The Swing Book

by Degen Pener

  Sammy Kaye and Kay Kyser: Reviled by serious jazz fans and adored by millions, both the Kyser and Kaye orchestras played sugar-cube music and laid on cute gimmicks. Kaye’s band, dubbed a “Mickey Mouse” outfit by Metronome, let audience members come onstage and wave a baton during a musical number. Kyser had a quiz-show-themed radio show, Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge. But history buffs will want to hear the patriotic World War II songs each turned into hits, Kaye’s “Remember Pearl Harbor” and Kyser’s “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”

  Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy: For a while, Kirk’s outfit gave the Basie band a run for its money in the hot Kansas City jazz scene. Kirk’s best songs include “What’s Your Story, Morning Glory?” singer Pha Terrell’s “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” and the evocatively titled “Mess-a-Stomp.” But his greatest contribution may have been to provide a roost for pianist Mary Lou Williams, one of the only female instrumentalists allowed to really shine during the swing era. She began as a chauffeur for the band and worked her way up, eventually earning top billing as “the Lady Who Swings the Band.”

  MORE GREAT SINGERS

  The Andrews Sisters: The best-selling girl group of all time, LaVerne, Maxene, and Patti Andrews were so magnitudinally square—they poured so much innocent glee into their impeccable harmonies—that the group’s music seems almost bizarrely tweaked today. Nostalgic symbols of wartime America, they created a multicultural musical stew, with influences ranging from polka to calypso to boogie-woogie bugle boys. They even sampled Yiddish on their first big hit, 1937s “Bei Mer Bist Du Schoen.” (Greatest Hits: The Sixtieth Anniversary Collection, MCA, which includes many of their famous duets with Bing Crosby, is a super collection.) But just how naive were they? The trio recorded at least two risqué songs back in the day: “Rum and Coca-Cola”—its lyrics were about both mothers and daughters in Trinidad “working for the Yankee dollar”—and the fairly obvious “(Hold Tight) Want Some Seafood Mama.” About the former, Maxene told Fred Hall in Dialogues in Swing, “We didn’t have any idea what it meant.”

  Peggy Lee: That instant when smoke comes off a flame? Lee seemed to sing from that place all the time on such sultry hits as “Fever” and “Black Coffee.” Her talent, however, lay in much more than imparting a sexy purr to a song. She joined Benny Goodman’s band in 1941, finding her first big hit two years later with the sweetly goading “Why Don’t You Do Right?” She had hits from there on out, culminating in 1969’s Top 40 smash, “Is That All There Is?” which she recorded despite resistance from her label. A talented songwriter, she penned “Mañana,” wrote part of the score for Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, and turned “Fever” into a hit after adding some of her own lyrics. Oh, and then there’s that Oscar nomination for the 1956 jazz film Pete Kelly’s Blues. Seemingly unstoppable, she has in fact retired twice. Since falling onstage in Las Vegas in the eighties, she’s been confined to a wheelchair and largely out of public view. Back in the late forties, after marrying former Goodman guitarist Dave Barbour and becoming a mother, she left the business … for a spell. According to Dialogues in Swing, after she was coaxed by producer Dave Dexter to return to recording, Lee thought about it for a moment and replied, “Well, I think I can get a babysitter.”

  Tony Bennett: Two words: MTV Unplugged. With his justly hyped special on the network and subsequent CD, Bennett’s coolness quotient hit the stratosphere in 1994. Suddenly the music video generation found out what Sinatra, who always referred to Bennett as his favorite singer, had been saying for years. Discovered in 1950 by Pearl Bailey and Bob Hope, Bennett put his signature smooth touch on such hits as the country-inspired “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Because of You,” “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”; paired up with Basie on Basie Swings, Bennett Sings; and recorded critically acclaimed tributes to Billie Holiday, Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, and fittingly, Sinatra. Not bad for a guy who started his career as a singing waiter.

  Bobby Darin: Splish, splash? More like flip, flop. Like an earnest chameleon, Darin jumped from persona to persona. He was a Sinatra-esque lounge singer (“Mack the Knife”); a rockin’ teen idol (“Dream Love,” “Queen of the Hop”); and, as Bob Darrin, an antiwar folkie (“If I Were a Carpenter”). But his style hopping has become an inspiration to today’s genre-straddling swing musicians. And his inspired ballad “Beyond the Sea” (recently covered by Royal Crown Revue) is an undisputed classic.

  Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin: Once you’ve got your Frankie albums, you’ll have a ring-ding of a time checking out the music of his Rat Pack buddies Sammy and Dino. The pair, remembered more today for their Vegas Strip hijinks, cut their fair share of suave tunes. Dean Martin: The Capitol Collector’s Series (Capitol) includes “Volare,” “That’s Amore,” and “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” while Sammy’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 (Garland/DNA) offers up “That Old Black Magic,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” and two numbers with drummer Buddy Rich.

  Dick Haymes: A former Hollywood stunt man, Haymes once equaled Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in popularity. His more than forty hits—many with Helen Forrest, his former colleague in the Harry James Orchestra—include “It Might As Well Be Spring,” “It Can’t Be Wrong,” and “I’ll Get By.” And Haymes certainly did that. He was married seven times, once to Rita Hay-worth.

  Lena Horne: Crushingly beautiful and amazingly multitalented, Horne turned up everywhere during the swing era with Zelig-like regularity. She danced in the chorus line at the Cotton Club early in her career, starred in many movies, including Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky, enjoyed romances with both Joe Louis and Duke Ellington, toured with Charlie Barnet, and recorded with Artie Shaw. During the war she also became the single most popular black pinup girl. More of a pop than jazz singer, Horne, who turned eighty in 1999, remains a symbol of the class and sophistication of the age.

  Anita O’Day: Anything but just another canary, O’Day sings with a husky voice that imparts a knowing toughness to every number she grabs hold of. Still performing today, O’Day began her career with drummer Gene Krupa in 1941 — Uptown (Columbia) collects her amazing work with Krupa and trumpeter Roy Eldridge from this time—then went to Stan Kenton’s band, where she had a hit with “Her Tears Flowed Like Wine.” After that O’Day went solo and established herself as one of jazz’s best scat singers. But as O’Day revealed in her 1981 autobiography High Times, Hard Times, she’d battled addictions to heroin and alcohol for years. The wine had flowed like tears too.

  The Helens: Do you know how to tell your Helens apart? Four major singers of the swing era shared this first name.

  HELEN FORREST: The epitome of the big band girl singer, Forrest performed for the orchestras of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman (whom she quite disliked), and Harry James. Her claret voice endowed such romantic numbers as “I Had the Craziest Dream” and “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” with the most plaintive longing.

  HELEN HUMES: Succeeding Billie Holiday in the Count Basie Orchestra, Humes—known for her beautiful high voice—recorded such numbers as the sensual “One Hour with You” and later had an R&B hit, “Be-Baba-Leba” in the fifties with pianist/organist Bill Doggett.

  HELEN O’CONNELL: Known as the sweetest of canaries, O’Connell sang for the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra and recorded such 1940s hits as “Green Eyes” and “Tangerine.”

  HELEN WARD: Girl-next-door Ward, Benny Goodman’s first singer, most famously sang “Goody-Goody,” about the pleasure of hearing that an ex-lover (and cad) has himself gotten dumped.

  Jimmy Rushing: Known as Mr. Five by Five (for his height and girth), Rushing brought blues to the big band, performing from 1935 to 1950 as the male vocalist for Count Basie. With his amazingly clear and strongly supported tenor voice, he was adept at taking lovable ballads and casting them in dappled bluesy light. You’ll hear his warm, cheerful tone on Basie’s Complete Decca Recordings (Decca/GRP), singing such songs as “Georgianna,” “Blues in the Dark,” and the classic “Sent for You Yesterday.”<
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  Jo Stafford: Dreamy but sensible, sweet but substantial, Stafford was dubbed GI Jo during the war by her legion of enlisted fans. As part of the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, she was one of the Pied Pipers, backed up Frank Sinatra on “Stardust,” and had her own hits with “Manhattan Serenade” and “You Took My Love.” After the big band era, Stafford’s career soared, including major duets with Frankie Laine (“Hey, Good Looking”) and Gordon MacRae (“My Darling, My Darling”). But she’ll always be remembered for her oddball campy side too. Using the pseudonym Cinderella Stump, she sang the hillbilly curiosity “I’m My Own Grandma.” And she and her husband, Paul Weston, under the aliases Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, recorded a number of albums in which they purposefully sang and played off-key, sending up everything from “Honeysuckle Rose” to “I Am Woman.”

  Mel Tormé: Tormé’s career went in the opposite direction of most singers’ of his era. Dubbed the Velvet Fog, a nickname he hated, Tormé was a gifted songwriter who had his first song, “Lament to Love,” published at age fifteen after Harry James recorded it. After he began his solo career in the mid-forties, he dueted with Peggy Lee on “The Old Master Painter,” penned the solid gold chestnut “The Christmas Song” (more than seventeen hundred versions of it have been recorded), and charted with such pop songs as “Careless Hands” and “Bewitched.” But he soon set out to prove his chops as a jazz singer, recording acclaimed tributes to Benny Goodman, Fred Astaire, and Bing Crosby. As he once said of himself, “This syrupy, creamy bobby-sox sensation was taking the musical bull by the horns and singing the kind of music he wanted to sing.” When Tormé died at age seventy-three in 1999, he was lauded for doing just that.

  Dinah Washington: If she was mad at you, Washington would as likely pull a pistol on you as curse you out. Notoriously hot tempered and married at least seven times, Washington began her career in 1942 singing for Lionel Hampton when she was just eighteen. In the fifties she became known as the Queen of the Blues, admired for both her fearless gospel-influenced style, on such songs as “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” and “This Bitter Earth,” and for the way she could take a chestnut and make it new again, as she did with Nat King Cole’s signature “Unforgettable.” Washington’s hard living caught up with her in 1959 when she died of an overdose at age thirty-nine.

  Joe Williams: After knocking around with such orchestras as Lionel Hampton’s and Coleman Hawkins’s, Williams replaced Jimmy Rushing in the Count Basie Orchestra and was instrumental in reviving the band’s fortunes during the fifties. His voice had an elegant authority and deep soulful feeling, nowhere better heard than on “Every Day I Have the Blues,” the song that’s considered his greatest triumph. He recorded the classic album Count Basie Swings, foe Williams Sings, scatted like mad with Ella on the 1956 song “Party Blues,” and in the eighties reached a whole new audience through his role as Grandpa Al on The Cosby Show. As Duke Ellington once wrote of Williams, who died in 1999, “He sang real soul blues on which his perfect enunciation of the words gave the blues a new dimension.”

  THE TEN BEST COMPILATIONS

  Big Band

  1. An Anthology of Big Band Swing 1930-1955 (GRP) is a Lindy Hopper’s dream. The two-CD collection not only features Henderson, the Dorsey Brothers, Lunceford, Armstrong, and Kansas City blues pianist Jay McShann, to name just a few of the giants, but also includes competing versions of “One O’clock Jump” recorded by Basie and Goodman.

  2. Oscillatin’ Rhythm (Capitol) is the hands-down favorite of swing DJs around the country, putting such standards as “Sing, Sing, Sing,” “Smoke Rings,” “For Dancers Only,” “Tain’t What You Do,” and “Leap Frog” all on one disc.

  3. Swingin’ at Capitol (Capitol) is another great one-CD introduction, featuring a diverse lineup of swing greats, from Harry James and Les Brown to Cootie Williams and Illinois Jacquet to Ray Anthony and Benny Carter.

  4. Swing Time, the Fabulous Big Band Era (Columbia/Legacy) is truly the swing mother lode. This indispensable three-CD set brings together the best bands and their biggest hits. From Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare” to Jimmy Dorsey’s “Green Eyes” to Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” the list never stops.

  Lounge

  5. Wild, Cool and Swinging (Ultra Lounge/Capitol) is the essence of Las Vegas cool, featuring Dino singing “Volare,” Wayne Newton’s “Danke Schoen,” Peggy Lee’s “Fever,” plus Lou Rawls, Bobby Darin, Louis Prima, Sammy Davis Jr., and Vic Damone. Just lie back and pretend you’re sippin’ a martini at the Sands.

  Jump Blues and R&B

  6. Blues Masters, Vol. 5, Jump Blues (Rhino) features eighteen wild tracks, including LaVern Baker’s “Voodoo Voodoo,” Wynonie Harris’s “Destination Love,” and Professor Longhair’s friskily titled “Ball the Wall.”

  7. Jump Blue: Rockin’ the Jukes (Blue Note) shows off such jump greats as Jimmy and Joe Liggins, Big Jay McNeely, Roy Brown, and Louis Jordan at their honking and shouting best.

  8. Jumpin’ Like Mad: Cool Cats and Hip Chicks (Capitol), a two-CD set, will knock the roof off the joint with such rockin’ R&B classics as Helen Humes’s “Be-Baba-Leba” and Louis Prima’s “Five Months, Two Weeks, Two Days,” plus Louis Jordan, Ella Mae Morse, T-Bone Walker, and the Nat King Cole Trio. As Peggy Lee sings it here, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  9. Original Swingers: Hipsters, Zoots and Wingtips, Vol. 2 (Hip-O Records) collects Dinah Washington, Jimmy Liggins, Erskine Hawkins, Count Basie, Lucky Millinder, and Louis Jordan all on one irrepressible CD.

  10. Risqué Rhythm: Nasty ’50s R&B (Rhino) pulls together the most raunchy double entendre songs ever made, from Moose Jackson’s “Big Ten-Inch Record” to Dinah Washington singing about a trombone player’s “big long slidin’ thing” in a song of that title, to the Toppers’ “I Love to Play Your Piano (Let Me Bang Your Box).” Let yourself be shocked.

  Brian Setzer strutting his stuff at the Hollywood Palladium. (MARK JORDAN)

  CHAPTER 5

  The Most Swinging New Bands

  If it was difficult defining what swing was back in the thirties, it’s become almost impossible to do so now. Today’s swing isn’t just one thing—it’s pure mutt, drawing from the original era but folding in a host of other influences. There is swing with bop, hip-hop, Beatles-style pop, Dixieland, blues, R&B, rockabilly, punk, ska, hard rock, and lounge. “It’s taken all we have learned about rock ‘n’ roll, all we’ve experimented with and developed in the past forty years and incorporated it into the music,” says Jack Vaughn, president of the neoswing label Slim-style Records.

  The following list of bands certainly runs that gamut. From the punk-influenced Royal Crown Revue and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy to the rockabilly sounds of Brian Setzer to the big band traditionalism of Bill Elliott and Eddie Reed to scores of others, you’ll be surprised by both the depth and breadth of the new swing music. Indeed, one Web site (www.406hepcats.bukowski.com) has links to more than 225 swing band homepages. Below you’ll get an introduction to the biggest, the most buzzed about, and the ones that the dancers can’t live without. They’re all in here.

  Plus, you’ll see the results of a survey that tells you which ten albums swingers think are the most righteous. Based on the opinions of the most hep-to-the-jive insiders—the top swingzine experts and radio and club DJs—it’ll let you know where to get started in building a new swing music collection. Most of the CDs are available at on-line music stores such as Amazon.com. But for harder-to-find albums, contact Hepcat Records (www.hepcatrecords.com), the indispensable retro music distributor, which puts out a great catalog of everything from swing to surf to rockabilly. You should also check out the Web guide in the appendix for a list of which swing sites have the best links to individual bands’ homepages.

  But let’s talk priorities for a sec. Listening to the music on a CD can’t replace the experience of getting out and dancing to a real band. More than anything else, live music is the foundation of the swing scene. In fact, as you’ll soon find out, most
swing dancers decide where to go based not so much on which club they like best as on which band is playing there that night. So head out to a dance spot. Support the bands. (But keep in mind that not all the groups listed below are as danceable as others.) And have a blast spinning your partner.

  THE BIG GUNS

  Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

  How do you know a swing band has really made it? When other bands start playing their songs. In the past couple of years, such BBVD tunes as “You and Me and the Bottle Makes Three Tonight (Baby)” and “Go Daddy-O” have become perhaps the best-known and most-covered songs in swing. “And we’ve never had a radio hit,” says lead singer Scotty Morris. Of course, the band hasn’t lacked for exposure. After a career-making performance in Swingers in 1996, they’ve since played for President Clinton, performed with Stevie Wonder at the Super Bowl, appeared on Melrose Place and Ally McBeal, and performed in promotional spots for the NBA. Morris, a former punker who put the band together on the outskirts of LA (in Ventura) in the early nineties, can now look back and laugh at how hard it was getting BBVD started. “I was trying to convince these good players that they should come to me and play pre-bop music and they were like, ‘Fuck, no way,’” he says. So what direction does this rocking high-energy band head in now that they’ve hit so many peaks? Getting even more rock/swing schizophrenic on their latest album. “The crazier stuff is by far crazier than anything we’ve ever done and the traditional stuff is more traditional,” says Morris. “I even wrote a seventeen-piece big band ballad.”

  Cherry Poppin’ Daddies