Roots of Jazz and Blues with King Henry
Episode 5 - Swing Jazz
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Welcome, welcome, welcome to episode five of the Roots of Jazz and Blues on W-A-Y-O-L-P Rochester.
Today we'll discover the origins of swing jazz.
First, why the name? Why is it called swing?
Because of swing dancing, such as the Lindy Hop that was developed in Harlem or Charleston that grew up in Charleston, South Carolina.
Swing jazz is characterized by two musical innovations.
The first is an emphasis on the off or weaker beat, thus the phrase offbeat, which in the 50s had finally morphed into beatnik.
The second innovation is crucial for modern jazz.
It is soloists improvising over a melody.
Swing was a major form of jazz, the major form of jazz in fact, in the 1930s and 1940s.
But by the end of that period, it had grown stale and sentimental.
It became your grandfather's jazz.
And in the 1950s was replaced by bebop.
But let's go back to the exciting early days of swing.
Fletcher Henderson was the key figure in the transition from New Orleans jazz to swing.
He grew up in a middle class black family and played music in high school.
He initially dedicated himself to science.
In 1920, he graduated from Atlanta University with a chemistry and math major.
He moved to New York City with the intention to go to graduate school in chemistry at Columbia.
But an amazing happenstance for the future of jazz led him back to music.
His roommate played in a riverboat band.
One day the roommate was sick and Fletcher went and substituted.
He was so successful that he soon became a full-time jazz player.
He accompanied many blues singers.
But he finally formed his own band in 1924.
Here's a 78 from my collection, Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra 1924, It's the Talk of the Town.
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That was Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra, It's the Talk of the Town from 1924.
You heard a beautiful solo on the saxophone by Coleman Hawkins and we'll be hearing more from Coleman in later episodes.
Fletcher and his arrangers Don Redmond and Benny Carter made Dixieland classic swing.
Remember Dipper-Bouthe Blues by King Oliver.
Here it is rearranged as Sugarfoot Stomp.
This tune made Henderson nationally known.
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That was Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra, Sugarfoot Stomp from 1925.
We could easily do an entire episode following Fletcher's career, but we have no time today in our rapid fire survey of swing.
So we must move on now to Louis Armstrong.
He was born in New Orleans and as a child worked as a rag and bones collector for a family of Lithuanian Jews.
His autobiography credited them with teaching him to sing from the heart.
By age 11, Louis was busking on streets and was soon playing river boats.
He joined King Oliver's band in Chicago and later Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra.
He headed his own band in 1925.
Here is Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five with the song Muggles from 1925.
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Louis Armstrong, Muggles from 1925.
By the way, Muggles was a slang word for marijuana.
Let's leap ahead now to 1931.
When Louis has developed a unique style of scat singing, he uses his voice like a trumpet.
This is well illustrated by his tune, Lazy River.
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Yeah!
Uh-huh!
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Sure!
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Uh-huh!
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Way down, way down!
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Boy, if I rip this evening, I hope so.
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If we would need a whole episode to do justice to Fletcher Henderson,
we'd need ten episodes to do justice to Louis Armstrong's five-decade long career.
Personally, however, I'm not a fan of his 1950s and 1960s work.
My vision of hell would be eternity listening to Armstrong's biggest hit,
Hello, Dolly!
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That's quite enough of Hello, Dolly!
Now, at the same time that Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong
were turning New Orleans jazz into swing,
a guy from Iowa named Bix Biederbeck was doing the same thing.
Despite living in the Midwest, he loved hot jazz
and often traveled to Chicago to hear King Oliver.
Bix played in a series of bands.
One of his first was The Wolverines.
Here we have 1927, Jazmy Blues by Bix Biederbeck and The Wolverines.
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That was Bix Biederbeck and The Wolverines, Jazmy Blues from 1927.
Another band Bix played in was led by Gene Colchetti.
Now Gene Colchetti and his orchestra was big in its day
but would be pretty much forgotten now
if it weren't for Bix Biederbeck's contributions.
Here is their biggest hit, Clementine from 1927.
Listen for Bix's cornet solo toward the end of the tune.
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Bix went on to play for many years in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra,
the most commercially successful and artistically dreadful big band of the era.
Whiteman lived up to his name with the whitest, least soulful jazz ever made.
So we're going to skip Whiteman and go on to who, in my opinion,
is the greatest swing band leader, Benny Goodman.
In our first episode, we heard that Nathan Oliver became King Oliver.
Now, Benny Goodman did not change his name but was given the nickname King of Swing.
He was born to poor Jewish immigrant parents who came from Russia.
Despite poverty, his father got him music lessons at a local synagogue.
Benny made his professional debut at age 13 and by 18 was a sideman for Ben Pollock's Orchestra.
In 1928, Goodman formed the band Benny Goodman's Boys and appeared on the radio show Let's Dance.
His 1935 King Porter Stomp played on the radio
and also to cheering crowds at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles.
Swing was sweeping the U.S.
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That was Benny Goodman, the King Porter Stomp from 1935.
Well, what else was happening in 1935?
The Nazis and fascists were rising to power in Europe.
Both Germany and Italy banned jazz.
They called it a Jewish conspiracy to destroy culture.
But back in the U.S., Swing took over the airwaves.
The 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall is called the greatest Swing concert in history.
Let's listen to Benny's introduction, followed by Don't Be That Way.
You know, we didn't know the concert was being recorded at the time.
We didn't find it out until afterwards.
Two copies were made, one for me and one for the Library of Congress.
I put mine away so carefully I completely lost track of it for about 12 years.
And then luckily one of my daughters found it in the closet about a year ago.
We had it edited and Columbia put it out on records.
And of course here you have the results.
But let me tell you a little about it.
That January 16th back in 1938 was a Sunday and a cold one.
We didn't quite know what would happen, how we would sound, what the audience would think of us.
Until they got there we didn't even know how many people would be on hand.
So we just went out and played.
Our first number was Don't Be That Way and you can hear the audience response in the record.
That really made us feel good.
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Goodman mentored countless young jazz artists. One of the greatest was Lionel Hampton who played piano and vibraphone.
What's a vibraphone you wonder? It's a xylophone with metal bars and an electric fan that adds tremolo to the sound.
In 1936 Lionel joined the Benny Goodman Quartet. It became the first racially integrated jazz group to perform professionally.
Let's listen to Lionel Hampton with the Benny Goodman Quartet playing Dizzy Spells, 1938.
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That was the Benny Goodman Quartet featuring Lionel Hampton with Dizzy Spells from 1938.
We first heard the tune, Muskrat Ramble, played by Edward Kidd-Orie in 1922 on an earlier episode.
Let's now listen to Lionel Hampton's version with his own orchestra from 1940.
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This was "Muskrat Ramble" by Lionel Hampton and his
orchestra from 1940. Let me remind you that you are listening to W-A-Y-O-L-P
Rochester streaming at wayofm.org. This is "Roots of Jazz and Blues"
with King Henry. Our next artist Artie Shaw was a classically trained clarinetist and many consider him to be the finest jazz
clarinetist of all time.
One of his most innovative pieces was Interlude in B-flat,
where he played backed only by drums and strings.
This piece introduced a new form of swing jazz called third stream.
It combined jazz with elements of classical music.
1936, Artie Shaw Interlude in B-flat.
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By 1940, Artie Shaw was earning the astounding sum of $60,000 a week.
To put this into context, this was about ten times the amount
earned by the most popular radio show people at the time, Burns and Allen.
By no small coincidence, Artie's orchestra provided the background music
for the Burns and Allen show, and he sometimes appeared as a character.
One of Artie Shaw's biggest hits that combined clarinet and strings again
was Forenze from 1940.
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Earlier I said that Benny Goodman was the greatest swing band leader.
Our next artist was both a great band leader and a truly great human being.
Glenn Miller grew up in Nebraska.
He earned money milking cows as a teenager that he spent on a trombone.
He was a high school athlete and football player
and became a very popular big band leader.
In a famous session in 1928, as part of the Nate Shill Crull All-Star Orchestra,
Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and others that we'll learn more about later on in the show
played Add a Little Wiggle.
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In 1940, the United States entered World War II,
fighting against the Axis power to restore freedom to the world.
At the age of 26, Glenn Miller joined the Army Air Force
and created the Major Glenn Miller Army Air Forces Orchestra.
This group toured throughout Europe, even in the heat of combat.
Glenn Miller was lost over the English Channel in 1944.
Before he died, however, he had recorded the first gold record ever.
That's a record that sells a half million copies,
the Chattanooga Choo-Choo, 1941.
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Glenn Miller from 1941, Chattanooga Choo-Choo.
Our next artist, Tommy Dorsey, had the nickname
the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing.
Together with his brother, Jimmy, he performed as the Dorsey Brothers.
Now, our next song has kind of a complicated history.
In 1934, Glenn Miller was part of the Dorsey Brothers band,
and in 1938, they recorded the song Boogie Woogie.
However, this song wasn't released until 1943,
long after Miller had left the band, as well as brother Jimmy.
1943, Glenn Miller and the Dorsey Brothers, Boogie Woogie.
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The second song by Tommy Dorsey also has a curious recording history.
The song I'll Be Seeing You was recorded by Tommy Dorsey's orchestra in 1940,
but it was never released because he simply had too much material in the pipeline at that time.
In 1942, there was a performer's strike.
In 1942, there was a performer's strike by musicians across the United States.
This strike lasted until 1944, so essentially no new music was recorded.
So in 1944, Tommy Dorsey pulled this old recording from 1940 out of the vaults and issued it.
It became an enormous hit.
It's kind of interesting to note that artists' striking did not begin with the 2023 US Actors' Strike.
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Who was that vocalist? An obscure singer named Frank Sinatra.
Well, enough Dorsey. I think he has become way too sticky sweet for my taste.
The next up is a true jazz master, Woody Herman.
Woody was born in Wisconsin of Polish immigrants.
As a child, he tap danced and played in vaudeville.
Like Glenn Miller, he was a clarinetist.
His first band was in 1936.
It was known for its orchestrations of blues
and given the Subra-K, the band that plays the blues.
His first big hit was Woodchopper's Ball, 1939.
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In 1942, Woody Herman released Blues in the Night.
It was his biggest hit and sold an incredible 5 million copies.
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♪ My mama done told me when I was in need pants ♪
♪ My mama done told me, son, a woman will sweet talk and give you the big eye ♪
♪ But when that sweet talking's done, a woman's a two-face ♪
♪ A worrisome thing will leave you to sing the blues in the night ♪
♪ Now the rain's a-fallin', hear the train a-callin' hoo-ee ♪
♪ My mama done told me, hear that lonesome whistle blowin' cross the trestle hoo-ee ♪
♪ My mama done told me, a hoo-ee da hoo-ee ♪
♪ Flickety-clacks are echoin' back the blues in the night ♪
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♪ From Manchester Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe, wherever the fall winds blow ♪
♪ I've been in some big towns and heard me some big talk ♪
♪ But there is one thing I know ♪
♪ A woman's a two-face, a worrisome thing will leave you to sing the blues ♪
♪ In the night ♪
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Woody Herman went on to be a pioneer of bebop jazz, so we'll hear from him again in a future episode.
The next artist was a leader of swing from the 1920s all the way through the 1970s.
He wasn't a king of jazz, but rather a duke, namely Duke Ellington.
He grew up in Washington, D.C. Both parents played piano and encouraged his musical education.
He began playing professional piano at private parties and embassy balls.
And in this Washington, D.C. high society, he developed his elegant style.
In 1925, he moved to New York City and became a mainstay of the Cotton Club, the leading jazz venue in Harlem.
Now to get to the Cotton Club from downtown, you follow the instruction in Billy Strayhorn's song, Take the A Train.
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That was the Duke Ellington Orchestra 1941 Take the A Train.
In 1940, along with a group of other star performers, he recorded a live performance in Fargo, North Dakota.
However, this performance was only issued on record in 1978.
Here's one of the tunes from that session, Duke Ellington, The Mooch.
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In the 1950s, the public's interest in swing music declined as people began listening to more and more bebop.
However, Ellington's career had a big revival after he played a hit concert at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival,
and we went on to perform internationally throughout the 1970s.
The last swing artist today is Cab Calloway.
Calloway was a vocalist.
Like Ellington, he was a regular performer at the Cotton Club in Harlem,
and was the first black musician to sell a million copies of a record.
Now, Duke Ellington just gave us the mooch.
There was a lot of mooching going on in the swing era, so let's listen to Calloway's hit,
Mini the Moocher.
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What an incredible performance.
That hidey-hidey scat just sends chills up and down my spine.
An interesting note about Calloway.
He wrote a dictionary of Harlem musical slang.
He called it Cab Calloway's Catalog, a Hepsters dictionary.
It included entries such as Armstrongs, nouns, musical notes in the upper register,
or high trumpet notes, mitt pounding, noun, applause,
and one I find rather mysterious, V8, noun,
a chick who spurns company, is independent, is not amenable.
Before we close out today's show, I'd like to remind you that you are listening to
W-A-Y-O-L-P Rochester, streaming at wayofm.org,
and this is The Roots of Jazz and Blues with King Henry.
Our last song is 1949 Cab Calloway, Shotgun Boogie.
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♪ There he stands in the corner with the bass so sweet ♪
♪ I looked up the wind and ran over the gate ♪
♪ The big fat rabbits were jumping in the grass ♪
♪ Wait to lay him a shotgun blast ♪
♪ Shotgun boogie ♪
♪ I done saw your tracks ♪
♪ Look out Mr. Rabbit when I cut my hammer back ♪
♪ Well, over on the ridge there's a scaly bark ♪
♪ Hickory nuts so big you can see them in the dark ♪
♪ The big fat squirrel says sassy and fight ♪
♪ I'll be on that ridge before daylight ♪
♪ Shotgun boogie ♪
♪ All I need is one shot ♪
♪ Look out Bushy Dale tonight you'll be in a pile ♪
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♪ Well, I met a pretty gal she was tall and thin ♪
♪ I asked her what she got she said a box of four tins ♪
♪ I looked her up and down and said boy this is love ♪
♪ So we headed for the bridge to shoot a fat dove ♪
♪ Shotgun boogie ♪
♪ Oh, the feathers flew ♪
♪ Look out Mr. Dove when she draws a bead on you ♪
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♪ I sat out all along and took her on my lap ♪
♪ She said wait a minute bud you gotta see my pal ♪
♪ You got a 16 gauge tote barrel like a rifle ♪
♪ You don't like a man that's gonna try ♪
♪ Oh, shotgun boogie ♪
♪ Has the meat so fine ♪
♪ Look out big boy cause it's loaded all the time ♪
♪ Well, I called on a pop like a gentleman ought to ♪
♪ He said no brush hunter's gonna get my daughter ♪
♪ He got back the hammer right on the spot ♪
♪ When the gun went off I'll run that shot ♪
♪ Shotgun boogie ♪
♪ I want it worth less ♪
♪ I'll be back little gal when your pappy runs out of chance ♪
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