The History of Jazz (28 page)

If Ellington felt any doubts about his ability to develop an audience for his more serious works, the band’s 1933 trip to Europe certainly put them to rest. Even before Ellington’s arrival, Spike Hughes had announced in
Melody Maker
that “America does not honestly know or appreciate the real treasure she possesses in Duke Ellington.”
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A two-week engagement at the Palladium drew fans from all over the country who were anxious to hear Ellington’s English debut. Ellington had brought along dancer Bessie Dudley and song-and-dance team Bill Bailey and Derby Wilson in an attempt to recreate a Cotton Club–styled revue in this new setting. Much to his surprise, many of the critics and musicians who had heralded the bandleader as the great new American composer expressed dismay at the show business trappings of these performances. In response to their demands, Duke added a number of his more ambitious pieces to the band’s program. “Maybe our music does mean something,” was Ellington’s characteristically understated comment on his return to America.
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Although the serious tone of this response must have been gratifying to Ellington, this was no time for complacency. An exciting swing band led by Jimmie Lunceford had recently arrived in Harlem, ready to challenge Ellington for supremacy on his home turf. Organized in Memphis in the late 1920s, the Lunceford band had polished its approach during summer engagements in Lakeside, Ohio, and then built up a following in Buffalo, New York, before finally coming to Harlem to appear at the Cotton Club. Lacking the depth of soloists and originality of the Ellington band, the Lunceford orchestra compensated with exceptionally fluid ensemble work, a tightly knit rhythm section, and a repertoire of solidly swinging dance charts. Coming of age only a short while before the dawn of the Swing Era—as the second half of this decade would come to be known—Lunceford was anticipating the sound of the future. Streamlined, stylish, and swinging, this was a band well suited to the emerging musical tastes of the American public.

Lunceford had learned several instruments during his youth in Denver, and had formally studied music at Fisk University and the City College of New York. As a bandleader, however, he remained content to delegate much of the direction of the group to others. Will Hudson’s 1934 charts “Jazzocracy” and “White Heat,” evoking memories of the Casa Loma Orchestra, provided Lunceford with his first recording successes. But it was left to trumpeter and arranger Sy Oliver to develop the mature sound of the group, with its winning interplay of brass, reeds, and rhythm instruments. In a series of memorable charts—such as “Shake Your Head” (1934), “My Blue Heaven” (1935), “Organ Grinder’s Swing” (1936), and “For Dancers Only” (1937)—Oliver set out a blueprint for crafting dance hall music of the highest order. This approach would be widely imitated by other swing bands over the following decade, and Oliver himself would resurface in other settings (most notably with Tommy Dorsey’s band) to create similar successes.

These carefully structured pieces have given the Lunceford group the reputation of being primarily an arranger’s band. However, the Lunceford orchestra was not lacking in talented soloists. Willie Smith, whose sophisticated and sweet-toned saxophone work places him behind only Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges among altoists of the decade, stands out as the most capable of the group’s instrumentalists, but the contributions of Trummy Young, Eddie Durham, and Joe Thomas are also worth noting. Even the heralded ensemble sound of the Lunceford band was as much a matter of individual musicianship as of arranging style. The technical facility and relaxed phrasing of the reed section—as seen, for example, in the 1935 performance of “Sleepy Time Gal”—were unsurpassed at the time. And though the brass section may have lacked the unique musical personalities who enlivened the Ellington ensemble, the range and execution of Lunceford’s individual players were beyond reproach.

Drummer Chick Webb also made an impact on the Harlem musical landscape during these years. A Baltimore native, Webb came to New York in his midteens and before his twentieth birthday was leading a band at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Webb demands our respect as one of the most exciting drummers in the history of jazz, but his reputation suffers from four factors: his relatively short career; the limited ability of 1930s recording technology to capture percussion sounds in a big band with any real immediacy; his unprepossessing appearance in an industry that celebrates image and glamor more than it will admit; and finally (and the only one of these obstacles that Webb brought upon himself) his decision to hire a singer whose fame would soon eclipse the achievements of her erstwhile boss. Yet if the history books have been unkind to Chick Webb, jazz fans at the time had no doubts about his preeminence. Relying on the imaginative compositions and charts of Edgar Sampson (“Stompin’ at the Savoy,” “Blue Lou,” “Let’s Get Together”) and propelled by the leader’s forceful drumming, Webb’s band developed into a hard-swinging ensemble, primed to compete with Ellington or Henderson at the legendary band battles staged at the Savoy. For a famous matchup with the Goodman band, held at the Savoy in 1937, a record crowd of four thousand packed the hall, while another five thousand were turned away. “Chick Webb Defeats Ben Goodman!” proclaimed the follow-up headline in
Metronome
.

The addition of singer Ella Fitzgerald to the band in 1934 further enhanced the group’s jazz credentials and added to its popular appeal, while her vocal on “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” propelled the song to an eighteen-week stint on the Hit Parade in 1938. Fitzgerald had been discovered at age seventeen in a talent contest at Harlem’s Apollo Theater and soon gained a reputation for her wide range, impeccable intonation, and sure sense of swing. “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” with its nursery-song quality, proved to be an ideal vehicle for Fitzgerald’s childlike vocal style—a style that stood in stark contrast to the sultry sexuality and dark moodiness of a Bessie Smith or a Billie Holiday. Bringing a naive innocence to her interpretation of a lyric, Fitzgerald conveyed a joyous exultation, tinged with a sense of humor, reminiscent of her early model Louis Armstrong (with whom she later collaborated in a memorable pairing). When Webb died from tuberculosis in 1939, Fitzgerald took over as leader and continued in that role for the next three years, until the group disbanded in 1942.

Ellington, Henderson, Lunceford, Calloway, Webb, Fitzgerald—these bandleaders represented a flowering of musical talent in Harlem every bit as vital as the community’s much-heralded writers and visual artists. The work of these African American musicians came to exert an influence far beyond the confines of Harlem, playing a critical role in defining the broader cultural tastes of the nation as a whole, and eventually gaining adherents overseas as well. In a very real sense, the rise of the great Harlem bands in the early and mid-1930s was a harbinger of a changing sensibility at hand. During the closing years of the decade, popular music styles would be transformed permanently by the rise of a high-energy dance style, drawing heavily from African American roots, that would come to be known as swing.

To a certain extent, this shift in the musical tastes of the broader American public served to validate Ellington’s career to date. After all, had he not already declared that “it don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing”? And certainly the aesthetic underpinnings of the swing movement drew on the same roots—especially the music of the Fletcher Henderson band—that Ellington had incorporated into his own efforts.

Even so, the lighter, more propulsive swing of the emerging style reflected a new emphasis in the music, away from the complexities and art music tendencies that had increasingly characterized Ellington’s work in the first half of the decade. Swing music was, if nothing else, deeply populist, with few highbrow pretensions. And though Ellington, Henderson, and others had paved the way, it would take a white bandleader of heroic proportions to establish swing music as the dominant popular music style of the era and bring it into the households of middle America. Through this surprising intermediary, the hot jazz of Harlem, intermixed with influences from Chicago and elsewhere, would become the everyday sound of American life.

5 The Swing Era

The onset of the Great Depression had a chilling effect on the jazz world, as it did on the whole entertainment industry. Record sales in the United States had surpassed one hundred million in 1927, but by 1932 only six million were sold—a staggering decline of over 90 percent. Record labels that had focused on black music—the “race records” of the day—were especially hard hit, but no sector of the music business proved immune to the economic malaise. During the same period, the growing popularity of talking movies led many theaters to halt the elaborate live shows that had previously been a staple of popular entertainment in most cities, further reducing paying jobs for musicians. Thousands of them changed careers—membership in the musicians’ union declined by almost one-third between 1928 and 1934—or else remained chronically underemployed. Greater and lesser talents suffered alike. Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Bessie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke—their individual stories are all different, but share at least this one similarity: their careers spiraled downward in tandem with the nation’s industrial output.

The end of Prohibition in 1933 transformed many speakeasies into legitimate nightclubs, but the change was hardly a positive one for most jazz players. Not only alcohol but the whole ethos and ambiance of jazz culture were demystified in the process. Both could now be easily consumed at home: alcohol legally purchased at the liquor store, jazz carried into the household over the airwaves. This was progress of sorts. Yet the harsh math of this new equation did not bode well for musicians: a single band could now entertain countless listeners through the magic of radio. By implication, a few instrumentalists were doing the work that previously required hundreds, maybe thousands, of bands. Thus, the same technology that brought unparalleled fame to a small cadre did irreparable damage to most players, as supply and demand were brought further out of alignment. Perhaps the growth of big bands during this era was as much a result of these economic forces as it was a sign of changing tastes. As wages declined and musician unemployment rose, a dozen players could be hired for relatively little. The big band, formerly a luxury, was now a standard format, as excess workers made labor-intensive activities—in music just as much as in production—more viable, hence more commonplace. Twenty-five years later this trend would reverse, as a growing economy and rising wages helped kill the big band, a bloated relic of a less expensive age.

Although the developments of the 1930s affected most musicians adversely, a handful of performers benefited considerably from the more stratified structure of the entertainment world. The creation of a truly nationwide mass medium in the form of radio catapulted a few jazz players to a level of celebrity that would have been unheard of only a few years before. True, artists had long been accorded fame and favor in the context of modern Western society, but now the concepts of stardom and superstardom began to emerge in their contemporary sense.

Such a step change depended, first and foremost, on a technological shift. In 1920 the first commercial radio station in the United States, KDKA in Pittsburgh, began broadcasting. But, in its early days, this new medium lacked a wide audience. In 1921, only $11 million in radio equipment was sold in the United States; by the close of the decade, annual sales had skyrocketed to over $850 million. The nature of the music business would never be the same. From now on, the twin industries, recording and broadcasting, would exert unprecedented influence over the careers of singers and instrumentalists, arrangers and composers. As finance, technology, and artistic production grew even more intertwined, a new class of entrepreneur grew in importance: the talent agent. Hence, our history is marked by a number of symbiotic relationships—between Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser, Duke Ellington and Irving Mills, Benny Goodman and John Hammond—in which the creative impulse requires the mediation of the businessman to reach a mass audience. As the stakes grew higher and higher, music became more deeply embedded in “the music business,” and the business became more and more consolidated in a few hands.

This transformation did not—and could not—take place overnight. Regional bands continued to flourish in many locales, oblivious to the mass marketing of national figures that would soon deprive them of much of their audience. The vast majority of musicians continued to look after their own finances, or lack thereof, without the aid of agents, publicists, managers, and the like. The “listening public” developed only gradually, as radio evolved from a novelty to a necessity for most American households. But, more than anything, the continuing poor state of the nation’s economy was the single most important factor in preventing mass media entertainment from realizing its full potential in the early days of the 1930s. Even so, the American music industry during these years was a tinderbox waiting for the spark that would set it off. The rise of network radio, much more than the earlier spread of record players, transformed the general public into passive receptors of entertainment chosen by a few arbiters of taste. The results were now all but inevitable. The mechanisms of stardom were set in place in the music world. All that was needed was the right star.