The Swing Book (21 page)

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.
(M
ARK
J
ORDAN
)

CHAPTER 5

The Most Swinging New Bands

I
f 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.

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.”

They don’t try to be offensive, they just are offensive and that’s the way they like it. A ska-inspired band with a big horn
sound, the Daddies started doing swing soon after getting together in Eugene, Oregon, way back in 1989. Fronted by former
punk rocker Steve Perry, the band would seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Pacific Northwest was
then ground zero for grunge, and the group’s antics were anything but angst propelled. They’d wheel a giant phallus-shaped
golf cart, dubbed the Dildorado, onstage during their shows. They put out an early album called
Ferociously Stoned,
with women on the cover so skimpily clothed they would have been at home in a David Lee Roth video. And then there was their
risqué moniker, inspired by the double entendre “race” records of early R&B. “It was dirty and filthy and bad and it was funny
and it swung, too,” Perry has told
Lo-Fi
magazine. Needless to say, it was a little too dirty for some people. The Daddies’ in-your-face attitude upset a fair share
of PC types; at one point Perry even had hot coffee thrown in his face while just walking down the street. But the band made
a shrewd decision in 1997. Before then they’d always mixed up ska, punk, and swing on their albums, but that year they improbably
decided to put together a greatest hits CD that gathered all their most swinging songs in one place. Named for their soon-to-be-huge
radio hit “Zoot Suit Riot,” the CD blew out of stores in 1998, selling over a million copies. It also made the Daddies emblems
of the swing scene, an odd place for the band given that they’re not a favorite of the dance crowd and are more likely to
be found touring with such ska bands as the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish. But the band’s pop success isn’t hard
to fathom. In their best and most irreverent songs, they smartly marry a blasting swing sound with lyrics that gamely tackle
the dysfunction of the nineties. For a signature Daddies’ tune, just check out “Drunk Daddy,” which opens with the following
line: “Momma married a big asshole / Whiskey bottles on the floor.”

Give ’em their props! The Royal Crowns are the true pioneers of the swing revival, bringing their pumped-up jazz to a whole
new generation for more than a decade. (For the full story of how they did it, check out chapter 2.) They’ve got the cred
and the cool and a range of influences as diverse as a Las Vegas buffet table. From Dashiell Hammett and film noir to juvenile
delinquent novels and Jim Thompson to punk and bebop, they throw it all into the mix. The result is that they’ve created a
hybrid brand of music they call gangster bop that’s hard to pigeonhole. Fronted by lead singer Eddie Nichols, they’ve toured
with the B-52’s and the Pretenders, recorded with Bette Midler, played on the Warped Tour, headlined the Desert Inn in Las
Vegas, performed at jazz festivals, and even opened for Kiss. “This isn’t anything like Glenn Miller would do,” says the band’s
trumpeter, Scott Steen. But is the band starting to show its sweet side as well? For their newest album,
Walk on Fire,
according to guitarist James Achor, “Eddie’s writing love songs.” Get ready to swoon.

Believe it or not, you can draw a line of inspiration from Tommy Dorsey to Brian Setzer. In the late eighties the former Stray
Cat first got the idea to take his brand of rockabilly and put a swing band behind it after he was scheduled to appear on
The Tonight Show.
A routine TV appearance perhaps. But the producers suggested Setzer do something totally different on air. They offered to
let him strum his guitar in front of the
Tonight Show
band, led by none other than the mighty trumpeter Doc Severinsen, who, believe it or not, got his start back in the forties
in the bands of Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Barnet, and Benny Goodman. And while the
Tonight Show
appearance never actually happened, the offer planted a seed in Setzer’s head. Cut to the early nineties. Setzer—with some
great advance money from Warner Records—decided to put his brainstorm into action. Putting together what are hands-down the
best musicians in the business, Setzer reinvented himself with the Brian Setzer Orchestra, which began playing its first gigs
in Los Angeles in 1993. “Man, I hit a brick wall,” he once told
Pulse
magazine. “It was like, what the hell are you doing? First of all, no one’s gonna book a big band, there’s too many guys
to pay. Then they’d ask, ‘What is a big band? Is that two drummers and four backup vocalists?’ They didn’t know what it was!”
Indeed, Setzer’s first two albums failed to spark. But the third,
The Dirty Boogie
—released in 1998 just as swing was about to hit critical mass—became a monster hit, no doubt helped immensely by the fortuitous
redo of Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail,” released at the same time as the Gap commercial, featuring the original. But
has Setzer—who won two Grammys in 1999 for
The Dirty Boogie
—really reinvented himself? Get beyond the Prima cover and this is still greaser rock, music that isn’t really that far afield
from “Rock This Town” and “Stray Cat Strut.” Not that that’s a problem. What could be better than getting to carry on the
tradition of Bill Haley and Eddie Cochran in two successful incarnations? This cat’s got at least a few more lives.

While they’ve been credited with convincing radio execs that retro music can be a hit—with their landmark 1996 calypso-tinged
song “Hell”—the Squirrel Nut Zippers, contrary to popular belief, aren’t really a swing band. In fact, they’ve strenuously
resisted being tagged with the swing label. Instead, this North Carolina band is a bunch of alt rock eccentrics who like to
play twenties hot jazz. Since forming in 1993, they’ve put out three albums,
Hot, Inevitable,
and
Perennial Favorites,
but the latest CD to look out for is
Jazz Squad,
the solo album from singer and resident banjo player Katharine Whalen. With her high but wry tone, she covers such pre–World
War II gems as “Deed I Do,” “Sugar,” and “Just You, Just Me.”

Perhaps the most dancer-friendly bandleader out there, Elliott started falling in love with Benny Goodman’s music when he
was ten and Fats Waller’s piano playing when he was sixteen, and he hasn’t stopped swinging since. Modeling his Los Angeles–based
fifteen-piece group on the orchestras of Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw circa 1939, Elliott plays a traditional big band style
of swing. He’s got great sidemen, a thrilling way with the keyboard, and a vocal group called the Lucky Stars who call to
mind the Pied Pipers. And he’s also an acute observer of the rapidly evolving swing scene, which shouldn’t be too surprising.
Elliott—who’s also a successful composer of movie and TV scores—started a jump blues band back in Boston two decades ago.
So what keeps his music fresh? Often it’s because he takes inspiration directly from Lindy Hoppers. In fact, he recently wrote
a song called “Shim Sham Shimmy” inspired by the dance of the same name. “Not every band can play at a medium tempo and have
it really cook,” he says. “I take pride in the fact that we can do music that isn’t fast but is still exciting.”