When Benny Goodman made his first radio broadcast in 1935, he couldn't possibly have known that his music would change America and later the world forever. And he could never have imagined, with his bank manager looks, that he'd become one of the world's first global pop stars. And the music was called swing. Everything in life got a beat and that's what swing was. The riff starts, you can see the audience, they're lighting up, and by the end of it they're standing up and dancing.
And it's the physical effect that it has on people, that's why the swing music is great. Decades before the 60s, it sparked the world's first youth cultural revolution. That was what the whole Swing era was about, was the dancing. Without dancing, there would have been no Swing era.
Swing was labeled as dangerous music that made you have sex with people. Swing has thrown up some of the most iconic stars of the 20th century. Today, it's still topping the charts with some of the biggest names in music. Robbie Williams'Swing album went platinum seven times over.
Nearly a hundred years on, Swing remains the longest-lived, most successful and coolest form of popular music. Of course, one never snaps one's fingers on the beat. It's considered aggressive. You don't push it, you just let it fall. Like this.
And of course, if you're real cool, then you're going to manage to affect a tilt of the left earlobe at the same time, like this, you know. And if you're cooler than that, then of course, you tilt the left earlobe on the beat and snap the finger on the afterbeat like this, you know. As a matter of fact, by rotating the tilting of the air lobe and snapping the finger, one can become as cool as one wishes to be.
We took a poll on the campus and almost everybody voted for Artie Shaw's band. Artie Shaw! Who's Artie Shaw?
Yeah! At its most basic, Swing is a mixture of orchestrated big band music and improvised jazz. In the 1930s, it turned band leaders like Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw into pop music's first superstars. They earned as much as $60,000 a week, roughly half a million pounds in today's money. Much of the credit for this goes to band leader Benny Goodman who, in 1935, almost single-handedly, turned swing into a global pop phenomenon.
The real credit for its creation, however, belongs elsewhere. and in an earlier time. The story of Swing is partly about poverty, crime and sex, but chiefly it's about race, and it starts in New York in the 1920s, where the music scene was as segregated as America.
Slavery had been abolished, but its legacy was a country divided along the lines of race, which meant that in much of America, African Americans could not drink at the same water fountains, eat at the same restaurants, or sit next to white people on the same bus. Black and white had died together in the First World War, but in post-war America, they lived separate lives and listened to different music. Subtitles by the Amara.org community White music had developed from foxtrots and polkas, black music from Africa and the jazz of New Orleans. But in the lean years following the First World War, what both audiences had in common was a thirst for fun, and that meant dancing. King of the white dance bands was Paul Whiteman.
Paul Whiteman became the band leader elect of the 1920s. Everything else was a smaller group. They were more like Vixieland groups, but they weren't as organized.
Paul Whiteman started, in my way of thinking, the organized type of band. He had people like Big Spiderbeck in the band that he featured. He had Bing Crosby.
Paul Whiteman was at the beginning of it. Paul Whiteman's smooth big band was perfect hotel music for a generation that wanted to dance the Charleston and forget the horrors of the First World War. It had elements of jazz but drew heavily on classical music.
Classically trained George Gershwin was one of Whiteman's chief collaborators. In 1924, Whiteman commissioned Gershwin to write Rhapsody in Blue, one of the first pieces of symphonic jazz. It has become a staple in the repertoire of classical music.
It was a style of music that would influence classical composers from Aaron Copland to Leonard Bernstein. What this well-organized big band music did not have was any of jazz's wild sounds or improvisation. For that, you had to turn to a black tradition of music, the jazz of New Orleans and Chicago.
Its greatest exponent, one of the most influential musicians of all time, was Louis Armstrong. And it was he, more than anyone else, who provided the inspiration for swing. And we're going to swing for you. In 1923, Paul Whiteman was amongst the many New York musicians who flocked to hear him play in Joe King Oliver's band.
I was looking around, Joe Oliver and myself was playing duets, all the musicians, Bix and all them boys come by, Paul Whiteman said, listen to us play and let them know how we did it, you know. I thought so much of him until I had... notes, second trumpet notes to all the riffs and all them breaks he used to make.
The breaks you hear now, they originated by Joe, and I had a note for every one of them. They thought that was marvelous. Couldn't nobody trick us. Armstrong's familiar showbiz personality makes it easy to forget that he was one of the greatest trumpet players the world has ever seen. MUSIC PLAYS Jazz starts with the rhythm.
The melody is very crucial, the harmony is crucial, but I'm a rhythm guy. I like that groove, you know, tap your foot. If you can't tap your foot, Duke Ellington say, don't mean a thing if it doesn't have that swing.
Louis Armstrong was about swinging. Armstrong was known as Pops, and he was the father of jazz, a master of one of the vital components that would come to define swing, improvisation. He's the greatest. I'm so happy to have been on the scene with him, become a good friend of his.
He and I and Dizzy used to live in the same neighborhood, rather, and occasionally Dizzy and I would call each other upset. Let's go bug Pops. So we'd walk up to Pops'house and ring the bell, and Lou would say, who is it?
She said, it looks like Diz and Clark. He said, little man, little man, my man. So we'd go in, and he'd say, sit down. I'm going to give you a kiss. the history of jazz.
And he was, of course, the history of jazz. Armstrong was the very definition of a virtuoso. He could spontaneously invent new melodies as he played. There was the idea of improvisation, where as we the kids say, you do your own thing.
Well, yes, there was this freedom to express yourself, and this was pure joy, because as we all know, And when we can do that, whether speaking or singing or playing or whatever, we feel good about it. When we can tell our story, and if you can tell it musically or otherwise, that's a good thing. And Louis Armstrong was the first great jazz improviser. He set the mold for everyone to come after him. Growing up in Jamaica, me hearing that feeling in the music ended up being called swing.
There was a pulse and a rhythm and it was, I knew from a very early age that it was all this New Orleans influence. And I think what New Orleans was, was a real melting pot, a cauldron of all these peoples coming from various places. When you say New Orleans, right away it stood for the groove. Armstrong was raised in New Orleans where music was a fundamental part of the city's way of life.
New Orleans produced some of the greatest improvisers of the age. People sing because they can't vote. People play instruments because they don't have political power or social mobility.
People sing or play instruments because they don't have economic opportunities. People sing or play music because they don't have a system of justice that is equal to what was going on in terms of citizenship or whatnot. So music played a very practical and functional role. It was the primary, if you will, method and means of expression and communication for a people who felt ostracized and disenfranchised.
Young Louis Armstrong grew up expecting local musicians to be playing at nearly all important events, birth, marriage and death. Jazz is still the order of the day at funerals in New Orleans, happy on the way back from the funeral and sad on the way there. Steal away, steal away, steal away home to my Lord. Some of the greatest names in jazz, such as Jelly Roll Morton, started their careers as jobbing musicians at the home of the recently deceased.
Of course, now when the dead man would be there, he wouldn't hear anything that we would be singing at all, nothing. And of course we'd all go right on back to the kitchen and get our cheese sandwiches, ham sandwiches, all slappin'over with mustard and some whiskey and can the bed sometimes. And sometimes if it was a man bed, a lot of times the lady would be glad, you know, the wife to the husband would be glad that it was gone. And she would of course, she'd be havin'a wonderful time also.
But the magnet for many of the city's greatest musicians was the prospect of work in Storyville. This was New Orleans'officially licensed red light district, and there was plenty of jobs for musicians to play in the lobbies of brothels and drinking dens. It was where a very young Louis Armstrong found work, delivering coal in an area that was usually off-limits. Music brought me out of it just because I was working for a white man. I didn't have no problem at all.
I could hear the best music there was down there. All your best musicians. Like many of the greatest jazz musicians, Armstrong had extraordinarily wide-ranging tastes in music throughout his life. Growing up in New Orleans, he was soaked in church music, ragtime and the blues, as well as pop tunes.
His technical brilliance allowed him to absorb all of it at his own feel and turn it into a brand new music. Decided and got capable of improvising, then everything changed. He was so relaxed and so flexible and so elastic and so swinging, you know. But that also made it very attractive to outsiders who listened to it and who watched it. Because they were attracted to this freedom of improvisation, this joy that was being expressed by these people.
I'll be glad when you're dead, she writes for you. I'll be glad when you're dead, she writes for you. When you're laid six feet deep, no more fried chicken when you eat. Ha ha ha, that'll break your heart. You love chicken, yeah.
In 1924, Armstrong's New Orleans sound was about to change the course of 20th century popular music. This was the year he teamed up with an African-American big band leader from New York, who, like so many, was mesmerized by Armstrong's talent. His name was Fletcher Henderson.
In New York City, it was either you either think about Paul Whiteman or you think about Fletcher Henderson. Like the other New York musicians, Henderson was blown away by what Armstrong had done with the jazz of New Orleans and the fusion of the two would create what we now know as swing. When Fletcher Henderson first heard Armstrong, he told everybody that he had heard this guy who could really swing. And as far as we know, that's the first time that phrase was, or that term was used to describe a certain way of playing the rhythm. And so it really originates with Armstrong.
Fletcher Henderson had seen the future and in 1924 he persuaded Armstrong to come to New York and join his band. So when he comes to play with Fletcher Henderson's band, this is like the hottest band in New York. So this country boy walks in, you know, they don't think much of him. But once he started playing though, then they knew what the deal was. They knew he could do something they couldn't do.
You could actually say, I think with no exaggeration, that the swing era starts when Louis Armstrong plays with Fletcher Henderson. Now, jazz was a music that was not written. They played it, but they didn't write it.
Fletcher Henderson began putting those notes down on paper, and out of that came the great swing bands. Henderson had been taking a master's degree in chemistry when he realized America had no place for a black scientist. He switched to bandleading and relied heavily on Don Redman, his saxophone player, the son of a music teacher, to write arrangements incorporating Armstrong's virtuosity and improvisation into the big band sound. Fletcher Henderson started out accompanying blues singers and had his own band, but it wasn't until the arrival of Louis Armstrong that actually gave a kick to Fletcher's band. It really gave Henderson a vehicle to bass arrangements.
around. And this is what we begin to talk about the development of the swing formula. The way of arranging the big band to keep this sound moving that makes people want to dance. You can have one section playing a melody and the rest of the sections backing them up with these little riffs or these little shouts if you will and then who plays the melody changes.
Who plays the shouts changes. So you have this unique dynamic that is new. When you hear the earlier jazz recordings, it's a lot more improvisational.
Once they started writing the things out, of course, you're getting two halves of stuff. You're getting part of the people playing the written part, and then somebody improvising. over the top.
Music is one of the few art forms where the fact that you're focusing on two or three things happening at once is what gives you the the vibration that is really great and with the big band is the most perfect. vehicle for that. So if somebody has written out sort of a big riff going, well I can't play on the piano because I've got enough hands, but if somebody's got, you know, the rhythm section keeping the...
and then the sort of saxophones... or whatever it is they're playing... and then somebody on the top on a clarinet or whatever is going there... and so you're getting this, but you can, when you hear all the three things at once... Then, that's when the whole thing worked.
When Fletcher Henderson unleashed Swing in New York in 1924, it was at just the right time and in just the right place. It became the soundtrack for one of the greatest explosions of African-American culture the world had ever seen. George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern may have been the kings of popular music of the time, but in the New York district of Harlem, everyone was listening to Swing. It was helping to turn the area into the black cultural capital of the world. Since the beginning of the century, an emerging black middle class had colonized Harlem and turned it into a haven for the many escaping rural depression and racism.
Harlem was the one place black people could come to and be free. No place else. That's why people came.
They came from the south, they came from the west, they can walk. they could ride, whatever way they got to Harlem, because it was there. Whatever they wanted to do, there was the best place that they could do it was in Harlem, and there was nothing to stop them from doing it. So that became a magnet.
With the arrival of intellectuals and writers like Langston Hughes and Marcus Garvey, 20s Harlem experienced what was known as the Harlem Renaissance. For the first time, the world became aware that the world was a place of the free. of African-American culture. Josephine Baker rocked Paris, and a Harlem Revue called Blackbirds was a huge hit in 20s London. Everybody came to Harlem, everybody.
Poets, singers, writers, they were all condensed in this one small area. So here you had the most talented, most brilliant-minded people who had no freedom. Hair was a place. You could write your books, you could produce your great Cat Calloways and Bill Robinson.
Every place was a rehearsal hall. That's all I used to do on Saturday was go from one rehearsal hall to the other. Because I just wanted to be, I wanted to be one of them. Into this artistic melting pot stepped arguably the greatest American composer of the 20th century, and he took swing to ...to a whole new level. Edward Kennedy Ellington's natural grace had earned him the nickname Duke at the age of seven.
He was born into a middle-class household in Washington, D.C., and moved to New York in 1923. When he heard Fletcher Henderson's band, with its complex interplay between instruments, he knew that swing was the perfect new framework for his own refined style of music. The thing that made Duke Ellington unique was that he really discovered how to blend the refined and the raw perfectly. It was a devastating combination.
By the late 20s, swing was by far the dominant form of jazz. Ellington and the rest of them were really taking over. A jazz band that was a swing band, it was a dance band, it wasn't pure jazz. And a lot of the early jazz fans were very well aware of this.
And they said, this stuff that's being... played by Ellington or Henderson. It's not the true jazz.
The true jazz is the New Orleans jazz. It didn't matter. The New Orleans jazz was dead, and whatever kind of jazz you're going to have was going to be played in the context of a big dance band.
Well, you know, sometimes a tune just comes into you, knocks you down, you can't resist it, and you just have to put it down. And usually it associates itself with some specific performance. You could take any 18-piece orchestra, 15, 18-piece orchestra, and line them up and have them to play one of Ellington's charts and then have Ellington's band play it, and it wouldn't swing as much because Duke knew how to use the people that he had in his band.
Some members of Ellington's band stayed with him for 45 years. What is the secret of keeping a band together for as long as you do? Well, you've got to have a gimmick, Humphrey.
And it's a... the one I use, I mean, I use a gimmick, is give them money. Yes, I can see that's very popular.
Because he had the same people in the group for such a long time, that meant that you got this not only consistency of sound, but it... In the end, the thing that I'm starting to achieve with my band, although my big band has been, I suppose, going for maybe 15 years, 10, 15 years, is they start thinking as one, and so you no longer have to explain things. Some things you write an arrangement out, other things... you just start playing and people find parts that are actually better than the ones you'd write out because they the band thinks as one and not only could his band if they wanted to they could play the blues and swing that straight away if they wanted to but they could go off in all sorts of other tangents but it always had what the ellingtonian thing was you could always tell it was him many of the techniques allenton expected of his band had previously been the preserve of classical musicians.
Circular breathing, for example, a fiendishly difficult technique that allowed brass players in his band to sustain a note indefinitely. You take an intake of air through your nostril. And while you're breathing that air through your nostril into your lungs, your jaws are filled with air. Push the jaws like that.
So it's like... And at the same time, you have to realize, I haven't played in a couple of days, so I don't have any ambition, but you have to buzz. As long as you can keep a buzzer and keep your chops buzzer like that, you can go on forever.
Don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing. It was Duke Ellington who first noticed that swing was a bit more than just a form of music. Swing was the music of black self-expression.
But most importantly of all, it was dance music. And on the dance floor, anyone was free to get up and let themselves go. You're dancing to the beat. And that's what it was.
It was the beat. And everything in life got a beat. And that's what swing was.
I mean, you couldn't listen to the music and not dance to it. Throughout the 1920s, dance had remained one of the key forms of entertainment for black and white audiences in America. Crazies had come and gone, but the most popular dance of the decade had been the Charleston. Young white college students had scandalised their elders by wildly jigging about or flapping.
This dance was taken by African-American audiences and adapted to suit their music swing. The resulting dance, the Lindy Hop, was a careful combination of the organized and the improvised. The most famous dance troupe of the day was Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, and Norma Miller, born in was one of its key members.
They were the resident dancers at the Temple of Swing Dancing, the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Harlem's hot and noisy Savoy. Well, I was 12. I wasn't supposed to be there, but I got in there because of Twist Mount George.
That was Easter Sunday and they had a matinee and you left church and you went up to Harlem because you wanted to see the Easter Sunday. parade and that was a time coming out the winter coats and things and you saw clothes that you couldn't believe and this was an Easter Sunday and I was standing outside the Savoy because I wanted to see the people going in they were dressed up in this man called me and wanted me to, you know, when the music started playing, I was out there dancing in the street like all kids. And he asked me to come up and dance with him at the Savoy Bar. Well, this is what we did seven days a week. We had to learn a routine.
We would train like athletes. I mean, this was every day, rehearsing, rehearsing, until we became the the best in the world. We were just the best. Your life began with swing.
For large swathes of America, however, the open exuberance of swing dancing confirmed their opinion that this latest form of jazz was a threat to the nation's morals. Worse still, it thrived in the illegal drinking clubs or speakeasies that flourished in the Prohibition era. The speakeasies did a land office business, and Texas Guided, with their gals, kept customers roaring. Duke Ellington was the star turn at Harlem's legendary Cotton Club, a few hundred yards from the Savoy Ballroom.
The Cotton Club was owned by British-born gangster Oney Madden, one of New York's most influential and violent citizens. Jazz has always originated in places that allowed it to nurture. Like, it was always in either whorehouses, nightclubs that had a lot of drinking, had a lot of dancing.
But most of all, places that were run by the rackets. Gangsters, basically. And they loved jazz musicians because it was happy music that made people feel good.
And for some reason, I never knew any jazz musicians that worked in those places that had any trouble with the gangsters at all. We were in Cotton Cuff for five years. We had a wonderful spot. It was owned by people who were very influential and prestigious with having things accomplished. And the great...
thing was about it that when the show on and they did have a wonderful show no one was allowed to talk and some guy would start talking and the waiter was coming sir would you please and the next thing you go on and next the captain would come come over and the next thing you know the head waiter would come and then the next thing you think the guy would just disappear that of course is that in being the what the prohibition here era wouldn't it yes by that time yeah did you have any trouble with federal federal agents or anything like that you know federal agent no no i didn't i uh there was never another anything left for them Unlike the Savoy, Oney Madden's Cotton Club was exclusively for rich, white New Yorkers. That was right up the street, but you can work the Cotton Club, you couldn't go in the Cotton Club. But I never went in the Cotton Club anyway.
I couldn't even afford to go to the Cotton Club. Club. But they had black shows, but white audiences. As a matter of fact, white people took over Harlem at nighttime when I was coming up.
I guess when I was about 13 years old, I became aware. of jazz on a Duke Ellington record. I let a song go out of my heart.
And of course, it was the first time I really heard jazz. Of course, in my house, my mother was an opera lover, concert goer, chamber music person. And the nearest I ever got to jazz was George Gershwin on our piano, a music role.
I guess that's what started. And from there on in, man, I couldn't get enough of it. Duke Ellington may have been playing in a segregated club, but he wrote a series of pieces that captured the mood of black America as the high hopes of the Harlem Renaissance floundered on the realities of prejudice and economic hardship.
Duke had first-hand experience of how America could treat some of its greatest musicians. In 1931, he was on the radio in Chicago, but the show wasn't broadcast nationally. Advertisers didn't want to be linked to a black performer. He was at a dinner and it was segregated and he got invited to the white table and Duke said, well I'm not going unless the entire orchestra goes over there.
And so they went back and they asked the people hosting the party if that would be okay. And they said no, but you should come over anyways. And then my grandfather took exception and left with the entire orchestra.
Racism wasn't the only problem Ellington and the other bands faced. The stock market crash of 1929 started the Great American Depression of the 30s. Only the biggest crowd-pleasing bands could survive, providing a jolly antidote to the economic reality. And then there was an error on the part of show business managers. They thought jazz was dead.
That was something that had happened in the 20s. It was finished. It was over.
It was a fad. Forget about it. What people want is nice, dreamy, and very slow dancing and this kind of thing.
And they were wrong. Easy-listening big bands seemed to be taking over, and by the early 30s, Fletcher Henderson was on his uppers. Desperate for money, he started selling his precious arrangements. He sold some to a brilliant young clarinetist.
His name was Benny Goodman. He swung on his clarinet, whether he had a band behind him or a small group behind him, he was just a swinger. I think he was a natural virtuoso.
He wasn't an original, he didn't have an original style, except one which he created from the hybridness he took from several other clarinets. but he was clever enough to do that and make it individual. And he could do anything.
I still get astounded half a century or more later, some tracks that I'd never heard of Benny Goodman, where he hits on a new idea that I'd never heard before. and he probably never used again after that record session, but he could just do anything he wanted. By the time Benny Goodman arrived, Swing was ten years old and had already spawned some of America's greatest musicians, but it was yet to be embraced by mainstream America. Benny Goodman changed all that.
In terms of success, he was about to become the Elvis Presley of Swing. Goodman was heavily indebted to Fletcher Henderson's arrangements. Goodman could have never had the sound he had without Fletcher Henderson.
So we're talking about a man of color. who wrote for Benny Goodman. When he did the King Porter Stump, it was Fletcher Henderson who wrote that arrangement. So it might have been played by white musicians, honey, but they were getting their soul and their spirit from Fletcher Henderson because he was something else. He was a real swinger.
In Goodman's hands, swing would go mainstream and become the soundtrack for the first sighting of the American teenager, a full-time... Twenty years before the arrival of rock and roll, adults were baffled. Swing! Swing!
What does the dictionary say about rhythm? As we feared, a measured beat. Let's measure it with our special camera.
The exposure is made with a spark. Benny Goodman was one of 12 children born into a poverty-stricken Chicago family. Like many Jewish musicians, he saw jazz as a way in to mainstream American culture and a way of making a living.
By the age of 16, he was working professionally in white big bands. Later, when he moved to New York, he spent a lot of time in Harlem and became one of the first white band leaders to play alongside African-American musicians. If Betty wished for anything, he'd wish to be coloured.
Because he used to spend all his time in Harlem. And when he heard Teddy Wilson, he flipped out. When he heard Lionel Hampton, he hired him immediately.
Jazz brought the races together. And that's how Benny Goodman had the first black musicians in his band. And it just went on from there.
Other black musicians, that's how it broke out of that mold. Black musicians couldn't go into hotels. White musicians couldn't play jazz without a black man sitting beside him.
It was as simple as that. When you listen to them, you actually get the impression, or I got the impression when I first heard them, that this is a black guy. On the clarinet, playing with some white guys on these other instruments. Goodman might have been colorblind, but America was not.
Racial prejudice had stopped Duke Ellington's radio show being transmitted across the country. For a white band leader like Goodman, however, there was no such restrictions, and in 1934, his breakthrough came on a radio show. By this time, many dance halls had been brought to their knees by the Depression, and radio had begun to fill the gap for dance music. Goodman landed a spot on NBC's nationally broadcast music show, Let's Dance. A program called Let's Dance, where he was the orchestra selected for the jazz part.
The producers of that show realized that the collapse of the ballroom business and the death of the bands of the 20s was largely an economic thing. The people still wanted to have a dance on Saturday night. They just didn't have a place to go or money to pay for the entry. And the places had folded because nobody was going.
So they gave them a Saturday night dance on the radio. Somebody could put a radio out and they would have their own little homebrew dance. And the show clicked.
It was very popular. When Goodman's radio show led to a national tour, Middle America, it was felt, wasn't ready for a mixed-race big band. So the big band he took on the road was all white. He loved playing with black musicians, but he was very conservative. He came from a very poor family, and they worried about getting anything to eat, let alone getting enough to eat.
And Benny was the first one to be able to make any money, and he wasn't about to jeopardize that because he was supporting the whole family. I mean he loved playing with the black musicians but he was afraid that he just wouldn't be accepted and as it was he couldn't play in the South with them. In the spring of 1935 Benny Goodman's all-white big band set out on the tour that would change the history of popular music forever but it all started very badly.
It wasn't genteel enough for some of these these people. And they couldn't stand it because he was too loud. And they got to Denver, and the only people in the audience were friends of the musicians, and Benny was ready to turn back and give up the band-leading business. But his musicians talked him into continuing the tour, and they made it out to Los Angeles. I think August 21st, 1935 is widely held to be the inauguration of the swing era.
That was the day Benny Goodman turned up at the Palomar Ballroom. The Palomar Ballroom called itself the largest and most famous dance hall on the West Coast. Its dance floor could accommodate 4,000 couples. After his dismal tour, Goodman was sure most of it would be empty. An estimated 10,000 people showed up to hear the Goodman Band.
Apparently, his nationwide radio show had been airing in California, and people had been listening. And the place went nuts. And then the word got out, and all the other kids, it had to be a thing, you had to go hear the Benny Goodman Band, so it was a great success.
Swing was a phenomenon, and just the way the Beatles turned out to be a phenomenon, you know, 40 years later, 30 years later. It was 1935. America was still in the depths of depression, and the world was waking up to the possibility of war. Against this unlikely backdrop, America's teenagers had found something to celebrate, an exciting new music they could call their own and dance to. A new kind of jazz, something called swing, and Benny Goodman is the king of it. It starts in the dance joints, jams the theaters, even raises the roof at classical Carnegie Hall.
Now you have young teenagers who are able to... Embrace not only buying Benny Goodman records, but now they come out in droves to see him. It became a social thing to do as a part of your social life as a teenager.
To go to dances and that was part of the romantic scene and so forth. And it was part of the youth culture. First, the basis of every swing band is the rhythm section.
Mass youth culture and American popular music exploded in the middle of the American Depression. Everyone wanted to know about swing. In Artie Shaw's rhythm section, we have drums, piano, guitar, and bass fiddle. You can hear the rhythm section through every swing tune. Now, on top of this, an intricate melody.
Artie Shaw and his famous clarinet, then a saxophone section, playing melody and harmony, and finally, a brass section of trombones and trumpets for full coloring and a full band effect. And we've got swing that's really in the groove. White teenagers were driving the swing phenomenon and bands such as Artie Shores and Jimmy Dorseys joined Benny Goodman on the radio, on record and on film.
The dance always associated with swing, the Lindy Hop, crossed over to a white audience to become something else, the Jitterbug. Young white women hadn't been seen dancing like this before. Adult America, already suspicious of the music's African-American origins, was horrified.
Swing was labeled as dangerous music that made you have sex. And, you know, I think people are all interested in sex and danger to a certain extent, as long as no one gets hurt. And, you know, music's not really going to hurt you. You're probably just going to have a good time.
Swing was more than music. For the teenagers embracing it, it offered a way of life. Music, a code of dress, even a language.
It was the world's first youth culture. Swing music acts as a narcotic and makes them forget reality. It is like taking a drug. Swing music represents our aggression to our primitive tam-tam-tam.
Dr. Brill's film went on to outline the dangers swing presented to an average American diner. Any public gathering, having a wash, And worst of all, housework. Joy and dance was something that was really needed, especially in America, that was in the depths of the Great Depression, when people were... homeless and had no jobs and uh and it was there that the uh the youth took on this new music that was coming out and they they embraced it wholeheartedly so the band leaders were definitely the the pop stars of the other time the magazines devoted exclusively to what they're doing what they're wearing and all that sort of thing The mass audience that Benny Goodman brought to swing also benefited African-American bands.
One of these turned out to be arguably the greatest swing band of all time, the Count Basie Orchestra. MUSIC PLAYS Casey was one of the best human beings I think I've ever met. He was like an angel. Everybody loved Count Basie.
You could never find anybody who ever said a bad word about him. Count Basie was a tough New Yorker stranded in Kansas City. when the vaudeville show he was the pianist in ran out of money.
The next really good... kind of swing came from the southwest. Kansas City, Oklahoma, Omaha even and it was a place in the depression the only place that didn't suffer from the depression was Kansas City. Kansas City was run by Mayor Prendergast and didn't matter in the teeth of the depression the worst time the town was wide open it was run by the rackets He played in a little club in Kansas City, and he knew everybody who came in to join.
And everybody who came in the club would order a drink for Basie. So while they're playing, Basie takes a... little vacation from them.
Bleep! Ba-dum! He gets up to the piano and says, Hey, Joe, how you doing, man? He goes over to Joe's table and says, has a little drink because he knew he had one there. So he had a little drink with Joe.
Then he goes back to the band which is still good. Bleep! And then he saw, hey Bill, what do you say Bill? So he goes over to Bill's table and has a little taste with Bill.
And he says, I got to get back. And he goes, ba-doom, ba-doom, ba-doom, ba-doom. And then, oh, John comes in. Hey, John.
And that's taking advantage of space. At the heart of Count Basie's music lay what was considered the best rhythm section in the business. Guitarist Freddie Green, drummer Joe Jones and bass player Walter Page.
Walter Page was a band leader of his own all through the 20s and he was a bass player. He's the man who taught the whole Count Basie rhythm section how to play, to where you had a nice floating thing. But Basie was just playing chords here and there. Everybody's played down to the level of the bass, and that's what started the whole floating thing that was so wonderful about the Count Basie thing. With a rhythm section like that, you couldn't go wrong.
It automatically says to you, this is the way to do it. Take advantage of this, and you gotta listen to the chords, and listen to the way the band swings. They really figured it out. And when they came to New York, then that's when they really turned everybody out, you know.
Count Basie may well have languished in Kansas City if he hadn't traveled to New York to appear in one of the first ever major concerts to celebrate African American music. In the renowned Carnegie Hall, the series of concerts were called Spirituals to Swing. These landmark concerts were a real eye-opener to New Yorkers who had never appreciated the full range of African-American music.
They heard gospel, blues and boogie-woogie, as well as Benny Goodman and Count Basie. Now, at YouTube, ...part, played piano in one of the first jazz concerts of all time in Carnegie Hall, didn't you? That was the Benny Goodman concert, and Benny invited about six of our group along.
for the jam session part of it. And it was truly a great thrill. That was a milestone in jazz history, really, wasn't it?
Well, I think it's one of them, I would say. The arrival of Count Basie in New York marked a creative high point of the swing era and turned the city into the jazz and swing capital of the world. At this point the music had matured.
It had the improvisation of Louis Armstrong, the sophistication of Ellington and the rhythm of Count Basie. Plus, a new generation of extraordinary vocalists was beginning to make their mark on the music. Singers had featured in big bands from the very earliest years, but most band leaders had dismissed them as an interruption of their music.
By the 30s this had all changed with the arrival of some of the greatest singers of the 20th century, people such as Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald. Somewhere there's music, how near, how far. The darkest night would shine, if you'd come to me soon. Until you will have still my heart I'll hide them all First of all, the singers, they were considered a necessary evil. The publishers demanded that the song have words and somebody sing them.
So they always stuck them down in the second chorus of an arrangement. The singer would sing after the band played a chorus, and then the band would play out, you know, after that. So the singers didn't usually even end the old records, if you remember. You know, all the Benny Goodman records with Helen Ward, they sang in the middle of the song, not at the beginning and the end.
And the leaders didn't like singers, a lot of them. They only had singers because they had to have them. Now the singers were starting to generate as much publicity as the bands. Billie Holiday had started as a jobbing singer with big band leaders Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw.
But by 1939, she was packing black and white alike into a club called Caffey Society in New York's Greenwich Village. Thank you. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. And now I'd like to sing a tune, it was written especially for me.
It's titled Strange Fruit. One of the high points of Billie Holiday's performance was when the lights dimmed, waiters stopped serving and she slowed the swing down to sing Strange Fruit, a song about the horrors of lynching in the South. Bear strange fruit, blood on the leaf, and blood at the root. My aunt was a singer, and she played me a record.
And I didn't know what it was, but I said to my aunt, I want to sing like her. There was a record by Billie Holiday of Strange Fruit and when I heard that record, that changed my life. Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain to gather.
For the winter sun Initially, the record company she worked with refused to release such a sensitive song. For a tree When it was eventually released, Strange Fruit was banned by many radio stations in America and by the BBC in London. Here is a strange... Billie Holiday was painfully aware of racial prejudice.
She had felt it firsthand on joining Artie Shaw's band in 1938. She had just quit the Basie band and that was a horror for her because they dressed her up as Aunt Jemima and the band was wearing old field hand stuff. She didn't like that. And I said, it's time for you to get a job.
She said, where? I said, with me. She said, go away. I said, I'm telling you. So she said, what's it pay?
I said, 60 bucks. That's what I get, what everybody gets, a week. So she said, alright, I got nothing better to do.
With Billie Holiday on board, Artie Shaw soon had a hit on his hands. I wrote the song, the words and the arrangement because it felt like what Billie should sing. All through the years together, sharing the tears and stone.
And the sunshine... Any Old Time was a big hit, but in America at this time, that wasn't enough to make her immune from prejudice, even in metropolitan, sophisticated New York City. NBC presents the distinguished swing of Artie Shaw, king of the clarinets, and his orchestra, creating dance history in the blue room of the Hotel Lincoln in New York City.
Well, in the middle of all this, the woman who managed and ran the Hotel Lincoln came to me and she said, Artie, when the singers come in at night to change from the street clothes into their evening clothes, they go up in the elevator and Billy goes up and... And we have guests and they take the same elevator and they see a black, they see a colored lady in the elevator. And she said, it raises the dickens with us because they come, a lot of people are from the south, and they come to the desk and say, what do you do? You take colored people in here? and the man has to explain that she's a singer with a band.
She said, it causes tremendous problems for me. Would you ask Billie if she would mind going to her dressing room by the freight elevator? I said, Billie, I feel awful.
I don't even like to ask you this. Do you want to do it or don't you? She said, no, I don't want to do it. I said, okay. She said, what I really want to do is get away from this world.
Forced into using a service lift, Billie Holiday never went on the road with a swing band again. War song or no war song, from one end of the USA to another, soldiers on leave and war workers find that America's musical home front is jumping. By the time the Second World War broke out, swing was so popular that the American establishment was forced to perform a spectacular U-turn and embrace the music it had previously viewed as decadent and immoral. historic fact that music helps to win wars, the Army and Navy are working with the nation's song publishers who are helping to meet the need for more and more music, both popular and classic.
The war was good for the bands, basically, because you couldn't buy automobiles, you couldn't buy refrigerators, you couldn't buy clothes, anything, because all the stuff was going for war purposes. So there was a lot of money around, and you'd spend it buying records or going out to dances. And then the bands were being used to play for the troops. Famous jazz composers like the great Duke Ellington are turning out new works to fit the accelerated mood of a nation at war, but nevertheless determined to have its fun.
Benny Goodman was deposed as the nation's favorite pop star by probably the most famous swing musician of all time. His sound would forever be associated with the Second World War. His name was Glenn Miller. Ask a young person, you know who Ray Anthony is? Well, they don't have a clue.
You know who Glenn Miller is? Oh yeah, I've heard that name before. It's a strange phenomenon. Before the war, Glenn Miller had been a trombonist and arranger whose big band hadn't been going all that well. He decided he needed a new and distinctive sound and adopted a sweeter, more romantic tone.
It achieved almost instant success. It got bigger and bigger and then it went back down to a smaller and smaller size. Benny Goodman had five brass.
Glenn Miller was the first one to open it up to eight brass. So with eight brass you had to have more harmony within the arrangement. Glenn Miller's sound was more organized with fewer solos.
It was more soothing music, perfect for a country apprehensive about the onset of war. In 1939, Time magazine noted that roughly a quarter of all discs in the nation's jukeboxes were Glenn Miller's. Miller's main pre-war hit, Tuxedo Junction, sold 115,000 copies in the first week alone. It was popular music, but it was very good popular music. And those arrangements are very interesting.
They're put together in a very clever way with the movement among the various instruments, among the various sections going back and forth. Then, at the height of his popularity in too, Miller did an extraordinary thing. He disbanded his civilian band and decided to use his music to boost wartime morale.
At 38, he was too old to enlist, but managed to persuade the army to take him on to lead a joint forces band. The saxophone section is presided over by that rather portly gentleman near the center there. And he used to occupy that same position with Artie Shaw before Artie went in the Navy. His name is Sergeant Hank Freeman. He's in charge of the boys.
He transferred this 30-strong army and Air Force orchestra to London in 1944 to be as close as possible to the fighting troops. They gave over 800 performances to an estimated 1 million Allied servicemen and provided a powerful link to home and peace. By December 1944, he was a major and left for Paris intending to play for the soldiers who had recently liberated the city. He never got there. His plane disappeared over the Channel.
What happened remains a mystery, but it made him a national icon. I was on Midway Island when we heard of his failure. It was like a president of the United States dying.
It was that strong. It was not just American. troops who were inspired by swing.
Much to the annoyance of the Nazi leadership, German troops were tuning their radios into it too. Music This led to one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of the music, Nazi Swing. The Nazis had originally tried to outlaw Swing as degenerate music, and their propaganda films emphasized that it was played by black people and spread by Jews.
Despite this, they found it impossible to ban, and like the Americans, decided to harness it for their own war efforts. Joseph Goebbels launched a swing counterattack. He put together a Nazi swing band called Charlie and His Orchestra. which made over 90 recordings between 1941 and 1943, mainly Nazi versions of American swing hits.
Your Driving Me Crazy was a popular American swing tune of the 30s, here performed with its Nazi rewritten lyrics. Here is Winston Churchill's latest tear jargon. Yes, the Germans. are driving me crazy. I thought I had brains, but they've shattered my brains.
They've built up a front against me. It's quite amazing. Clouding the skies with their planes. The results were broadcast to Britain and the States.
Rumour has it that Winston Churchill enjoyed them no end. MUSIC It was fitting then that the Allies would celebrate winning the war at Hitler's old stomping ground, the Nuremberg Stadium, by playing host to Glenn Miller's band. Back in Britain, Swing had had a huge impact and left an enduring legacy. The exotic American troops who had brought the music with them might have gone, but Britain's homegrown music scene had been electrified by Swing.
I played with him from 1945. The ensemble playing was excellent. Learned from the Americans at the game that we all listened to in the war. Glenn Miller's band and the artists...
We started in 1953 and did all the circuit in Britain. By the time it got to 1959 we were invited to the Newport Jazz Festival where we were playing with everybody. It looked like a who's who of jazz. We went on and played how we knew, and when the New York Times came out, they said that this English band is still using something which has virtually disappeared from many American bands, and that is the ability to swing.
That was the surprising truth, because while the Second World War was followed by a golden age for swing in the UK, in America, its home, swing was sinking into decline. British Swing had a big advantage because there was very little homegrown competition. In America, by contrast, there was lots of new music.
Smaller bands were forging the way towards rock and roll. Big bands faced so much competition that they were finding it hard to survive. Even Duke Ellington had to subsidize his big band after the war with his recording royalties. I have so many expensive people in the band, and you know, it's the highest paid band in the world.
I mean, the individuals are the highest paid, the men in the band. They get the money, I get the kicks. I wish I could afford this pay-per-view.
The rest of the big bands had to change their ways. It's a great sound, but that was an expensive sound, and the world just couldn't afford it in the later years, after the 40s. So the bands had to downsize, even Lionel Hampton had to downsize.
Peggy Lee had first recorded... recorded Why Don't You Do Right in 1942 with the full might of the Benny Goodman band behind her. When she recorded it again ten years later, it was a very different story. She was backed by just four musicians.
full of you why don't you do it right like some of the men do get out of here get me some money too big bands were giving way to more cost-effective small bands These small combos were creating their own version of what a swinging big band was. But it didn't have to be three trumpets and five tenors or saxophones. Great pianists like Oscar Peterson, Errol Garner. They were like mini big bands. It was all in those fingers and an understanding between the bass player and the drummer and whatever feeling they had.
individualized. Whole new styles were beginning to undermine swing. A small but intense minority of the industry's customers are rail record fans, many of them addicts of hot jazz in its more erudite forms, such as today's bebop. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey Bebop came in, which was the Miles Davis and the Charlie Parker.
They brought a music in. They didn't want you to dance to their music. They wanted you to listen to their music.
So that was where you had to sit and listen. And they cut the dances out. They had signs up, no dancing, no dancing. And that damaged us.
Taste had changed. These older people who had been the basic audience for the dance dance fell away. They couldn't go out dancing.
They had families. And the younger people coming along were interested in the pop singers. Yeah?
Good morning. My name is Frank Sinatra. What? Like most other singers at the time, Frank Sinatra had started out as a less significant element in big bands.
But after the war, he was extraordinarily successful as a soloist. Now it was the swing singers people wanted to hear. Accompanied him on a couple of occasions. I saw something about this man of small build That was like powerful.
You know it just had this very Magnetic personality and people just smitten with his whole outlook Frank Sinatra was one of the first singers to start employing the bands that had started off employing him There's nothing better happen to me than spending the years on the bus with the bands because you worked 365 days a year and if you're going to be good in any job at all I think if you eat sleep walk talk and dream it you're going to be good at it in the end you'll be a you'll be a big man in it. The singers were not that important part of a band. They would sit there.
Like when I was with the Glenn Miller Band, the Modern Airs were with the band, and Marion Hutton and Ray Eberle. The turning point came when Frank Sinatra to um got so popular saturday night is the loneliest night of the week cause that's the night that my sweetie and i used to dance cheek to cheek. I don't mind Sunday night at all cause that's the night friends come to call and Monday to Friday go fast and another week is past. In the 50s, the center of the swing universe moved from New York to California.
Capitol Records in Los Angeles signed not only vocalists such as Sinatra, but brilliant arrangers such as Nelson Riddle, capable of reworking swing to suit solo singers. Before you travel on... Say they took the vocalist like a jewel and they put it in the proper setting. It would be as if I brought you a raw stone and I said to you, please set this properly.
That's what the arrangers do. And they all were products of the big band era, as was my father, of course, but I think that I always have referred to their time in the big bands, all the singers and the musicians in the big band era, as that was their answer to no university training or anything. This was better than university because I don't think the curriculum at university...
What it was up to it, what they needed to learn, as it were, and most of them didn't have any money anyway. As well as backing this new generation of pop singers, big band music found a new home in Hollywood. Henry Mancini went from the Glenn Miller Band to the Pink Panther.
Johnny Mandel went from the Basie band to Hollywood movies, writing hits like Suicide Is Painless and The Shadow Of Your Smile. The visions of the things to be The pains that are withheld for me For the next 30 years, probably the best and most original swing music was composed for film. So, it was no coincidence that the next big bang in the history of Swing came from Hollywood in the shape of the 1989 rom-com When Harry Met Sally.
The huge success of the film's Swing soundtrack, sung by Harry Connick Jr., relaunched the music for a whole new generation which had never heard of Benny Goodman. Some others I've seen Might never be me, might never be cross, trying to be boss, they wouldn't do. In the 20 years since, Swing continues to... exert an endless fascination for modern performers such as michael buble and jamie cullum and for robbie williams whose 2001 swing concert at the albert hall became one of britain's 50 best-selling albums of all time selling seven and a half million copies worldwide Just a jackknife has only a key to bait And he keeps it...
Amazingly, swing has endured for nearly a hundred years. With his teeth, dear Scarlet billows No other form of popular music has lasted anything like as long or composed such a roll call of 20th century music greats. Don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing. That's what it was. It was the beat.
It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing BF-WATCH TV 2021 BF-WATCH TV 2021