In 2005, I received an unexpected email from Dr. Bernard Berkhout in which the General Practitioner from Dordrecht, a town south of Rotterdam, extolled the virtues of my book, Swingin’ the Dream and claimed that it had changed his life... What a delightful surprise for an author, for no one had ever before found my work to have such dramatic results. After years as a physician, Bernard was inspired by the book to take up the clarinet again, and to organize a swing band that could faithfully reproduce the exciting big band swing of Benny Goodman and other bandleaders of the 1930s. Even more, the Dutch doctor planned to use his band to show that sophisticated and exciting jazz did not just appear out of nowhere in 1945 and that the music of a previous generation deserved a wide, appreciative, and supportive listening and dancing audience. As he explained, he had contemplated this before but reclined because the clarinet seemed so out of favor in the modern era of bebop jazz, and he had even considered turning his back on swing because in the wake of modern jazz, the big band music of the 1930s and 1940s seemed, in the eyes of jazz critics, trite and clichéd. While I was happy to learn that my work had had such beneficial results, I was a bit skeptical as to whether such an ambitious endeavor was possible. That skepticism is gone! Bernard’s new CD, the accumulation of years of work, proves that his faith has been rewarded. The big band of fifteen musicians, produced in conjunction with swing dancers, really swings, which is the most appropriate word for this CD, the band, and its remarkable and dedicated director.     Dr. Berkhout has been kind enough to ask me to explain what prompted my interest in swing, which I am more than happy to do here. As a result of my first book, Steppin' Out, a history of New York nightlife during the ragtime era, I had come to believe that popular music defined an era, and I wanted to hone in more centrally on an era in which music had played a prominent role. The jazz age of the 1920s had received wide coverage already, but very little serious analysis had been devoted to the swing era, which lasted from the early 1930s to 1948 or so. Not only did I discover that the music expressed the hopes and fears of a youth generation mired in the Great Depression and World War II, I also realized that swing was part of a much larger cultural and political renaissance that had ties to the New Deal and the upsurge of leftist political sentiment. Most works on swing had ignored this connection, and needless to say I was excited to find such links. I was also drawn to this era of popular music because of my own personal discoveries during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period when I entered the history profession as a student and young professor. The Sixties was a time of cultural revolution when politics, youth culture, racial revolt and cultural expressiveness blossomed all around me, especially in popular music. Rock helped define the era of my cultural maturation, and I was eager to find another period where these diverse elements intermingled to produce a major cultural reorientation. I wanted to immerse myself in an era that was "hot", that burned with popular energy. Not only were the 1930s and early 1940s a Golden Age of popular music, represented by the creation of numerous new bands capable of playing hot jazz and popular songs, but the era also featured the mass appearance of new vernacular dances, rooted in African American culture, such as the Lindy Hop and the varieties of the Jitterbug. In addition, the period witnessed the revitalization of documentary film as well as the popular movies of Hollywood, along with American theater, American art, American song, and American sports. If one adds to the mix the new assertiveness of African Americans and the emergence of such major icons as Duke Ellington and Joe Louis, one has the makings of an exciting cultural stew that seemed more vital and important than previous analysts had imagined. In addition, there were personal reasons for my interest in swing. I came from a leftist Jewish background that celebrated the Jewish connection with the struggle for Civil Rights. While the progressive image of the Jewish people has been tarnished, at the time I was delighted to examine bandleaders such as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, as well as musical entrepreneurs like Barney Josephson, who promoted the racial integration of the band business. Even more personal though, I am a devotee of popular dance and one of the first dances I ever learned was a form of the Lindy Hop. I was eager to find out much more about this dance phenomenon and its music. As a dancer, when I listened to the music I could picture the energy and sophistication of the greatest dancers as they whirled, twisted, and flew through the air in the intense partner interaction that the dances required. All in all, in the Swing Era I had found culturally expressive forms and intricate musical practices that proved endlessly fascinating.     Most previous interpretations of swing viewed the music as escapist, foisted upon unsuspecting young people by the culture industry, or used as a means to forget one’s troubles in the Depression. The more I dug into swing, however, the more I began to develop a different view of the music and its era. As many analysts had noted, swing fused popular song and jazz. But while they maintained that this weakened jazz, I wondered what it meant for a generation that its popular songs had so much jazz energy. According to Benny Goodman, swing was “freedom of speech in music,” which meant that it embodied the essence of American political culture. Unlike the many sweet bands, such as those of Jan Garber or Guy Lombardo, the white big swing bands borrowed a good deal from the black bands of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, and Count Basie. At its heart, the swing band relied on a propulsive 4/4 beat that rested on solid, “hot” rhythm sections, rather than the tepid hotel rhythms that had dominated the early 1930s. This new energy, propelled in the Goodman band by Gene Krupa’s drums, also featured the call and response pattern of black big bands. Reed and brass sections interacted to push the beat to ecstatic levels, while the soloist, such as Goodman or Shaw on clarinet, interacted with the building pulse and soared above the band in ecstatic release. Unlike the sweet bands, the swing bands allowed a good deal of improvisation and solo space for the individual musician. The soloist drew energy and power from the rest of the band, and was released to express his own personal voice. This was what Goodman meant by freedom of speech in music. In addition, in response to the solid rhythms, dancers found room to express themselves personally amid a large ballroom or theater crowd and achieve for themselves a measure of ecstatic release. Organized society and the machinery of technology and modern civilization had failed in the Depression, but the big band, a modern organization, provided strength to the individual soloists and propulsion to the dancers. An organization could still provide liberty for the individual—and if rooted in black jazz, a measure of soulfulness and human feeling as well.     In many ways, swing was a form of cultural dethroning, akin to the antics of the Marx Brothers in their great comedy of 1935, A Night at the Opera. In that movie, Chico and Harpo disrupt the opera, here defined as an elite, supercilious and imperious cultural form, by suddenly singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game", which was a popular musical favorite at America’s national game—baseball, and by actually playing catch in the orchestra pit. At the same time, Groucho ridiculed the head of the opera and its rich patroness. Here was comedy acting to bring down elite culture in favor of popular music and popular energy. Similarly, white jazzmen brought to popular music and dance a free and improvised energy and a chugging express train of sound that challenged the old 2/4 of 1920s jazz, the sickly sweet dance bands and weak-kneed crooners of the early 1930s. They also challenged the notion that the true American musical expression rested on its association with classical European musical culture. At the heart of all this, swing musicians helped bring the music of black America into the heart of American culture, and in fact, made the claim that swing was the American music. True American culture came from below and not from elite musical pretensions. Nowhere do we see this better than in a comparison between Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall Swing Concert of 1938 and Paul Whiteman’s concert at Aeolian Hall in 1924. The goal of Whiteman’s concert was to “make a lady of jazz,” and in pursuit of that aim the program went in ascending order from “nut” or wild jazz to popular song and on to light classical music and even snatches of operetta, all crowned by the inaugural performance of “Rhapsody in Blue,” with Gershwin himself at the piano. All in all, there was little jazz, little improvisation, little propulsive rhythm, and absolutely no black musicians on the stage. What emerged from the concert was “symphonic jazz,” which became the Whiteman specialty, only with the emphasis on the symphonic. A generation later, Goodman’s concert did away with the need to legitimate swing. Instead, the big band played the same music that they would play in ballrooms, theaters, and dance halls. Hard-charging swing, with Krupa on drums, was the order of the day. As Metronome put it, the concert represented the triumph of “the short hairs over the long hairs.” Indeed, in the most venerable American classical music concert hall, the American music of swing was sufficient. In addition, the concert also featured Goodman’s trio and quartet, manned by Goodman, drummer Krupa, pianist Teddy Wilson, and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. That Wilson and Hampton were African Americans and played with Goodman on a regular basis suggests that the King of Swing, unlike the King of Jazz, was willing to acknowledge and even celebrate the African American roots of American musical culture. While Whiteman tried to obfuscate those roots, Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert went even farther. After intermission, members of the Count Basie Orchestra and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, all black musicians, joined Goodman and several members of his aggregation for a jam session. When the concert was over, many of the musicians left in a hurry to catch the battle of the bands between Basie’s Orchestra and Chick Webb’s band at the venerable Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. In another way Goodman would later turn the tables on elite music when he appeared with the Budapest Quartet and demonstrated that good swing musicians could perform the classical repertoire and should be taken seriously as musicians. Young people found in swing a music that helped them challenge the older generation, while at the same time they enjoyed a new form of freedom of expression. When a swing band appeared in a theater, swing fans overturned propriety by sometimes dancing in the aisles rather than sitting passively. Similarly, at dance halls and ballrooms, members of the audience certainly had the option of dancing, which many did enthusiastically. Yet, many fans would crowd near the stage to better see the musicians and how they interacted to produce the music. Often fans acted as critics, and critics acted as fans. That was certainly the case when swing fans wrote into the new music magazines that emerged to cover the music, Metronome and Down Beat, arguing that this swing musician was better than that one, or that Basie’s version of “One O’clock Jump” was superior to Goodman’s. Swing fans also had the opportunity to vote for their favorite musicians and bands in the polls that the swing magazines ran. Weighted heavily toward white fans and hence white musicians, the polls by the early 1940s began to recognize more and more African American musicians as deserving of top honors. Fans took great pride in their knowledge of the bands and the musicians, and they often acted to challenge the power and authority of the critics themselves. Conversely, the music critics were young men who often let their personal likes and dislikes get in the way of their musical judgment. This first generation of swing music critics found outlets for their views in a variety of publications unheard of during the 1920s, and hence ensured that on a regular basis swing would receive serious attention as America’s music. In 1935 Metronome, a venerable dance band periodical, switched its coverage to focus on big band swing with George T. Simon as one of the major critics, followed a bit later by Barry Ulanov and Leonard Feather. At about the same time, Down Beat emerged as the first American periodical devoted exclusively to jazz and swing music. George Frazier, John Hammond, and infrequently Helen Oakley, became prominent promoters of swing’s popularity, as did Marshall Stearns and many others. In addition, Otis Ferguson wrote both swing and movie reviews for the New Republic, and the black press began to feature critics such as Billy Rowe. Even the Daily Worker, the Communist Party’s newspaper, covered swing extensively as the true music of America since it was rooted in the lives of black and white working class Americans. Add to this the small music magazines that began to appear during the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it is clear that American music had its own regular critics and defenders for the first time in the twentieth century. A word is necessary about John Hammond, one of the major critics and impresarios of the Swing Era. Most notable for helping launch the Benny Goodman band and for promoting the career of Count Basie, Hammond was one of the key figures of the era. A descendant of the wealthy Vanderbilt family, the young tyro dropped out of Yale in 1931 to become a radical journalist, a jazz critic, a record producer, and a promoter of various bands and musicians. Like a Frank Capra movie hero, Hammond identified with the common folk and their music, especially blues and jazz which he viewed as a populist expression of American culture. Turning his back on his family’s social world, he became a rebel with a cause, using his inheritance to discover and promote Billie Holiday, Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton, just as in the Sixties and Seventies, he would do the same for Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen. During the early 1930s, the worst years of the Great Depression, Hammond encouraged Goodman to form a big jazz band, helped recruit musicians for it, and provided favorable reviews of their performances. Significantly, Hammond pushed Goodman to hire Fletcher Henderson as an arranger, and Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and the great electric guitarist Charlie Christian as members of his organization. As a board member of the NAACP, Hammond believed in racial integration and believed that the world of swing was a logical place for the transformation in race relations to begin. He also helped bring Count Basie to national prominence through favorable reviews in Down Beat. He dug the blues, and was determined that the Count’s southwestern swinging blues band get a hearing, even interceding with Goodman to invite Basie on his radio show and to appear with him in Hammond’s “Spirituals to Swing” concerts in 1938 and 1939. Less well known, in his role as a record producer Hammond promoted integrated recording sessions as a normal course of events.     In late 1934 Goodman’s luck changed, and so did that of the band business. He won a spot as the “hot” band on the NBC’s radio program, “Let’s Dance,” which reached audiences nationwide. Prodded by Hammond, who wanted to help Fletcher Henderson get back on his feet after his band fell apart, Goodman hired this major architect of the swing sound to write arrangements for his own fledgling outfit. Henderson turned over some of his classic arrangements rather than write new ones, including “Down South Camp Meeting,” as well as arrangements for popular songs such as “Blue Skies,” which took on new rhythmic urgency and complexity. Henderson and his arranger Don Redman had perfected arrangements that featured the call and response of the reed, brass, and rhythm sections, while leaving plenty of room for a hot soloist or big band singer. Just about one year later, the Goodman band had achieved great success, jazz men found regular employment again, new bands formed quickly to follow up on his success, and popular music took on new power and importance. Black music, albeit often with a white face, broke through and crossed over into white America. Throughout his career, Goodman had his band play in the Henderson style, such as in his theme song, “Let’s Dance,” and often hired black arrangers to write for the band, as when Edgar Sampson, of Chick Webb’s Orchestra, wrote the arrangement for Goodman’s big hit, “Don’t Be That Way,” and Jimmy Mundy produced an arrangement for “Swingtime in the Rockies”. There has been much criticism of Goodman over the years for being the white face of a black music. Some of the criticism is merited. As a prodigy, Benny was an arrogant, impatient perfectionist who often rubbed his players and associates the wrong way, and often was so wrapped up in music that he ignored the social niceties. Yet, he was drawn to black music because he loved it. Ever since his days in Chicago, he had looked to black musicians as the best jazz players and he modeled his own playing on theirs. The crucial question is why he was able to succeed at a level where Fletcher Henderson or other black bandleaders never could. The answer is pure and simple racism. In an age when the south was segregated by law and the north by custom, advertisers were reluctant to sponsor radio programs headlined by black bands, so there was no way a national corporation would pick the Henderson Orchestra to star on its program. Advertisers and radio corporation executives were reluctant to associate their products with black performers because they feared that doing so would turn off white consumers. Radio remote broadcasts from a ballroom were one thing, but sponsorship was quite another. And while Goodman was Jewish in an era of much anti-Semitism, his name did not give that away. As a result, Henderson wrote for Goodman until he got back on his feet, and Goodman became a national star. For many critics, this is an old story of black roots and white fruits. Yet this begs the question of why Goodman, followed by Artie Shaw, Charlie Barnet, Jimmy Dorsey, Gene Krupa and other white band leaders endeavored to play black music with black musicians. As for Goodman, his roots lay in jazz and he wanted to play with the best musicians, who in his opinion were African American. Also, having come from a poor Jewish background and with memories still fresh of pogroms in Eastern Europe, anti immigrant sentiment in the United States, and new anti-Semitism on the world horizon, Goodman sympathized with other victims of racial and religious prejudice. He wanted acceptance in America, but his idea of America was broader than a white, Christian nation. At a time when the Communist Party provided the most avid political support of African Americans, Goodman’s sister was a Communist, and he was both friends with and brother-in-law to the Popular Front radical John Hammond. Immersed in this milieu, Goodman organized benefits for the anti-fascist Republican government during the Spanish Civil War. Urged on by Hammond, Goodman found a way to integrate African American musicians into his performances. Fearful that there would be few venues for an integrated big band to play, he worked a compromise during his early days as a bandleader, wherein pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton would appear for part of the program as special guests in either trio or quartet format alongside drummer Gene Krupa and Goodman himself on clarinet. Goodman revealed a new vision of American culture in his great quartet, in which the Jewish-born Goodman appeared with the Polish Catholic Krupa, and African Americans Wilson and Hampton. By 1939 when he had established himself as the King of Swing, Goodman could include Henderson, Hampton, and various other black musicians in the big band itself. To a great extent, then, Goodman is important for helping to launch the desegregation of American music years before much else in America was desegregated. In his desire to play hot jazz, moreover, he also made the wider American public aware of the richness and beauty of black music. This was a more pluralist and democratic vision of American musical culture and its starting point took place during the Swing Era. But enough of this high-flown rhetoric. Put on the CD and “Let’s Dance.”   Lewis A. Erenberg, Chicago, Illinois
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