Module 3

Of any styles of American Vernacular Music, the "Swing Era" has an almost pragmatic quality to it.  It has stood the test of the time because of the quality of its music.  Our school jazz bands are still playing Swing Era charts, and in competitive jazz festivals, Swing is a requirement.  The Wisconsin School Music Association has changed its jazz band Solo and Ensemble requirements over the years, but a SWING CHART has always been required.  The underlined required in-text analysis tunes for this week are frequently found on the WSMA jazz band list, with different arrangements in found in different difficulty classes, and they're there because these charts are such important pieces of Americana and are still alive today as ever.

Hal Leonard has published a basic jazz chart book with tunes like Ja-Da, Blue Skies, American Patrol, It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got That Swing), and In the Mood.  Many of these charts have been published separately, and this particular version of It Don't Mean a Thing used to be on the WSMA Class B list in its separate publication.  These are great opportunities for us to expose jazz bands at any level to these Swing Era gems.

One of the things that may have contributed to the longevity of Swing Era in the US is Johnny Carson's reign on The Tonight Show.  As recently as 1992, people could tune in five nights a week and hear the Doc Severinsen-led swing band on television.  Carson's Tonight Show Band was playing their versions of these charts for thirty years, and are still touring together playing their versions of these charts.  I owned all three of the old Tonight Show Band albums on cassette and I recently purchased digital copies from iTunes so I could keep listening to them, as well as share the music with my daughter and with my students.  The Tonight Show Band's tempos aren't always the same as the original recordings, and especially Doc Severinsen’s version of In the Mood, which is significantly faster than Miller’s.  Sometimes the order of the phrases or complexity of the charts don't always match either, but Doc maintains the styles, as even in In the Mood, the stompy push on each beat (this is known to me as part of the dance band style).  I am not seeing a recording of One O’Clock Jump with our text, but YouTube recordings abound.  Doc’s version, which is full of just wild, showy playing, and dating to the mid-1980s, is still as authentic as everything we've been listening to this week. 


The version of In the Mood on this week's listening is the Glen Miller original, and it's certainly a swing chart that remains on that needs to be in every stage band’s books, whether it's a complex version of it, an majorly uptempo and harmonically more modern version like the Doc Severinsen version I spoke of above, or the more simple one readily accessible in the Hal Leonard swing book.
The Glen Miller In the Mood gives us further development of the dance style from what we heard in this week's listening of The St. Louis Blues.  In the version of St. Louis Blues for this week, we hear the great Bessie Smith singing the melody with Louie Armstrong on his cornet playing a counter-melody.  W.C. Handy’s composition dates to 1914 with the recording in our listening dating to 1925.  It's not an uptempo version that we've grown accustomed to hearing, but rather more of a ballad than the up-tempo foxtrots and quick dances of the time.  This particular YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmFUXYaZIMk purports to be a recording of Handy playing his chart on piano with period jazz orchestra, and I easily hear the foxtrot style with touches of ragtime infused.
With Miller's In the Mood, gone is the one-step, but a foxtrot dance might work.  In these swing charts, as I alluded to above, the power of the beat is a focus because these are dance charts.  It's really important for people to have a clear understanding of where the beat sits so that, as social dancers, you know how and where to move.  In the Swing Era, a further development of the cymbal swinging eighth-notes comes in to being, and you can hear it clearly on each of the recordings for this week.
With Smith and Armstrong we have a demonstration of an early ballad in the blues style, when we get to the Benny Goodman chart, we get a swing ballad that is something of a meld of the original Handy, the Henderson chart’s style and backgrounds, and the Smith and Armstrong recording.  I hear a progression in style of the ballad as we move from the blues to swing, and it becomes clear to my ears that all three charts are intricately related.  By the time that Paper Doll comes in during World War II, we’ve had almost twenty years of development from Smith and Armstrong’s balladification of The St. Louis Blues, and you can hear some very different harmonic and rhythmic lines in that development. You can hear this continued development in In the Mood and you can also hear it in the representative Severinsen recordings too.  Lastly, even Paper Doll appears in the Hal Leonard book, making it accessible to today's young jazz students.