The Swing Book (18 page)

Classic Songs:
“Fly Me to the Moon,” “My Way,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” and the Dorsey-era hit “I’ll Never Smile Again.”

Swing Trivia:
During the 1950s, according to David W. Stowe’s
Swing Changes,
Sinatra railed against rock music as “the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune
to hear.” Little more than a decade before, his own music had been cited by the New York Philharmonic’s leader as a prime
cause of juvenile delinquency.

CD Picks:
You could buy a dozen and not go wrong, but here are three to get you started.
I’ll Be Seeing You
(RCA) collects the best of his work with Tommy Dorsey.
The Best of the Capitol Years
(Capitol) pinpoints Sinatra’s pinnacle, with masterful arrangements by Nelson Riddle and featuring such songs as “I’ve Got
You under My Skin” and “You Make Me Feel So Young.” And to hear Ol’ Blue Eyes swingin’ with the great Count, check out
Sinatra/Basie
(Reprise).

“The First Lady of Song.” “Lady Time.” That’s the Ella we all know and cherish. But did you know that she was also the only
woman to lead a major swing band? After winning amateur contests at the Apollo Theater, Fitzgerald got her start at age seventeen
singing in the Chick Webb Orchestra and soon found fame with such hits as 1936’s “You’ll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)”
and the even bigger 1938 song “A Tisket A Tasket” (based on an 1879 nursery rhyme). But when Webb died in 1939, Fitzgerald
took over the leadership of his band for two years before going solo in 1942. Establishing herself as the best scat singer
of all time, Fitzgerald effortlessly swung, bopped, and went pop, famously dueting with Louis Armstrong and recording album
after classic album. But the most important were her so-called songbook LPs, a massive project begun in 1955 that married
her brilliant jazz artistry with the work of the best American composers—Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Ellington,
Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, and George and Ira Gershwin. Called by some the greatest singer in history, Fitzgerald,
who died in 1996, may sit atop the mountain of twentieth-century music, but her clear voice, her glad, warm way, and her impeccable
sense of swing make her accessible to every listener.

Classic Songs:
“Undecided,” “Flying Home,” and “Mack the Knife.”

Swing Trivia:
Louis Jordan, who recorded a 1945 calypso hit with Fitzgerald, “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” also romanced the singer
back when both were in Webb’s band. According to John Chilton’s Jordan biography,
Let the Good Times Roll,
Louis had an ulterior motive. He was planning on starting his own band and hoped, without success it turned out, that Fitzgerald
would come with him.

CD Pick:
The Best of the Songbooks
(Verve), drawn from the 16-CD
Complete Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks,
is a wonderful if relatively skimpy starting point with such standards as “’S Wonderful,” “Midnight Sun,” and “I Got It Bad
and That Ain’t Good.” But to hear her in her early swing incarnation, buy
The Early Years, Part 2
(Decca), which covers her stint as leader of Webb’s orchestra. It’s a bit of a shock. Fitzgerald, not yet the full-fledged
singer she later became, sounds positively girlish on such songs as “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and the novelty number “Chew
Chew Chew (Your Bubble Gum).”

Her life was anything but a holiday. Today Holiday’s difficult forty-four years of triumph, decline, and more decline have
been strangely romanticized. She’s become the poster child for tortured, self-destructive artists the world over. And indeed,
the list of her travails is exceedingly long. Born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, she was raped as a child and was put away in a
home for wayward girls. She worked in a brothel as a teenager (which she forth-rightly discussed in her 1956 autobiography,
Lady Sings the Blues
). After being discovered by legendary promoter John Hammond in a Harlem club, she made her first recording in 1933 with Benny
Goodman. The successes and troubles followed in equal measure. She was arrested three times on drug-possession charges, spent
a year in jail after the first bust, and was thereafter prevented from working in New York nightclubs because of a law forbidding
felons from holding “cabaret cards.” A lifetime of substance abuse—heroin, marijuana, opium, alcohol, and cigarettes—ravaged
her voice and ultimately brought on her death. When she passed away in 1959 at age forty-four, she had 70¢ in her bank account
and $750 taped to her leg. While it’s tempting to try to approach her music apart from her life, that would be impossible.
Holiday’s heartache infused everything she sang. Even in her most distinctly stylized vocals, she never worked on the surface;
she laid down her soul’s blue pain on vinyl with an intensity and strength that are far from tragic.

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.
(F
RANK
D
RIGGS
/C
ORBIS
-B
ETTMANN
)

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.