-rocking, shout-out group from Alabama who’ve become the band to know within the hard-core swing set. Their new popularity owes a lot to the group’s longevity. The Treniers, who formed back in the forties, still perform (with original members brother Claude and sax man Don Hill) in casino lounges around the world. They got their start with swing big bands—Claude sang with Jimmie Lunceford for a while—but eventually became one of the most rousing early rock bands of their time. When the Treniers shout “Go! Go! Go!” you’d better be on your feet.

  Classic Songs: “Rockin’ Is Our Business,” which they sang in the Jayne Mansfield movie The Girl Can’t Help It, and “Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song),” their highest-charting number.

  Swing Trivia: Claude and Cliff made an inauspicious but satisfying debut while studying at Alabama State in Montgomery. “We’d go into Pope’s Luncheonette and sing with the jukebox and the people would give us hamburgers,” says Claude, who recently passed the eighty-year mark. “At one time we had ten hamburgers stacked up on the jukebox. We had five or six guys we hung out with and they’d say, ‘We’re hungry. Go in and sing a song and get some hamburgers.’”

  CD Pick:They Rock! They Roll! They Swing! (Epic/Legacy) is a terrific collection of greatest hits. True to their billing, half of the songs have the word rock in the title. The CD also includes the band’s off-color novelty number “Poon-Tang!” recorded in 1952. “We said ‘a poon is a hug, a tang is a kiss,’” remembers Claude. “We tried to clean it up. But they wouldn’t play it on the air at the time.” Go figure.

  Big Joe Turner

  Called the Boss of the Blues, Turner backed up that claim with his unstoppable freight-train voice during his influential sixty-year career. He came out of the wild and swinging jazz scene of 1920s Kansas City, where he met up with pianist extraordinaire Pete Johnson, with whom he helped popularize the all-over-the-key-board sound of boogie-woogie. Both R&B and rock ’n’ roll owe a tremendous debt to his powerful mixing of jazz and blues. For example, Ike Turner hit it big with “Rocket 88,” a song about the classic Olds, six years after Joe Turner recorded the original version “Rocket Boogie 88” in 1948. Sun Records’ Sam Phillips later hailed Ike’s hit as the first rock ’n’ roll record.

  Classic Songs: The boogie-woogie “Roll ’Em Pete,” one of his first breakthroughs, and “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (Bill Haley’s megahit was a cleaned-up version of this Turner tune).

  Swing Trivia: Turner got his start as a singing bartender at Kansas City’s Sunset Club. Before that he worked as a guide for a blind guitarist.

  CD Pick: It’s a tough choice between Boss of the Blues (Atlantic), with Johnson, which features great selections of the pair’s early hits, and Big Joe Turner: Greatest Hits (Atlantic Jazz), a solid sampling of Turner’s more rockin’ work.

  MORE BIG BANDS

  Fletcher Henderson: Henderson laid the foundation of swing with his influential band in the 1920s, is credited with sparking Benny Goodman’s breakthrough, and had the most awesome lineup of sidemen of any bandleader ever (with Louis Armstrong at the top of the list, followed closely by all three great tenor sax players, Hawkins, Webster, and Young). His famous arrangements, many put together by reedman Don Redman, include “Tozo,” “Henderson Stomp,” “Whiteman Stomp,” and, for Goodman, “Blues Skies” and “Christopher Columbus.” But huge commercial popularity always eluded Henderson, which some historians attribute to his failure to be a tough taskmaster, something Henderson himself copped to. “When I’m lucky enough to get them all on the bandstand, I’ve got the baddest-ass band in the world,” he once said.

  Fats Waller: A renowned showman, Waller established himself as a jazz giant in the preswing era of the 1920s. Born in 1904 in New York and dead of pneumonia in 1943, Waller got his start as a protégé of Harlem stride piano innovator James P. Johnson. He soon began to rival his mentor in ragtime virtuosity and wrote such enduring hits as “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” which he performed with trademark flamboyance, his nimble eyebrows always highlighting his mischief-making tone. Bandleader Bill Elliott recommends buying anything and everything Waller ever recorded, an approach that Fats would have approved. Anecdotes abound of Waller’s more-is-more lifestyle. Whether it’s to be believed that he could eat three chickens and three steaks in one sitting is another story.

  Charlie Barnet: Barnet proved that even Park Avenue could swing. A rich Yale dropout, the sax-playing Barnet formed his own big band in 1933 and struggled for a few years for acclaim. By the mid-thirties, however, Barnet—a devoted admirer of Ellington—began to really swing it. Soon Metronome magazine had dubbed his group “the blackest white band around.” Barnet’s biggest hit is “Cherokee,” a hard-swinging number that had a successful second life as a bop standard after Charlie Parker reworked it and renamed it “Ko-Ko.” But the band’s most entertaining choice of material came after the orchestra lost its arrangements, uniforms, and instruments in the fire that destroyed LA’s Palomar Ballroom in 1939. The first song the band played after regrouping was a tune called “We’re All Burnt Up.”

  Benny Carter: One of the true geniuses of jazz, Carter led his own bands throughout the late twenties and beyond; composed and arranged tunes for Henderson, Ellington and Goodman; and along with fellow musician Johnny Hodges, carved out the distinctive place of the alto sax in swing. His song “When the Lights Are Low” became a standard, but others have failed to reach a wider audience. According to Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz, Carter’s moody, more “reflective style” was in opposition to the hot up-tempo tenor of the times. Carter turned ninety-two in 1999, having had one of the longest careers in his field.

  Woody Herman: An adored bandleader and reedman, Herman was as adept at reinventing himself as any nineties pop star, but he did it with leagues more depth. Nicknamed the Wood-chopper, he first scored it big in 1939 with the jaunty “Wood-chopper’s Ball.” After a string of swing hits—including a version of Louis Jordan’s “Caldonia” and the theme song to the Gene Tierney film Laura—Herman’s orchestra morphed by the mid-forties into a bop-influenced big band, one of the few orchestras, along with Stan Kenton’s, to successfully pursue what they called a “progressive” approach to the music. The band’s theme song, “Blue Flame,” is inspired by a locker room trick involving a match and …

  Earl Hines: Without Hines the jazz piano may never have existed as we know it. Known as “Fatha” Hines, this inventive player—in seminal recordings with Louis Armstrong in the late twenties—moved the piano beyond its more limited ragtime and stride structures into the looser rhythms of the swing era. In 1928 he began recording under his own name and led a band throughout the thirties that played the famed Grand Terrace Ballroom in Chicago. Hines also helped incubate bop in the late forties, hiring such greats as Charlie Parker, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sarah Vaughan for his orchestra. His hit song “Second Balcony Jump” was purportedly inspired by a too-high cat who tried to fly off the balcony of a nightclub.

  Les Brown: Known as Les Brown and His Band of Renown, Brown’s orchestra made it big once it hired Doris Day as its vocalist. Their hits together included “My Dreams Keep Getting Better All the Time” and the touching “Sentimental Journey.” Brown, who also fronted the house band on the Dean Martin Show, still does a radio show with his son, Les Jr.

  The Casa Loma Orchestra: Formed in 1929, the Casa Loma Orchestra was one of the only white bands on the circuit that regularly played hot tunes during the bleak jazz years of the early thirties. With fast-tempo hits like “Casa Loma Stomp” and “Maniac’s Ball,” they helped prime college audiences for Goodman’s later breakthrough. And unlike most bands, the Casa Loma was run not by a leader but as a cooperative venture. How about a quarterly dividend instead of a salary?

  Bob Crosby: Always performing in the shadow of his hu
gely famous older brother Bing, Bob nevertheless put together a real solid sender of an orchestra back in the thirties, creating a distinct swing sound with a Dixieland vibe. His best tunes, many done with his smaller combo the Bobcats, include “Wolverine Blues” and “March of the Bobcats.”

  Harry James: One of the most inspiring trumpeters of his generation, James enjoyed only a short honeymoon with jazz critics. A flashy high-stepping soloist, he first gained national attention with the Benny Goodman Orchestra, appearing most notably in the epochal concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938. (“I feel like a whore in church,” a nervous James reportedly said before the curtain rose.) But after he left to form his own band in late 1938, he poured on the syrup, with great success. By late 1942 he had a band that topped all others in popularity, scoring hits with Helen Forrest’s “You Made Me Love You,” and “Two O’clock Jump,” a reworking of Count Basie’s “One O’clock” standard. The quintessential celebrity bandleader, James gained further fame the next year by tying the knot with pinup queen Betty Grable.

  The International Sweethearts of Rhythm: One of the few all-female bands to break through during the male-dominated swing era, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm got its start in the thirties in Mississippi and struggled for years to be taken as more than a curiosity. It also numbered a few white musicians among its members, who attempted to pass as black during tours in the South.