Swing

For roughly a decade — from the early 1930s until the wartime mid-40s — jazz was American popular music. The vehicle was the big band: thirteen to seventeen players, the loose New Orleans polyphony replaced by written arrangements that pitted brass against reeds in riffing call and response (the church pattern again, scored for saxophones), with solo space rationed inside the chart (Gioia 2011).

Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman designed the formula in 1920s Harlem; Benny Goodman — using Henderson’s charts — detonated it nationally in 1935; Count Basie distilled Kansas City blues into riff heaven. Above them all stood Duke Ellington, who treated the big band as a composer’s instrument and wrote three-minute masterpieces tailored to the individual voices of his players for half a century.

Swing matters to this site’s web far beyond jazz. Its dance rhythm fed the jump blues that became rhythm and blues; its riff language is audible in every rock ‘n’ roll horn section; and a Belgian-Romani guitarist who heard it on records in Paris invented Europe’s first jazz dialect from it. When the singers stepped out of the big bands and the bands shrank to combos after the war, the era ended — and jazz’s next move, bebop, was already waiting uptown.