Swing,
Baby,
Swing
Here's an Aisle-Seat Story of
How the Hi-De-Hi-De-Ho IS
Produced in Music
IT'S
SWING-TIME
IN
America! After the war, it
was jazz-time. After the boom,
it was croon-time. After the de-
pression, it's swing-time.
Swing music is "tops" just now. It's on the
stage, on the screen, on the air. The music goes 'round and 'round,
and everybody comes out swinging.
What is this thing called "swing"? Is it a new kind of music?
No, it isn't even a kind of music. You can't tag swing as you
can a rag, a waltz, or a fox-trot. Swing is just a way of playing
music. It's a way of letting off steam in crazy cadenzas and hi-de-
hi-de-hoes.
A good swing man can swing any tune. For instance, Duke
Ellington can take a waltz or a namby-pamby fox-trot and "kick
it up" into a frisky tune. When he plays In the Shade of the Old
Apple Tree. it swings-shade, apple, and tree. But when Wayne
King, who isn't a swingster plays a "hot" number like Riverboat
Shuffle, it doesn't swing. It doesn't even shuffle. When Rudy
Vallee sings Am I Blue, it sniffles. But let Cab Calloway, ace of
vocal swingsters, take a whack at it, and you've got the Mississippi
doing the roarin', and the tearin', and the grievin', for you.
High-brow French critics call swing music la musique hot.
They say it's "dynamite with control." Louis Armstrong, No. 1
swing trumpeter, wouldn't recognize his own music by that name.
The English call swing music the "scientific application of meas-
ured stimuli." Benny Goodman, the crack swing clarinetist, would
toot a merry cadenza if he heard that one. To the men who make
swing music, swing is "like lovin' a special girl, and you don't
see her for a year, and then she comes back-well, it's somethin'
inside you."
That's the best description of swing: something inside you that
must come out in music. Swingmen create as they play. They
play without a score. And good swingmen hardly ever play the
same piece twice in exactly the same way. They take a simple
melody, a well-known tune. They elaborate it. They improvise.
They fake. They syncopate. They play it as the spirit moves
them. They play the music as it was not written. The melody is
heard only now and then, just enough to tease the listeners, and
to make them wonder how much music can be played in and out
and all around a tune which they once thought very simple.
Suppose we go swinging. It's one o'clock in the morning.
We know that the Cotton Club in, New York's Harlem is going
'round and 'round with Duke Ellington and his music. So, to the
Cotton Club and a ringside able for our first-hand experience with
swing.
The Duke is swaying at the piano. The orchestra is quietly
playing Old Black Joe. "Not much to that," we say, "just like
any orchestra in Kalamazoo." "Jus' you wait," says our waiter.
"They's only ridin"" "Riding," we learn, is playing music as it is
written, in easy-going style.
Then suddenly Old Black Joe seems to stumble; it misses a
beat, then another. Our waiter whispers, "There they goes' They's
gettin' off. Them cats sure friskin' dem whiskers. They're kick in'
out! They's in de groove! They's SWINGING!"
Sure enough! Old Black Joe, the lazy plantation song has be-
come a swing song, wild with scales, chords, broken chords, and
cadenzas. The simple melody has turned into an inspired hodge-
podge of syncopated toots, growls, squeaks, boom-booms, and
whoa-ho-hoes. Now a trumpet insists on "comin' 'cause his head
is bendin' low." Now a clarinet is vowing that "he hears their
voices calling Old Black Joe." And all the while, above and
under the trumpet and clarinet are the brasses, the saxophones, the
piano, the violins, the trombones giving Old Black Joe a send-off
he never had before.
And now it's three o'clock in the morning. The Duke and
his men have to have a rehearsal. We've got a pull with the man-
agement, so we stay on. The waiter says, "They's goin' in de
woodshed." We scramble to our feet. Where's the woodshed'
The waiter calms us down. "There ain't no woodshed. I means
they's goin' to experiment with a song, private-like."
The Duke sits at the piano and runs his fingers nimbly over
the k~ys. We hear St. Louis Blues. We're disappointed: the
band lO Kalamazoo is always whining the St. Louis Blues. But
listen~ What a~~ t~e~ sa~ing? "Here, gob stick (clarinet), get
off (Improvise)!
Pick It up, trumpet." "Moth box (piano)
br~ak it dow.n (get hot)!" "Break!" "Lick!' "Sock!" "Swing!':
Without a slOgle sheet of music before them the Duke and his
~wingsters are sy~copating.' improvising, fakidg, breaking, swing-
109: And St. LouIS Blues IS no longer a weak whine, but an angry
wail'
But our experience with swing is not yet complete. We've got
to attend a "jam session." That's where swingmen really cut loose.
After .their commercial work-that is, playing for money-swing-
men like t? get together and play for their own amusement. They
have certam places they go to-small night clubs off the beaten
track of Broadway, usually in a basement.
On a small platform are some musicians lolling in their chairs.
They're c~ffee-and-cake men who sit there every night-the regular
crev.:, as It were. They don't get much for playing; that's why
they re called coffee-and-cake men. On chairs drawn up around
the platform are the sitting-in men. They just drop in to "jam."
There's no sheet music around. There's no leader.
Suddenly one of the sitting-in men picks up his clarinet and
starts to play. s.oftly: . W:e think we recognize the tune. Slowly
the other muslClans Jom 10, one by one. The clarinet is still lead-
ing. The rest follow, playing an intricate obbligato or accompani-
ment. Now we're not so sure that we recognize the tune. Then
without warning a trumpet picks up the lead. The clarinet sub-
sides. Th~ trumpeter shouts, "Blues in A fiat!" Away they go!
each man IS playmg for himself alone, and by himself. Yet each
man's idea of what blues in A flat should be seems to follow and
synchronize with the trumpeter's idea. Their individual music
put together has a definite melody, a definite pattern.
That's "jamming." At a jam session, alligators (listeners-in)
aren't allowed to clap. The "cats" (swingsters) don't like it be-
cause it reminds them of their commercial work. So we alligators
just sit and wonder at the musical energy cut loose before us.
How old is swing D?usic? As old as human nature, though we
have become aware of It j~st .recently. T~e fiddler at a Kentucky
barn dance who, after sWlggmg corn whiskey, bursts forth into
wild cadenzas and double-stops is a swingster. A poet by the name
of Shakespeare who wrote Romeo and Juliet went "swing" one
day when he wrote a song about a lover and his lass who went
"a-swinging" with a "hey, and a ho, and hey nonino."
Swing is just music played "that way because you can't help
yourself!"
[Reprinted through courtesy of THE EAGLE MAGAZINE}