JAZZ PERSPECTIVES
The Swing Era I - Precursors
From the beginning, ensemble playing has been an integral part of jazz.
Originally musicians improvised their parts, organizing their ideas around roles
for their particular instrument. The trumpet played lead, the clarinet played an
obbligato, and the trombone played a melodic line built around harmonic themes,
often a counter-line to the lead melody, called a "tailgate trombone"
part. The rhythm players (tuba and drums) established the two-pulse of ragtime
while the banjo played off-beat chords. Piano players combined the rhythm parts
into a bass-chord pattern matching the tuba-banjo relationship.
Gradually arrangers like Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington began grouping
instruments together in sections, clarinet trios being among the first. Fletcher
Henderson and arranger Don Redman learned to make an arrangement swing by
writing melodic lines which sounded improvised, and then harmonizing the line
for entire sections. Many of these arrangements featured a call-and-response pattern, with brass and reeds repeating phrases
back and forth. These phrases became known as riffs, and the style called
riffing.
Another band using this concept was Bennie Moten's Kansas City band
with pianist Count Basie. Marshall Stearns has this to say in The Story Of
Jazz [p.204]. "The
Moten band raised the riff to a fine - and even improvised - art, while
retaining the blazing solo work of top jazzmen, and frequently combined the best
of both. The leaders of the brass and reed sections would invent a series of
ascending riffs on the spur of the moment... which the entire section would
forthwith play. And the riffs would build, bolero-like, back and forth between
the sections, chorus after chorus, from simple to complex, into a swinging
climax.... the guitar was substituted for the banjo, and the string-bass began
to 'walk', or play melodic figures instead of pounding away at one or two notes.
All of these innovations of the 1932 Moten band became standard five or six
years later."
Other bands used this call-and-response pattern to create their arrangements,
including the Dorsey Brothers and Detroit's Casa Loma band. The latter, which
became Benny Goodman's model, used five brass, three saxes and a four piece
rhythm section, one sax short of standard swing band instrumentation. The Casa
Loma band became very popular among Eastern colleges, being heard regularly on
the Camel Caravan radio show, and helped set the stage for Benny Goodman's
overwhelming popularity.
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- article by Frank Singer ©2002
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JAZZ PERSPECTIVES
CONTENTS
Jazz
Origins
I - Beginnings
II - Jazz and Technology
III - Radio and the Industrial Beat
The
Swing Era
I - Precursors
II - The Decade of Swing
III - The
BeBop Strain
A
First Look Back
New Orleans
Revival
Jazz
Forms
The Blues
The 32 bar Song Form
The Latin Influence
Cool
Hard Bop
Evolution 1 - A New Dialogue
Evolution 2 - Into The Seventies
Evolution Of The Jam Session
Post Modernism
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