3 . OUT OF STEP WITH SWING - The Birth of Bebop

The truth is that the public will absorb only a very limited number of Negro bands.

p a u l e d u a r d m i l l e r

Few colored bands of today are getting rich, anyway. c o l e m a n h a w k i n s

During the years that Coleman Hawkins lived in comfortable isolation in Europe, the professional world he had left behind was transformed almost beyond recognition. In 1934 the entertainment industry as a whole was reeling from the Depression, and portions of it—recordings, vaudeville—lay in ruins. While black musicians continued to ply their trade and a few bands (Ellington’s, Calloway’s) did quite well, working conditions for most were poor and horizons limited. The once-prosperous Fletcher Henderson band teetered on the brink of insolvency.

On Hawkins’s return just five years later, jazz-oriented dance bands (rechristened ‘‘swing bands’’) were not only restored to health, but took their place at the leading edge of a full-scale recovery. Dance music, once on the periphery of the entertainment industry, now reaped unprece-dented profits and moved forcefully to the center of American popular culture. This transformation lasted barely a decade, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, but it looms so large in the history of American popular music that it is universally known by the portentously inflated title the Swing Era.

From the musicological standpoint, swing is a stylistic category, and a rather ill-defined one at that. Unlike bebop, it was neither a revolution nor a movement. There are few sharp dividing lines between preceding styles (‘‘early jazz’’ or ‘‘New Orleans jazz’’) and the common practice of

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the 1930s. The obvious distinction is in instrumentation and sheer size of the ensemble: the aptly named big bands, with their sections of trum-pets, trombones, and saxophones, versus the informal New Orleans–style combo. But the trend toward larger and more organized bands was really a product of the 1920s, fueled by the early examples of Paul Whiteman, Fletcher Henderson, and other bandleaders.

In strictly musical terms, the most that one can fasten onto is a subtle but decisive shift in rhythmic sensibility—a quality first evident, per-haps, in the soloing of Louis Armstrong and in the relaxed lope of a good New Orleans band, but by the beginning of the 1930s increasingly per-vasive in dance bands. One useful marker of this shift is the widespread and rather sudden replacement of the tuba by the string bass in most bands in 1930, as well as the roughly contemporaneous surfacing of

‘‘Harlem’s newest dance craze,’’ the lindy hop, beyond its home territory.

As the jazz scholar Howard Spring persuasively argues, the two factors are intricately interconnected. The string bass facilitated, and the lindy hop depended on, a rhythmic foundation of an even four beats to the bar—a radical departure from the 2/4 feeling of most dance music before swing.¹ Soloists found the new rhythmic framework congenial, as did arrangers. One could argue that the arrival of swing was announced more by the shift from verb to noun, as in Ellington’s ‘‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’’ of 1932, than by Benny Goodman’s suc-cesses some three years later. As Gunther Schuller has recently con-tended, ‘‘Jazz had by 1932 evolved aesthetic, stylistic, technical criteria which were to govern its future for some years without major changes or radical breakthroughs.’’ It is this plateau—Andre´ Hodeir’s ‘‘classic pe-riod,’’ marked by the ‘‘equilibrium which comes with maturity’’—that

1. In 1942 bandleader Shep Fields discussed the changes in dance music over the previous decade for the readers of Down Beat. Before Goodman introduced a ‘‘smashing powerhouse style with its flat 4/4’’ to the dance world, Fields said, dance music was in 2/4. The second and fourth beats of the measure were ‘‘an upbeat—it was much easier to dance to because it indicated to the average guy when to go and when to stop. Technically speaking, the sort of beat a good swing band plays is better dance music, but only for a good dancer. He takes the unvarying accent, and dances against it, instead of just following along the way an ordinary dub does. . . . If you’ve ever really watched the dancing at the Savoy up in Harlem, that’s the essential difference between the dancing done there and by the average goon.

Uptown, they know what’s happening, and can use counter and cross beats. Downtown they just got to follow along—and when you play straight 4/4, they don’t know what to do with themselves—someone took the signpoles down.’’ Fields cautioned against ‘‘sweet’’

bands drifting into a 4/4 feeling without being aware of it: it’s ‘‘worthless for dancing or anything else unless it has the power of a really good swing band behind it’’ (‘‘ ‘Too Little Dance Music’—Shep; Bounce of Lunceford Recommended for Style,’’ Down Beat 9 [1 July 1942]: 17).

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defined the musical language of jazz until the bebop revolution more than a decade later.

Yet in certain respects, the Swing Era was a genuine revolution—if not in musical language, then certainly in the economic and cultural basis for musicians’ careers. The indelible images of the revolution—Benny Goodman’s breakthrough engagement at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles in 1935, the frenzied crowds of bobby-soxers dancing in the aisles of the Paramount Theater in 1937—suggest a nexus with two com-plementary components. On one side was a new mass audience: mostly white, youthful, and relatively affluent, filling theaters, ballrooms, and even Carnegie Hall to overflowing. On the other side was the figure of bandleader-as-celebrity. Both were unprecedented. The jitterbugs’ enthu-siasm for their ‘‘new’’ dance music and their willingness to express that enthusiasm through consumer spending (recordings, attendance at dance halls and theaters) set off an explosion within the entertainment business that had the music industry scrambling to meet the spiraling demand. In the process, previously anonymous bandleaders were elevated to icons of consumerism. A few dance band musicians had attained some fame be-fore, but now Goodman, Artie Shaw, Harry James, and others became stars—identifiable by first name alone—rivaling the Hollywood pan-theon (and through screen appearances and marriages to movie stars, even blending in with it). If only a handful attained this lofty status, a degree of glamour now touched the entire profession.

The cult of personality, carefully nurtured by publicity machines, ob-scured the fact that the Swing Era was above all a system of economic interdependence in which individual musicians played clearly defined roles. This is perhaps true of any art form in a modern capitalist economy.

But with the Swing Era, the integration of dance music with other forms of mass-market entertainment was carried out on a scale and with a degree of technological sophistication never seen before. New media—

radio, recordings, film—began to tie the vast American continent to-gether into networks of production and dissemination controlled from New York and Los Angeles. Each step brought new efficiencies that in-creased the potential for profit, while requiring the individual to yield more and more autonomy to the system. By the 1930s these networks had matured to the point that they were virtually inescapable, even at the local level. Just a decade or two earlier the careers of dance musicians, especially black musicians (the pioneers of jazz in New Orleans come to mind), could unfold almost untouched by the emergent popular music

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industry; indeed, it required conscious effort and ambition to find a place within it. By the Swing Era, the system, with its booking agencies, radio broadcasts, and record contracts, was pervasive and all-inclusive. To exist outside of it was either an admission of incompetence or an act of re-bellion.

The role played by African Americans within the system during the Swing Era was also revolutionary—or at least, potentially so. Their mere presence in popular culture is hardly surprising. From the minstrel show to ragtime to early jazz, black music and dance had proven an irresistible product, and black artists increasingly became more directly involved, as entertainers, instrumentalists, and songwriters, in its production. With the opening up of markets aimed at the rapidly expanding black popu-lation in the North, their public careers in show business became even more secure. The early twentieth century even saw some of the first black celebrities—Bert Williams, Bill ‘‘Bojangles’’ Robinson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington—drawing support in equal measure from black and white audiences. While the ability of even the most famous black mu-sicians to reap a reward appropriate to their efforts was inevitably con-strained by racism, the penetration of jazz-oriented dance music into the popular mainstream promised to reward a much wider stratum. If black musicians remained on the periphery of economic power during the Swing Era, they were nevertheless closer to the center than ever be-fore. Skeptical as they may have been of any opportunities offered by white society, they must have been tantalized by the possibility for change.

During the boom years, from 1935 to about 1939, what black jazz musicians hoped to get out of the new prosperity often split along gen-erational lines. Seasoned veterans already at the top of the profession (such as the members of Cab Calloway’s bands) tended to accept success as their due, a welcome if belated confirmation of their life’s achievement.

Younger musicians like Dizzy Gillespie entered the profession brashly expecting to storm their way to the top through talent and determination.

Yet after 1939 such hopes would be frustrated by the subsiding of the swing craze and by the racial barriers erected by white society. The story of Coleman Hawkins’s brief career as the leader of his own swing band is a cautionary tale—at once the fulfillment of Hawkins’s dreams and the thwarting of his ambition. His disappointments had a particular res-onance for musicians of the bebop generation, for if Coleman Hawkins couldn’t make it, who could?

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The Swing Boom

The economic structure of the Swing Era had its roots in the gradual concentration, over several decades, of economic power in popular enter-tainment into large, impersonal institutions. It started with the mass pro-duction of popular song, centralized as early as the 1890s in the New York publishing firms known collectively as Tin Pan Alley. (Music pub-lishing and songwriting remained the nominal center of the music busi-ness until the mid–twentieth century, even as new technologies rapidly eroded the power of the printed page: through the formation of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers [ASCAP] in 1914, publishers and composers shrewdly extended their control into live performance, forcing payment of licensing fees wherever their songs were performed, including, eventually, radio and film.) In the early years of the century, giant vaudeville circuits controlled the movements of large numbers of musicians (as well as comedians, dancers, and entertainers of all kinds) across the country. These enterprises were dominated by whites, but black artists and entrepreneurs eventually managed to gain a foothold, sometimes through ordinary channels (as with black songwrit-ers and such headline acts as the nonpareil comedian Bert Williams), but more often through parallel institutions that, by catering to a specifically black clientele, ‘‘took advantage of the disadvantages’’ of segregation. Ex-amples include the chain of black theaters known as the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) and ‘‘race recordings’’ marketed exclusively in the black community.

Revolutions in communications technology in the early twentieth cen-tury transformed this landscape and hastened the process of consolida-tion. Sound recordings of popular song and dance music gained steadily in popularity and, by 1920, began to rival, and in some cases exceed, sheet music in sales. (Publishers and composers were protected: by virtue of the 1909 copyright law, they automatically received royalties for ‘‘me-chanical reproduction.’’) The first radio stations were rapidly absorbed into national networks, beginning with NBC in 1926, permitting broad-casts to be coordinated on a vast scale. The burgeoning giants of the motion picture industry meanwhile developed their own chains of hun-dreds of movie theaters, often at the expense of vaudeville chains.

The onset of the Depression only deepened the reliance on new tech-nologies and on economies of scale. There were winners and losers.

Vaudeville fell into an irreversible collapse: its theaters either folded or were absorbed into the movie chains, and its stars fled to radio and film.

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The recording industry, surprisingly, was another apparent casualty. Sales plummeted from a peak of $106 million in 1921 to $5 million in 1933, and dozens of small companies went bankrupt. Although the industry recovered handsomely by the end of the decade (helped, in large part, by the swing boom and by the new technology of the jukebox), the multi-plicity of companies that had flourished in the 1920s was reduced to three (the ‘‘Big Three,’’ or the ‘‘majors’’): Victor, Columbia, and newcomer Decca.

Black musicians gradually became absorbed into these nationwide net-works. In the 1920s most dance music remained stubbornly local in scope.

While the most famous dance orchestras performed and recorded in New York and Chicago, the remainder—‘‘territory bands’’—were regional, operating in ‘‘territories’’ that were within a day’s travel over rough roads by automobile from the home base. Like circuit preachers, these bands brought dance music to large areas too distant from major cities to have access to the best-known bands and too small to support a local music scene. Business arrangements tended to be decidedly casual and personal;

bookings were handled in most instances by the bandleader (although a number of bands operated as cooperatives).

Fletcher Henderson’s band both fit this pattern and showed the way for black musicians to take advantage of the emerging national system.

During Hawkins’s years with the band, Henderson participated in some of the most important transformations of the music business. Hender-son’s home base was the Roseland Ballroom in midtown Manhattan, at the very center of the entertainment industry. Nearly from the outset, the Henderson band was a national band, with influence far beyond its local ‘‘territory.’’ Although Henderson was frequently criticized for his lack of business acumen, his was probably the first black dance band to establish a national reputation through a skillful combination of media exposure and touring. In this respect, as contemporary commentators noted, the Henderson band resembled the prominent white bands of the era—those led by Paul Whiteman, Ted Lewis, Vincent Lopez—more than its black counterparts. Henderson recorded prolifically—nearly two hundred individual titles in the 1920s alone—and broadcast frequently on powerful New York stations. During its summer vacations from the Roseland, the band reinforced its popularity through tours, at first con-centrating on neighboring New England and Mid-Atlantic states but by the end of the decade regularly extending to the Midwest as well. Such touring was made possible by the rapid improvement of highways in the 1920s. Many of the Henderson musicians developed a fondness for fast,

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expensive automobiles, including Hawkins’s Cadillac Imperial and Hen-derson’s Packard roadster. They made something of a sport of racing from job to job, resulting in not a few accidents, including the 1928 incident that seriously injured Henderson. But in one important respect, these high-tech tours remained old-fashioned: Henderson and his wife, Leora, continued to handle all the engagements themselves, coordinating their travels through a tedious round of letter writing, telephoning, and tele-graphing.

Even this modest degree of autonomy in business affairs had to be jettisoned in the early 1930s. To survive during the Depression, black dance bands needed to gain access to the increasingly centralized re-sources of the entertainment industry. This meant placing their fate in the hands of professional intermediaries.

The first important agencies, like the William Morris Agency, were organized at the beginning of the century to handle the theatrical and vaudeville trade, and in time branched out into radio and film. By the late 1920s, similar services were offered for dance orchestras, and the Music Corporation of America (MCA) emerged as the leading agency.

Professional intermediaries rapidly became the norm. Personal managers and booking agents (the latter characteristically employees of large agen-cies) represented the bands to ‘‘buyers’’ in the business and coordinated the various aspects of the bands’ business. Large institutions like theater chains, record companies, and radio networks found working with pro-fessional agents more congenial and efficient than working with individ-ual bandleaders. By the end of the 1930s, a handful of giant booking agencies (MCA, General Amusements Corporation, William Morris) controlled access to nearly all major venues.

At first, these agencies handled only white bands. But black bandleaders proved to be particularly in need of professional services, if only because as black men they had a doubly difficult time gaining the attention of white corporations. Mavericks like Irving Mills, Joe Glaser, Harold Oxley, and Moe Gale specialized in black music. The difficulty of the task only spurred their ingenuity. Duke Ellington’s rapid rise to national promi-nence, for example, depended not only on his strikingly original music, but also on the shrewd strategy of his manager, Irving Mills. In a pattern that would become standard during the Swing Era, Ellington established his reputation in the late 1920s through radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club (over the CBS network), recordings (for Columbia and Victor as well as numerous smaller labels), and aggressive press releases (a Mills specialty). He then cashed in on that reputation through extensive tours

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of theaters and ballrooms far from his New York base. All of this came at a price, of course: for large agencies, the customary 10 percent; for personal management, ‘‘a piece of the action’’ (Mills, for example, became a partner in Ellington’s business and regularly added his name to Elling-ton’s compositions). Bandleaders also relinquished considerable control over where and what they would play, and under what circumstances.

But such were the sacrifices musicians were willing to make to assure professional survival.

Bands like Henderson’s that adapted imperfectly to the new system were doomed, in John Hammond’s words, to be ‘‘exploited by the small timers.’’ In the lean years of the Depression, Henderson’s band was fre-quently shortchanged by cash-poor club owners, who found it easier to alienate an individual band than a professional agency. Longtime band members, accustomed to the relative security of the 1920s, complained bitterly. (‘‘You know what used to happen during the depression?’’ Haw-kins recalled. ‘‘We used to play a lot of jobs and didn’t get paid. Everybody belonged to the union and everything, but it seemed like there wasn’t anything we could do about it.’’) Henderson finally gave up and signed up with an agency in early 1934 (a press notice bluntly described him as the ‘‘property’’ of Irving Mills), but the damage had already been done:

In document The Birth of Bebop (Page 132-189)