Another influence on the Swing Era was whom we have mentioned but not discussed at length is Duke Ellington. To classify the Ellington Orchestra as swing would be absurd. Like the giants of jazz, Ellington is beyond classification. His music was its own jazz school.
Indeed, the Ellington orchestra did not prefer to swing as much as they were capable of it:
Duke Ellington - Cotton Club Stomp - YouTube
Duke was a composer and loved to work with moods no differently than a classical composer. His use of subtlety and nuance could rarely be matched and his musicians knew what he wanted. Swing, in contrast, was loud, fast music for the kids who loved it so that’s where the money was prompting Duke to comment that “jazz is music, swing is business.”
However, his placement on the timescale of jazz as well as his fateful decision to move to Harlem from Washington DC enabled him and his band to make indelible contributions to the emerging swing subgenre. In the early days of the era, Ellington and his musicians were laying down riffs that were certainly causing the up-and-coming swing bands to sit up and take notice. It could have hardly have been avoided.
Despite the 1935 date for the start of the Swing Era, I place it at 1928. What really set off the new generation jazz musicians from the earlier ones was simply training. Where the earlier jazz musicians such as the brilliant Freddie Keppard were often musically illiterate, the new generation was highly trained. Many, such as Mary Lou Williams, could write and arrange scores for entire orchestras. Even those that lacked that level of musical sophistication were impressive sight-readers. This is because the new generation was classically trained. Playing in large swing orchestras would simply have been impossible without it. Even earlier jazz musicians who taught themselves to play by ear had to learn to read music such as Kid Ory (who couldn’t have played for Jelly Roll Morton without being able to read) and bassist Wellman Braud (who, after all, would go on to play bass for Duke who demanded all his musicians be competent sight-readers). Louis Armstrong was not that good of a sight-reader until he married Lillian Hardin who was classically trained on piano at Fisk University. She turned him into one of the best sight-readers in all of jazz. He could not have played for Fletcher Henderson without it. There were exceptions such as Bix Beiderbecke who never learned to sight-read particularly well but made up for it with his amazing improvisatory gift.
What the classical training did in the late 20s was allow jazz a much wider cultural and musical expression by incorporating classical music and Tin Pan Alley fare. In this way, jazz was able to reach out to a wider audience as well as attract a higher grade of musician to the genre. It was the very beginnings of jazz as art music. Indeed, songs as “I’m in the Mood for Love” never could have entered the jazz idiom otherwise nor could its authors, Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, have become household names within jazz without this broadening of the jazz’s horizons by a new crop of more musically sophisticated musicians into its ranks. Art Tatum made a living of taking ordinary popular songs and turning them into incredible jazz masterpieces.
One band that deserves a lot of credit for the birth of the Swing Era, even more than Goddman’s, is Jimmie Lunceford & the Harlem Express. Goodman gets more mention in the history books because Lunceford’s popularity rested mainly in the black public and only nominally among whites. Nevertheless, Lunceford drew more people to his shows than Goodman and was doing this at least two years before Goodman started to play swing. In fact, Goodman didn’t really start to swing until he added Vido Musso on tenor sax to his orchestra in 1936. (Musso was a funny character whose English skills left something to be desired. Once while touring in Stan Kenton’s band, he told someone on the tour bus to crack open a window “before we all get sophisticated.”)
Like Goodman, Lunceford enjoyed radio success while playing at the Cotton Club, his radio stint starting a couple of months before Goodman’s. While Goodman is often credited with starting the racially integrated jazz band in 1935, Lunceford was already working with white composers, arrangers and musicians in 1933. His band was also the first with blacks to play at white colleges. Lunceford, as a rule, never played in segregated establishments preferring the venues known as “black & tans” that admitted white and black clients. While Goodman was dubbed the King of Swing by the white press in 1935, Lunceford was dubbed the “King of Syncopation” by the black press seven or eight months prior to that.
Jimmie Lunceford, "JAZZNOCRACY" (1934) - YouTube
“Jazznocracy” was the Lunceford band’s signature song for quite a while before changing it to “Uptown Blues.” Recorded in 1934, there is no doubt that this is swing well before its supposed “birth” at the Palomar Ballroom.
JImmie Lunceford And His Orchestra - YouTube
“Rhythm is Our Business” was the band’s slogan. A wonderful live clip of the Harlem Express. This gives you an idea of what you would have seen had you gone to the Cotton Club in the thirties. That’s the great Sy Oliver on trumpet.
The Lunceford band specialized in hard swing numbers or what they called “flag-wavers.” The time was right for it. In the wake of major wars, there are baby booms. We know of the most recent one that occurred just after Word War II and the generation that was being born at that time is appropriately known as “baby-boomers.” But a similar boom occurred in the wake of World War I in 1918. Since the U.S. spent only six months in that war, the boom wasn’t as huge as the one that occurred after the Second World War but it was fairly sizable and peaked about 1921. The generation born in those post-war years were now anywhere from 13-17 years old when the Swing Era started. This was the core of the swing generation. They were coming of age and their musical preferences drove the marketplace. They didn’t want Tin Pan Alley songs or ragtime or melodramatic wartime fare, they wanted to cut loose and vent their pent-up energy on the dance floor. Lunceford and Goodman were there to answer the call and others soon jumped in the fray—the Dorseys, Basie, Gene Krupa, Anita O’Day, Andy Kirk, Mary Lou Williams, Stan Kenton, Harry James, etc. Each had their own brand, their own stamp, on swing music.