Stan Kenton had a grand ambition. He wanted to transform jazz into the modern equivalent of classical music. Over the years, Kenton wandered down one blind and tone-deaf alley after another in search of his new musical paradigm. Even before he had figured out what he wanted his new highbrow music to sound like, Kenton did know one thing for sure — it wouldn’t be for dancing. Who, after all, dances in the rarefied world of the concert hall?
” Jazz bands don’t belong in ballrooms or hotel grills,” Kenton said in 1947, ” not as long as they cater primarily to dancers.” Thirty years later, in May 1977, Kenton’s grand vision had taken him, not to the concert stage, but to the Lancer Steak House in Schaumberg, Ill. There, his band blared bombastic Latin-rock epics in strange meters at a befuddled audience. When he was offered feeble smatterings of perplexed applause, Kenton was finally driven to desperate measures: “We’re gonna play you a couple of dance tunes and see if we have any takers. If we don’t, then we’ll go back to what we’ve been doing.” He was met by laughter from the Lancer Steak House crowd, and he laughed in response. “Our reputation as a dance band couldn’t be worse. So even if you don’t know how to dance, push each other around the floor. It’ll look good for us.” The band’s performance was recorded that night, and without the slightest irony Kenton released the album under the title ” Artistry in Symphonic Jazz.”
The sound the steak-house audience heard was the death rattle of jazz itself.
It is hard to remember that in the 1930s and ’40s, jazz was the popular music. It was rock, country, pop, and rap mixed together. It was everything. Fifty years later, jazz accounts for a little less than 2 percent of all record sales, about half of which can be attributed to the Muzak-like saxophonist Kenny G. But in the 1930s, jazz bands of great artistic distinction — Duke Ellington’s, Benny Goodman’s, Count Basie’s, Tommy Dorsey’s — were also the most popular musical acts in America. Now, large jazz ensembles don’t even make up a sliver of the music business.
The precipitous decline of the big bands after World War II is the great mystery of American music, a pop-culture conundrum as confounding as the fate of the Stonehenge Druids or the Hohokam Indians. Any number of explanations have been offered. There’s the business-cycle explanation: Inflated wartime salaries and the postwar economic bust of 1946 made big bands an economic dinosaur. There’s the right-to-work explanation: When the American Federation of Musicians called a strike in 1942 and refused to play on any commercial record for more than a year, singers rose to their current level of prominence while bandleaders and band members fell into obscurity. There’s the anti-bebop explanation: With indecipherable melodies and cryptic harmonies, the music of Charlie Parker and others drove away all but the self- consciously cool. Finally, there’s the “Rebel Without a Cause” explanation: Teenagers in the 1950s rejected swing for rock as a way to rebel against their big-band-loving parents.
All these explanations have merit, but they do not suffice. What killed the big bands was neither economics, taxes, changing popular tastes, nor new styles in youthful rebellion. No, the cultural ambitions of the bandleaders themselves sank the swing ship. They didn’t want to play music for people to dance to; they wanted people to sit, close their eyes, and study the music as it played. Stan Kenton wasn’t the only jazz musician to turn up his nose at a dancing audience; Artie Shaw’s discontent was so deep that he walked away from music at the zenith of his popularity. “They always wanted to hear dance music,” the 86-year-old Shaw sneered in a recent NPR interview. In a way, the big bands were victims of their own aesthetic achievement. As the swing era wore on, the number of serious jazz critics multiplied. And almost to a man, they whispered in bandleaders’ ears: “You’re too good for dancing; dancers don’t deserve you; you belong on the concert stage.”
The dance bands of the ’30s and ’40s ceased to be dance bands largely of their own accord. And in so doing they abandoned not only their raison d’etre, but the touchstone of their art. Nothing killed the big bands. They committed suicide.
There is ample forensic evidence of this self-immolation in a recent five-CD set from the Smithsonian called “Big Band Renaissance: the Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra. ” This is a collection of recordings from the end of World War II to the present and represents an effort to demonstrate that the jazz orchestra is alive and kicking. But “Big Band Renaissance” actually proves that modern orchestral jazz isn’t so much a corpus as a corpse, and the perfect subject for an autopsy.
Well, maybe not the perfect subject. “Big Band Renaissance” is such an odd anthology that it almost seems as if its compiler, Bill Kirchner, left out the best of a bad lot to make the situation look worse than it is. There is a ho-hum version of “I Remember Clifford” by Dizzy Gillespie and His Orchestra, but Gillespie’s brilliant bebop bigband recordings aren’t here — there’s no “The Shape of Things to Come,” no ” Dizzy’s Blues,” and no “Manteca.” Woody Herman is represented by a lugubrious 1972 rock-ballad version of “Summer of ’42,” not by his postwar recordings of “Lemon Drop” and “Early Autumn.”
The first disc, mostly made up of late- ’40s music rooted in the dance beat of the swing era, isn’t too bad at all — Duke Ellington performing “Perdido,” the Basie band swinging through “Rambo,” and even Stan Kenton blasting through one of his few dance-tune hits, ” Intermission Riff.” But even here one can discern why sensible people stopped buying big-band records. Boyd Raeburn is on hand with an annoying effort at surrealism titled “Dalvatore Sally.” Ray McKinley provides an angular piece of modernism with an apt title — “Idiot’s Delight.”
The second disc offers more evidence that most postwar big-band jazz was musically bankrupt long before the orchestras stopped paying their bills. Exhibit A is “A Trumpet,” arranged for Stan Kenton’s band by Bob Graettinger, a composer whose atonality makes Schonberg sound like a model of melodicism.
Graettinger’s conceit that bigband jazz could be modeled on European art music may have been the reductio ad absurdum of the anti-dance movement in jazz, but there were many other arrangers vying for nadir honors. The arrangers for the acid- drenched Don Ellis Orchestra of the late 1960s and early ’70s seemed to hate the concept of dancing as much as they disliked music itself. How else can one explain their penchant for time signatures with 19 or even 33 eighth-note beats to the measure? “Chain Reaction,” the Ellis cut selected by the Smithsonian, is in 13/8 time. And the beat goes like this: 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3. Try to dance to that.
By contrast, the pre-war big bands were basically required to provide a beat for social dancers; dancers actually brought large jazz orchestras into fashion in the early ’30s. Before then, jazz was primarily the work of just a few players; Louis Armstrong’s seminal groups were made up of five or seven musicians. This was for aesthetic reasons — only small groups can really improvise, and improvisation was at the heart of New Orleans jazz. But it was also economically sound. After all, it’s obviously in a bandleader’s interest to keep his band’s size (and thus his payroll) down. The increasing size of jazz bands in the early ’30s not only cost bandleaders money at a time when money was tight, it limited the ability of their musicians to improvise.
So why did the size of the swing bands double? Because of the 21st amendment to the Constitution. During Prohibition, nightclubs were usually illicit and therefore small. It wasn’t until the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 that large-scale nightclubs and dancehalls became the norm across the country. As the venues grew in size, so did the orchestras, for the simple reason that the rooms needed a big sound. Without sound systems capable of boosting each instrument’s volume, it was impossible for a seven- or ten-piece band to fill a room as vast as Roseland in New York or the Aragon in Chicago.
The need to fill massive halls with danceable music shaped the structure and the sound of swing bands. The rhythm section — piano, guitar, bass, and drums — had to work in near lockstep to supply the underlying groove. The bass and guitar would strike each beat. The pianist would pound out 4/4 time with a left-hand stride as swing drummers thumped.
But no rhythm section by itself was enough to fill a grand ballroom. The horns had to contribute as well. It was no accident that riffing — the rhythmic repetition of musical fragments — was the definitive characteristic of the swing sound. The use of danceable riffs, perfected by the Count Basie band in the late ’30s, led to a miraculous marriage of groove, melody, harmony, and improvisation that has never been duplicated.
The lack of amplification wasn’t the only technological limitation crucial to swing’s artistic success. In the days when records were made of shellac, the maximum length of a record side was about three and a half minutes. This was thought a great impediment to the grand visions of jazz composers, but it imposed an extraordinary musical discipline on big-band arrangers. They had to learn to construct a beginning, middle, climax, and ending all packed into three minutes’ time.
This limitation brought out the best in Duke Ellington, among others: Who in his right mind would prefer Ellington’s meandering, 13- minute, four-sided “Reminiscing in Tempo” to the breathtaking perfection of ” Concerto for Cootie,” which clocks in at 3 minutes and 18 seconds? It was doubly unfortunate that the long-playing record (or LP) came along just as the big bands were falling victim to their high-art ambitions. Without time constraints, length became just another of the excesses of the modern jazz arranger.
When improved sound systems liberated jazzmen from the restrictions of the old-time dance hall, the postwar big bands indulged themselves like college freshmen at a keg party. Gone for good was the danceable 4/4 drum thump; instead, rhythm sections became unpredictable. Arrangers stopped using horns as a part of the rhythmic engine, treating them instead as tonal colors on a confusing palette. Up-tempo came to mean breakneck speed. Ballads became dirges.
Ironically, the dance bands were casting off the dance idiom at the very time the newly dominant bebop jazzmen were struggling to appeal to dancers. The savvy Dizzy Gillespie knew that unless modern jazz got its rhythmic house in order, it was doomed: “We’ll never get bop across to a wide audience until they can dance to it,” he wrote in the late ’40s. “They’re not particular about whether you’re playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.”
Gillespie may have thought a good dance rhythm was merely a sop to his audience, but one of the earliest jazz critics, R. D. Darrell, recognized that dancing was not just something musicians had to put up with to get paid. In a 1932 essay, he argued that dance was essential to Duke Ellington’s artistic success. “As a purveyor and composer of music that must be danced to (if he is to earn a living),” Darrell wrote, “Ellington’s composition is narrowly limited by dance exigencies while he is allowed a wide range of experimentation in the way of instrumentation and performance. What is remarkable is that working within constricted walls he has yet been able to give free rein to his creative imagination and racial urge lot expression.”
A decade later, Ellington had tired of these restrictions (and was doubtless sick of the boorishness of many dancers, particularly the rude jitterbug subset known as ickies) and became a proponent of concert jazz. “The purpose and virtue of the concert hall is that in it people have listening isolation and do nothing but listen,” Ellington wrote years later, “whereas in a dance hall, they end up doing a lot of things people with social aspirations want to do. They want to dance and embrace the girls.”
And yet, when the big bands separated themselves from dancers, musicians could no longer feel the exhilaration that comes from interacting with a crowd of bodies impelled to move in rhythm to the music. In the concert hall the audience gives nothing but its applause at the end of the performance. But, as drummer Jimmy Crawford once said, “In ballrooms, where there’s dancing like I was raised on, when everybody is giving to the beat, and just moving, and the house is bouncing — that inspires you to play.”
These days the jazz establishment constantly bemoans its lack of commercial success. Audiences are uneducated, they say. Jazz gets no radio airplay. Television ignores them. Government doesn’t give them enough money. In other words, it’s everyone’s fault — everyone but the musicians’.
The key to a jazz revival is for the musicians to alter their relationship with the audience, letting the listeners participate in the music, letting them “give to the beat” by dancing to it.
Rock music has revitalized itself time and again by returning to its dance essentials. Jazz can still save itself — artistically and commercially — by embracing its dance tradition. The only thing standing in the way is 50 years of prejudice and pretension.
By Eric Felten
