Bought Arrangements and a Borrowed Sound
The swing era began with a transaction. In 1934, Fletcher Henderson, whose orchestra had pioneered big band jazz in New York since the early 1920s, was broke. His band had splintered, and he needed cash. Benny Goodman, a twenty-five-year-old clarinetist from Chicago, had just landed a slot on the Let’s Dance radio show, a three-hour Saturday night broadcast on NBC sponsored by the National Biscuit Company. Goodman needed arrangements fast. Henderson sold him dozens: King Porter Stomp, Down South Camp Meetin’, Sometimes I’m Happy, Bugle Call Rag. Within months, Goodman had roughly seventy Henderson charts in his book. These arrangements, built on call-and-response between saxophone and brass sections, riff-based backgrounds behind soloists, and a propulsive four-to-the-bar rhythm, became the blueprint for the swing era.
Goodman was born on May 30, 1909, the ninth of twelve children in a poor Jewish immigrant family on Chicago’s West Side. His father sent three sons for music lessons at the synagogue. The biggest got a tuba, the middle one a trumpet, and Benny, the smallest, a clarinet. He studied under Franz Schoepp of the Chicago Symphony at Jane Addams’s Hull House. By sixteen he was a working professional.
Let’s Dance aired from 10:30 p.m. Eastern, meaning West Coast listeners heard Goodman’s hottest sets at prime evening hours. When the show ended in May 1935, Goodman booked a cross-country tour that flopped everywhere. By the time the band reached the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on August 21, 1935, morale was low. Goodman opened with stock arrangements to a flat response, then pulled out the Henderson charts for the second set. The room erupted. The teenagers who had been listening on the radio at 7:30 p.m. Pacific had come to hear that music live. Time magazine called Goodman the “King of Swing” in 1937.
The Savoy and the Battling Bands
The real laboratory for swing was a dance hall. The Savoy Ballroom, at 596 Lenox Avenue in Harlem, opened March 12, 1926: 10,000 square feet, room for 4,000 people, a double bandstand so one group could start the instant the other finished. Unlike the Cotton Club, which barred Black patrons, the Savoy enforced a no-discrimination policy from opening night.
The Savoy’s resident king was Chick Webb, a drummer from Baltimore who stood four feet tall due to spinal tuberculosis. He played a custom-built elevated kit and hit harder than anyone. His band held off all challengers in the “Battle of the Bands” format, where two orchestras played alternating sets and the crowd picked the winner by volume of applause. Webb defeated Goodman in 1937; in 1938, he bested Count Basie, who later said he was relieved simply not to have embarrassed himself. In 1935, Webb hired a seventeen-year-old singer named Ella Fitzgerald, fresh from winning Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater. Their 1938 recording of A-Tisket, A-Tasket hit number one. Webb died on June 16, 1939, at thirty-four.
The Savoy also produced the Lindy Hop, named after Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic flight. Herbert “Whitey” White, a former boxer turned bouncer, organized the ballroom’s best dancers into Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, choreographed by Frankie Manning, who invented the “air step,” a move in which a dancer is flipped over a partner’s back mid-swing. The troupe appeared in the 1941 film Hellzapoppin’ before its male members were drafted.
Kansas City and Two Orchestras
Kansas City, Missouri, where the Pendergast political machine kept clubs open all night through Prohibition, was swing’s second capital. Its jam session culture ran on one rule: anyone could sit in, and you played until someone cut you.
Count Basie arrived in 1927 and joined the Bennie Moten Orchestra. When Moten died in 1935, Basie formed the Barons of Rhythm at the Reno Club. Producer John Hammond heard them on a late-night radio broadcast in 1936 and brought them to New York. The rhythm section (Basie on piano, Freddie Green on guitar, Walter Page on bass, Jo Jones on drums) became the model for every swing band that followed. Basie played sparely, dropping single notes with deliberate space. Lester Young, his tenor saxophonist, floated long cool lines that contradicted everything people expected from a jazz soloist.
Duke Ellington operated on a different plane. His orchestra was a composing instrument: he wrote parts for the specific timbres of individual players, from the growling plunger-muted trumpet of Cootie Williams to the liquid clarinet of Barney Bigard. During a residency at Harlem’s Cotton Club from December 1927 to mid-1931, he composed over 100 works while radio broadcasts carried his music nationwide. By 1940, with bassist Jimmy Blanton, tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, and arranger Billy Strayhorn in the fold, the orchestra reached its peak. The 1940 to 1942 recordings (Cotton Tail, Ko-Ko, Concerto for Cootie) remain among the most sophisticated ensemble writing in American music.
The Carnegie Hall Concert
On January 16, 1938, Goodman brought his orchestra to Carnegie Hall, the first time a jazz band had played the venue. The 2,760 seats sold out at a top price of $2.75. The program included guest musicians from Ellington’s and Basie’s bands, plus Goodman’s racially integrated quartet with pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. The climax was Sing, Sing, Sing, twelve minutes driven by Gene Krupa’s tom-tom pattern. Goodman’s friend Albert Marx had the concert recorded as a gift for his wife. The acetate discs sat in Goodman’s closet for twelve years until Columbia released them in 1950; the album became one of the first LPs to sell a million copies.
The Unraveling
The swing era was dismantled by economics and policy. On August 1, 1942, James C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, called a recording ban: no union musician could make a commercial record until labels paid royalties into a fund for live performance. Decca settled by late 1943, but RCA Victor and Columbia held out until November 1944. For over two years the two largest labels released nothing with instrumentalists. Vocalists, who belonged to a different union, kept recording; singers like Frank Sinatra became solo stars.
Then came the tax. In 1944, the federal government imposed a 30 percent excise on any venue that served food or drink and allowed dancing. The rate later dropped to 20 percent, but ballroom revenue collapsed. By 1946, Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Harry James had all dissolved their orchestras. The tax was not fully repealed until 1965. Clubs that presented only instrumental music to a seated audience were exempt, and it is no accident that bebop, the small-group, non-dancing music that replaced swing, emerged in precisely those rooms.
Essential Listening
- Benny Goodman – The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (1950)
- Duke Ellington – Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band (2003)
- Count Basie – The Complete Decca Recordings (1992)
- Chick Webb – Stompin’ at the Savoy (1968)
- Jimmie Lunceford – For Dancers Only (1949)
- Artie Shaw – Begin the Beguine (1938)
- Glenn Miller – Chattanooga Choo Choo: The #1 Hits (1991)
- Lionel Hampton – Hamp: The Legendary Decca Recordings (1996)
- Fletcher Henderson – A Study in Frustration (1961)
- Tommy Dorsey – Yes Indeed! (1990)
- Ella Fitzgerald & Chick Webb – The Complete Decca Sessions (1934–1941) (2013)
- Lester Young – The Complete Aladdin Recordings (1995)