The History of Jazz (33 page)

But swing music also contributed to its own demise. The increasingly formulaic sound of the swing idiom, circa 1942—with only a few exceptional bands maintaining any degree of originality—indicated that this style was at the point of exhaustion as a dominant force in popular music. From this perspective, the rapid rise to prominence of Glenn Miller during these years served as a fitting close to the era. With Miller, the white big band came full circle, back to the ethos of the pre-Goodman period. Relying on catchy melodies, well-crafted if sometimes unambitious charts, and simple dance rhythms, Miller retained only a peripheral attachment to the jazz tradition. Hot solos and expressive soloists—so important to Ellington, Goodman, and Basie—never played a critical role in the Miller style. Miller’s frequent reliance on syncopated riff songs, such as “Tuxedo Junction,” “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” and “In the Mood,” marked his one major debt to the Swing Era. And even here, the riffs employed were always the most facile, the syncopations the most stereotyped. Instead of looking backward, Miller mostly anticipated the popular music of the postwar years, with its sweeter, less frenetic ambiance and its growing separation from the African American roots that had inspired Goodman and so many of his contemporaries. A decade would pass before the advent of rock and roll would reenact the Palomar phenomenon, tapping the more impassioned energy of the black R&B idiom and bringing it to a mass audience. In the interim, the pop music ethos of Miller and his heirs would reign supreme.

Between spring 1939 and September 1942, when Miller joined the U.S. Army Air Force, no band exerted a greater impact on the public’s imagination. “Moonlight Serenade,” a huge hit from 1939, showed how close to the sweet bands Miller was willing to venture. But the singular virtue of Miller’s music was its sure instinct for memorable melodic lines. Harkening back to Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata
and anticipating a host of pop instrumentals from later years (such as “Ebb Tide” and “Theme from
A Summer Place
”), this trademark Miller effort epitomized his knack for paring down the excesses of swing jazz and returning to the basics of tunesmithing. Simple, catchy, unpretentious, more concerned with novelty than originality: these were the traits Miller would bring to bear in a series of hit recordings, “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” “In the Mood,” “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo,” “At Last,” “Tuxedo Junction,” and “A String of Pearls,” among others. Underpinning Miller’s success were a variety of instrumental textures that he had refined over the years, especially a velvety brass sound relying heavily on the use of mutes in the large trumpet and trombone sections, and sonorous reed work with its particularly effective use of clarinet, frequently in the lead role.

Although jazz fans often carp at Miller’s popularity, which to their dismay has proven to be remarkably long-lived, this body of work is not so easily dismissed when dealt with on its own terms. As a jazz artist, Miller was a negligible force, but as a maven of popular music, Miller reached the highest rung. And of all the big band leaders, Miller may have been best equipped, in terms of temperament and style, for meeting the musical tastes of postwar America. But this was not in store for him. After the outbreak of World War II, Miller enlisted in the Army Air Corp—even though, at age thirty-eight, he would have been exempted from the draft. On December 15, 1944, the bandleader’s plane disappeared while flying over the English Channel. No wreckage or bodies were ever found. In the absence of hard facts, rumors of all sorts circulated and continue to stir debate decades later.

Goodman, for his part, pressed forward with his commitment to modernism in the years following World War II. And though he had made a number of derisive remarks about bebop in the past, he now decided to incorporate many of the elements of the new style into his own music. Did the King of Swing really dare to leave swing behind him? In truth, Goodman’s instincts would not allow him to embrace bop wholeheartedly, but he did hire a new crop of artists who managed to adopt progressive mannerisms without veering too far afield from more traditional sounds, such as saxophonists Stan Getz and Wardell Gray, pianists Mary Lou Williams and Jimmy Rowles, and clarinetist Stan Hasselgard. Yet few were surprised when Goodman’s interest in matching the progressive sounds of Woody Herman and Stan Kenton proved to be short-lived. By the time of his fortieth birthday, in 1949, Goodman had effectively lost interest in following the trends of the younger generation. With his later bands, Goodman maintained a strict allegiance to the Swing Era style, supplemented by his ongoing second career in classical music. Except for a 1962 State Department–sponsored tour of the Soviet Union, Goodman rarely ventured into the limelight during the final three decades of his life. He seldom fronted a working band during this period, preferring to hire musicians for short tours or special events. Yet Goodman never let go of his perfectionism and his commitment to musical excellence. He continued to play scales every day before breakfast, striving for improvement even in his mid-seventies. On June 13, 1986, Benny Goodman was practicing Mozart when he was felled by a fatal heart attack.

The jazz recordings made during the 1920s and early 1930s provide modern listeners with little indication of the rapid and pervasive geographical spread of the music during those formative decades. Our histories tell us of New Orleans, Chicago, and New York—and little else. But no major urban area in the United States was left untouched by this new paradigm of American vernacular music. Piecing together the full history of this transformation would be a Herculean and perhaps impossible task. Our sources are too few, the subject too large. As it stands, a patchwork of information—drawn from hearsay, anecdotes, newspaper accounts, oral histories, and all too few recordings—conveys only the barest outlines, arbitrary and incomplete, of the broader sweep of this movement.

The chance intervention of various record companies saved a few of these regional bands from total obscurity. And even fewer managed to develop national reputations. McKinney’s Cotton Pickers was one of these. Formed in Ohio and later enjoying a long residency in Detroit, this band was admired widely for its solid recordings featuring the arrangements of Don Redman. Such notoriety, however, was the exception rather than the rule. Plying their trade in Miami, Alonzo Ross’s De Luxe Syncopators caused little stir in the jazz world, but eight mostly forgotten sides recorded for Victor during a tour to the Midwest reveal a polished and swinging band that in its day (1927) would have stood out even in the major centers of jazz. The history of jazz in the Carolinas is typically ignored even by specialists in jazz esoterica, but several ensembles are known to us from scattered recordings: Dave Taylor’s Dixie Orchestra, Jimmy Gunn’s Dixie Serenaders, the Carolina Cotton Pickers, and the Bob Pope Orchestra, the last leaving behind over three dozen sides to indicate its prescient conception of 4/4 swing. In Los Angeles, the studio work of local bands led by Sonny Clay, Curtis Mosby, Paul Howard, and Les Hite testify to the rapid spread of the New Orleans style and other influences to the West Coast. A number of St. Louis bands made records, including trumpeter Charlie Creath’s Jazz-O-Maniacs (which released twelve bluesy sides in the mid-1920s), the Missourians, and the Jeter-Pillars Club Plantation Orchestra. The trumpet tradition was especially vibrant in St. Louis and featured, in addition to Creath, Oliver Cobb, Dewey Jackson, and Harold “Shorty” Baker (and, some years later, Miles Davis and Clark Terry). In Memphis, we find Blue Steele and His Orchestra; in Milwaukee, we encounter Grant Moore and hear word-of-mouth accounts of never-recorded Eli Rice; in Cincinnati, Zack Whyte; in Omaha, Red Perkins and Nat Towles. No major urban area was without its dance orchestras, and smaller communities hosted the many bands that went on the road.

And go on the road they did! Memoirs and biographies of the era are full of accounts of musicians on the move, one-night stands, ephemeral triumphs, and resounding failures in distant cities, or disastrous tours culminating in stranded musicians struggling to earn a fare home. The advent of affordable transportation made such tours possible, while Depression economics made them necessary. As America’s infrastructure of asphalt, track, and highway linked up city, town, and village, the nomadic bands of jazz, the modern equivalent of the wandering minstrels of yore, seized the opportunities that this trailblazing offered. Distances of anywhere from several hundred to a thousand miles from gig to gig were not uncommon for these road warriors. From this institutionalized wanderlust comes the term
territory band
, signifying the move beyond city limits to wider geographies of these dance orchestras on wheels.

The Southwest proved an especially fertile area for territory bands. Texas, with its spread-out geography and relatively large population, offered the greatest opportunity, with developed markets for dance music in Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, Austin, Amarillo, and other cities. With homegrown audiences so plentiful, the Texas bands developed to a high degree in relative isolation from outside influences. The black theater circuit, which brought top-quality African American musical acts to many other cities, did not reach Texas until the middle 1920s. But traditional and down-home musical styles were pervasive—so much so that a distinctive blend of jazz and country emerged under the name of “western swing.” Its most famous exponent, Bob Wills, made his name in the 1930s with his Fiddle Boys or Light Crust Doughboys, before settling on the soon-to-be-famous Texas Playboys. As with Goodman, Wills built his reputation over the radio and parlayed local fame into a national audience—most notably on his 1940 hit “New San Antonio Rose,” a song that delighted fans with its mixture of big band horns and countrified strings.

The impact of the New Orleans diaspora, so decisive in other parts of the country, was less strongly felt in this region. In contrast, the sound of the blues was pervasive in Texas, building on a local aural tradition that had been shaped by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, and Blind Willie Johnson, among others. So-called “Texas piano,” with its evocation of honky-tonk and boogie-woogie, drew heavily from the blues, as did a legion of later Texas guitarists and singers. And with the rise of larger dance bands, this predilection for the blues again stood out. Gradually, the influence of Redman and the Northeast arrangers was also felt and incorporated into this grassroots style, and is especially evident in the work of Alphonso Trent, one of the best of the Texas jazz bandleaders of the day. But, for most ensembles, an informal “head chart” style relying on simple memorized parts was preferred. Many of these same elements would figure prominently in the Kansas City style as it evolved in the 1920s and 1930s. One need not look far to find the reason for this convergence of styles: many of the Texas bands—largely forgotten ensembles such as the Troy Floyd Orchestra, the Deluxe Melody Boys, the Happy Black Aces, and Terrence T. Holder and His Dark Clouds of Joy—served as traveling academies for a number of musicians who would later move to Kansas City.

Again, economic factors played a key role in drawing many of these performers to Kansas City. A wide-open town with a tolerant—albeit corrupt—city hall controlled by political boss Tom Pendergast, Kansas City offered a hospitable environment to most of the social vices. And as the histories of New Orleans and Chicago attest, where leisure and whiskey flourished, so typically did jazz. One newspaper columnist, after visiting the city during the Pendergast years, advised his readers: “If you want to see some sin, forget about Paris and go to Kansas City.”
⁴
At the Reno Club, where Count Basie entertained, beer cost five cents, Scotch ran fifteen cents, marijuana sticks sold three for a quarter, and a “visit upstairs” commanded two dollars. These may seem like small sums, but in aggregate they amounted to big business. A formidable forerunner to Las Vegas, Kansas City boasted gambling revenues of around $100 million per year during this period; in addition, roughly $1 million worth of illicit drugs was sold annually; figure in prostitution and alcohol, and the total impact of the underground economy on the so-called Pendergast prosperity was enormous. As the effects of the Depression ravaged the music communities of other cities in the region, more and more players gravitated to Kansas City to share in the good times. By the middle of the 1930s, Kansas City had emerged as a potential rival to New York and Chicago in its concentration of outstanding jazz talent.

But Kansas City jazz was much more than a matter of favorable supply-and-demand conditions. A distinct style of jazz gradually took root in the city’s environs, drawing on disparate elements: the blues tradition of the Southwest, the big band sounds of the Northeast, and the informal jam session ethos of Harlem. Each of these would be transformed in its Kansas City form. The elaborate orchestrations favored by the New York arrangers would be pared down, giving way to simpler riff-based charts. These quasi-minimalist textures of Kansas City jazz imparted a looser feeling to the music, allowing even big band performances to retain the hotand-ready ethos of the after-hours jam sessions, whose informality of spirit lurked behind—and no doubt inspired—the head charts and written scores. But more than anything, the rhythmic essence of this regional style would set it apart. The two-beat pulse of New Orleans and Chicago would give way to a more modern 4/4 conception of time. Tempos gravitated toward a middle ground. Yet this had little to do, as some have suggested, with lower standards of musicianship among Kaycee players. When the occasion so warranted (hear, for instance, the Moten band on “Toby”), the best of the local ensembles could stoke the fire at a pace well beyond 300 beats per minute, outracing even the fastest jitterbugger on the dance floor. In most settings, however, the ambiance of Kansas City jazz life demanded a relaxed swing, with only a subtle undercurrent of urgency.