Swing, Brother, Swing

the big bands came rolling into the thirties like streamlined cross-country trains loaded with jazzmen

After the stock market crash of 1929, a lot of people were no longer misbehaving--they couldn't afford it. The formerly rich plunged from windows, and people who weren't rich found life two or three twists harder. Jobs disappeared by the thousands, banks failed and a drought turned the farming lands of the western Great Plains into the Dust Bowl. The Joads hit the road seeking the good life in California but found more Depression instead. Families couldn't afford to live together, so they split up and scattered.

And jazz musicians found themselves out of work, like everyone else. Those were hard times. As the mood of the country changed, so did the music.

The small Chicago-style rave-up groups of the Twenties, such as those fronted by Louis Armstrong and Bix Beider-becke, gave way to something new: the big bands.

Starting in the late Twenties, the bands, less by design than by imperative, began getting bigger. The raucous and freewheeling individualism of the smaller groups gave way to a new sound, smoother and sleeker than jazz had ever been, more streamlined, sophisticated. And more corporate--groups of instrumentalists playing in concert. There were great soloists (and vocalists), but increasingly the ensemble was ascendant.

Although his band was far from the first to play the music, Benny Goodman was the first King of Swing. The term swing had supposedly been coined by Louis Armstrong. Duke Ellington gave it legs with his 1932 hit, It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing).

Even though big-band swing was created by such black groups as Fletcher Henderson's and Ellington's in New York, and Bennie Moten's out in the "territories" around Kansas City, in the Twenties, the sound in the Thirties came to be dominated, in sheer numbers at least, by white bands such as Goodman's.

Born in Chicago in 1909, Goodman was playing professionally on Lake Michigan summer-excursion boats at the age of 14. Two years later he traveled west to join the Ben Pollack band in Venice, California, a group that also included Glenn Miller, a young trombonist who was five years older than Goodman.

In 1928 the Pollack outfit moved to New York. Goodman left in 1929, appearing around the city as a sideman on many records. In the first half of 1931, he played on 175 sides and earned upwards of $400 a week--big change back then. He also worked in pit bands for Broadway shows, such as George Gershwin's Strike Up the Band, alongside Red Nichols (one of the better white trumpet players of the period), Glenn Miller and Gene Krupa--Goodman's drummer during his late-Thirties heyday. Generally dismissed by critics as ham-fisted and uninventive, Krupa's leonine good looks and energy made him a hit with the fans.

So intense was the racism of the period that white players got more studio work than the blacks did. According to Samuel Charters in Jazz: A History of the New York Scene, the New York studio scene was "almost completely restricted to white musicians and it was the men from the white orchestras who were getting the work. The Negro musicians complained bitterly about the discrimination, but the white musicians never attempted to help them. A few of them, notably Goodman, were to use a few of the Harlem musicians, but in the first Depression years, the studio orchestras were white."

Goodman put his first band together in 1933 with the help of John Hammond, the ubiquitous record producer, critic and discoverer of talent. His finds included Goodman, Billie Holiday and Count Basie in the Thirties, through Bob Dylan in the early Sixties. A rich white kid who was connected to the Vanderbilt fortune, Hammond loved the music and had great taste. He was easily the most influential nonplayer in the history of jazz.

Hammond had a contract to record some jazz sides for release in England and asked Goodman to get a group together. These 1933 sessions produced Billie Holiday's first recorded work and got Goodman into bandleading.

Luckily for Goodman, who was a great, fluid clarinet player, but whose taste could be idiosyncratic, Hammond continued as Goodman's musical advisor. At these early recording dates, for instance, Goodman was talked out of doing some Hawaiian novelties he thought would be interesting.

Hammond was responsible for putting together the crucial deal in which Goodman bought song arrangements (for $37.50 each) from Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman, respectively a black bandleader-pianist and a black arranger-saxophonist, who virtually invented the idea of sections of instruments playing together as one big instrument. They began working out these ideas during the mid-Twenties in New York, in Henderson's orchestra. But Henderson was basically A.W.O.L. as a leader, his band fell apart and he eventually ended up working for Goodman as an arranger in the late Thirties. Despite their indispensable contribution to what became the sound of the Thirties and Forties, Henderson and Redman are, for the most part, remembered these days by only knowledgeable students of jazz.

Over the next few years, along with Henderson, Hammond was also responsible for bringing Gene Krupa, pianists Teddy Wilson and Jess Stacy, pioneer electric guitarist Charlie Christian and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton into Goodman's band.

Goodman's success wasn't immediate, but by 1936 his band was the new hot thing--in large part as a result of radio. For these jazz groups in the early Thirties, radio was both a curse and a blessing.

Just as the arrival of TV in the Fifties hurt movie theaters and drive-ins, the spread of radio was one more blow to the faltering record industry, which saw booming sales nose-dive after the 1929 crash.

As a result, many jazz groups broke up, with former headliners going back to low-paying straight day jobs or bailing out for Europe in hopes of finding work there.

But radio could now make reputations. Benny Goodman realized this early on. As he later wrote in his autobiography, "Radio was just beginning to spread out, and it seemed to me that a musician's future was going to be tied up with it."

In 1934 the Goodman band got a gig on a new radio show called Let's Dance, which featured a Latin band, a sweet band and a hot band--the last being Goodman's. The show folded after a few months, but it provided enough national exposure that, in the summer of 1935, Hammond and Goodman put together a cross-country tour of one-nighters winding up in California.

To their dismay, they discovered that most people no longer wanted hot music. As James Lincoln Collier says in The Making of Jazz, "This was the Depression; those people who had enough money to buy records or go out dancing wanted a music more soothing.... The audiences along the way were worse than unenthusiastic. They hated the up-tempo swing that Goodman wanted to play and kept demanding syrupy arrangements of popular tunes.... In Denver, dancers actually asked for their money back. Goodman later called it 'just about the most humiliating experience of my life.'" But their lives were saved by radio--and time zones.

When they hit Oakland, they were all fairly bummed out. Like a last-place baseball team in September, they were looking forward to the end of the tour and going home. One of the last gigs was at the fancy and popular Palomar Ballroom in Hollywood. The place was packed with "hep" young people, none of whom liked the syrupy stuff Goodman now figured audiences wanted. After a few tunes, Goodman apparently said screw it, and began playing some of the hot arrangements he'd bought from Henderson and Redman. The crowd went nuts; the Goodman band ended up playing the Palomar for months, doing national broadcasts from there. The swing-band boom was on--largely due to radio.

As Collier explains, the Let's Dance radio show put the Goodman band on last, after much of the audience in the East and Midwest had gone to bed. But in California, the band came on at just the right time for the kids to boogie, and had built a secret following.

Pianist Art Hodes said of Goodman's popularity, "The white public was looking for someone who could play black jazz in a style acceptable to them, and the crown fell onto Goodman's head. He dethroned the black musicians for the white public. He was to music what Jess Willard was to boxing when he defeated Jack Johnson: the great white hope."

The radio--and omnipresent John Hammond--were also responsible for the national popularity of the Count Basie band beginning in 1937. Without both, Basie might have remained just another musician playing the "territories" in Oklahoma and around Kansas City.

Basie got his start as a bandleader in the boonies, but was born in 1904 in Red Bank, New Jersey, and grew up there. His family scraped along. His father held various jobs, a sometime butler or yardman, and his mother took in laundry. But they had a piano, and starting when Basie was six, his mother came up with a quarter a week for lessons, significant money for working people back then. Basie went from doing odd jobs around Red Bank's Palace movie theater to working as an occasional replacement for the piano player who accompanied the silent movies. He also began doing small gigs around the area, often with Sonny Greer, who went on to be Duke Ellington's longtime drummer.

One day, Basie and a buddy named Elmer decided to seek their fortune in Asbury Park, where Elmer spotted his Uncle Ralph driving "a big long Cadillac," two pretty girls riding with him. Uncle Ralph had a big house that was more than a home, with lots of bedrooms and a piano in the parlor--"and always a lot of very good-looking and very, very friendly female companions around," Basie recalled. So they moved into Uncle Ralph's whorehouse and began looking for work. Not finding much, they jumped when a friend named Smitty invited them to come crash at his place in New York.

It was 1924 and Greer was already playing drums for Ellington--the band still known as the Washingtonians--at the Kentucky Club on Broadway at 49th Street. Through Greer, the two legends-to-be met for the first time. Basie also met the reigning Harlem piano kings.

James P. Johnson, still in his 30s, was an "old head" born in New Jersey who won most of the afterhours cutting contests. He took young, plump Fats Waller under his wing, showing him his way around a jazz piano, as well as around the sweetest cribs and clubs. In turn, Waller, who often played as a silent-movie accompanist, not on piano but on some big-ass organ, began teaching Basie how to play it, since Basie, too, survived by improvising sound tracks for silent movies. Basie remained fond of the organ and kept recording on it, despite its schmaltzy roller-rink sound.

Another slightly older head on the Harlem scene was Willie "The Lion" Smith--whose nickname came from his early desire to be a rabbi. "I got as far as becoming a cantor. Because of my devotion to Judaism, I was called The Lion of Judah, later abbreviated to The Lion." Smith had been playing in various Harlem clubs since 1912, interrupted by a volunteer stint in the Army that took him to France, where he was on the front 51 straight days (he also played bass drum in a regimental band). From the early Twenties until the late Forties, he led groups or was featured pianist at clubs all over New York: the Garden of Joy, Capitol Palace, Pod's and Jerry's, the Onyx, Adrian's Tap Room, the Apollo.

In 1925 Basie got a job on the Columbia Wheel, a circuit of vaudeville houses. It was the first of many such tours he did until finding himself one morning hung over in a Tulsa hotel room, suffering from the effects of "chock," a local high-octane concoction. He heard music, so good and clear he thought it must be a new Louis Armstrong record. But it was Walter "Big Un" Page and His Blue Devils, playing from a truckbed in the street below, cruising slowly around town advertising the night's show.

Basie pulled on his pants and ran downstairs. It was the beginning of the Count Basie Orchestra.

A few years later, the bandleader, bassist Big Un Page, who was from Missouri, and vocalist Jimmy Rushing, born in the Oklahoma territories and whose stature earned him the nickname Mr. Five by Five, would both become longtime Basie band members. And, for a time, so would the trumpeter Basie so admired, Oran "Hot Lips" Page--no relation to Big Un--who was from Texas and had toured with blues singers Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Ida Cox before joining the Blue Devils in 1928.

A different sound had been coming to life with these Midwest and territory bands--so called because many of them worked in the old Indian Territory and because they tried to establish exactly that, a territory in which to be top dog and work every night. Their sound was considerably bluesier than New York bands, based more on riffs, soloists and "head" arrangements cooked up while playing, not written out in advance.

Territory bands such as the Blue Devils and Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy had a geographical link to New Orleans. Few New Orleans musicians had traveled East to pass the music on directly.

As Collier puts it, "By 1936 or 1937 two streams were feeding the big-band movement: one stemming from Henderson and [bandleader and pianist] Sean Goldkette, with a concern for interesting scores precisely played; and the other coming from the Southwest, emphasizing riffs and good solo playing."

This difference--which ultimately fused in the streamlined bands of the late Thirties--also reflected the same class divisions and collisions that first created New Orleans jazz. As a result of Jim Crow laws, middle-class Creoles such as Jelly Roll Morton, who grew up with music lessons and opera, found themselves competing with working-class blacks such as Louis Armstrong. Similarly, New York bandleaders Henderson and Ellington were raised on standard music repertoire, not country blues or New Orleans jazz. Neither Ellington nor Henderson were steeped in blues or New Orleans music, and they had to learn to play these styles. Also, the East Coast players could usually sight-read music, a skill Basie and Armstrong struggled with at first.

You can hear it in the difference between Basie and Ellington. Ellington's range is much wider, but his music became increasingly more experimental and composed--and influenced by Europeans. By the mid-Thirties, Ellington was already being taken seriously as a composer, not just as a jazzman.

Basie's music, on the other hand, remained more bluesy and down-home, warmer, than Ellington's many explorations. Not too long after hearing them from his hotel window, Basie became one of the Blue Devils. "The Blue Devils was the first big band I ever had a chance to get close to and really listen to," he later wrote, "and it was the greatest thing I had ever heard. I had never heard the blues played like that." About this time, Bill Basie became Count Basie.

The Blue Devils were a little like the early Grateful Dead, more of a commune than a successful economic unit. Any money they got for a gig, Big Un would distribute equally after taking out expenses and gas money to get to the next town. "A lot of territory bands operated like that in those days," Basie remembered. "They were called commonwealth bands. It was just like a beautiful family."

They orbited around Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma, playing in any town that would have them. In Wichita once, they couldn't come up with the hotel bill. Basie and Hot Lips Page and some of their instruments were held ransom until Big Un made it to their next date in Oklahoma City and wired some of the advance money back to the hotel to spring them.

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In autumn of 1933, the Blue Devils fell apart because of chronic money troubles, and Basie landed in Kansas City, going back to playing organ for silent movies at the Eblon Theater, where he had worked before. On days off, he'd go to see Satchel Paige pitch for the Kansas City Monarchs.

Kansas City at the time was hopping. The jam sessions were famous. Pianist Sam Price remembered one in Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: "I came by a session at about ten o'clock and then went home to change my clothes. I came back a little after one o'clock, and they were still playing the same song."

"You could hear music twenty-four hours a day in Kansas City," said drummer Jo Jones, also to become a longtime Basie Orchestra member.

There was a lively night-club scene providing lots of work for musicians--among them several ex--Blue Devils, one being sax player Lester Young. Tenor sax player Ben Webster--who went on to play with Andy Kirk, Henderson and Cab Calloway before his breathy work with Ellington in the early Forties--was also in town, as were blues shouter Joe Turner and K.C.-born pianist Bennie Moten, whose chief territory rival had been the Blue Devils.

Moten lured several of the former Blue Devils into his band after they broke up, including Basie, Jo Jones and Lester Young. Ben Webster, who had learned tenor sax from Young while touring for a few months with the Young family band, also joined. They did pretty well in the territories, but in 1934, Moten died after a tonsillectomy. In 1936 a Basie-led band containing several former Moten band members got a regular gig at the Reno Club in Kansas City, and it went out over regional radio. John Hammond was listening in Chicago. Typically, since he would seek out talent anywhere it popped up, he jumped in a car and drove to K.C. Soon Basie found himself back in New York, this time as a bandleader working at some of the hottest clubs.

Jazz had spread all over the country since its beginnings in New Orleans, and there were jazz bands playing in most cities of any size by the mid-Thirties.

The music was branching into several noticeably different directions, including such white country-swing bands as Bob Wills's Texas Playboys. Swing of various stripes became such a national phenomenon that, as critic Nat Shapiro wrote in The Jazz Makers, "in the years from 1936 to the outbreak of World War Two, for the first and perhaps for the last time in its history, a segment of jazz became the popular music of the country."

From the early Thirties on, the home of jazz became New York City--at first in Harlem, and then with outposts in Mid-town, mainly around West 52nd Street, which by the end of the decade was known as Swing Street.

When Basie began establishing himself around New York in 1937, Ellington--who at the age of 38 was just five years older than Basie--was already an international star whose New York base was Harlem's Cotton Club.

Ellington was the first jazz bandleader to be considered a modern composer, comparable to Ravel, Delius, Stravinsky and the rest. In fact, when Stravinsky visited New York in the early Thirties, he told reporters that the first thing he wanted to do was go up to Harlem to see Ellington at the Cotton Club.

Brought up in Washington, D.C., in fairly comfortable circumstances--his father was a butler who often worked at the White House--Ellington was by all accounts a pampered little prince. As a kid, he was nuts about baseball and sold popcorn at Washington Senators' games; his mother started him on piano lessons to wean him from baseball.

In high school, he realized that playing an instrument was a great way to meet girls. When he saw that a local band was getting work through an ad in the Yellow Pages, he put in a bigger one, and for a while as a teenager was booking several bands a night, along with his own, sometimes making over $150 a week--this when regular working schlubs with families didn't make $150 in two months.

Ellington made his first assault on New York in 1922, playing with Wilbur Sweatman, whose claim to fame was playing three clarinets at once. But he was soon back home. A year later he tried again, this time as part of the Washingtonians, the five-piece group that included Sonny Greer, who would be Ellington's drummer for 30 years (and who as a kid had played gigs in New Jersey with Count Basie and Fats Waller).

For six months in New York, the Washingtonians starved. Ellington said they sometimes had to split one hot dog five ways. They played at rent parties. To raise rent money for their apartments, people would provide food, drink and a piano player, and charge admission. Musicians didn't always get paid, but could usually eat and drink free. Some of these apartments were more like unlicensed clubs, where the party went on seven days a week, night and day.

It was at such parties that Ellington first got to know--and competed in cutting contests with--James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith and Waller, who was five years younger than Ellington, but who taught him a few things about jazz piano.

But the Washingtonians weren't making it. Like Jelly Roll Morton, they tried pool hustling on the side to raise cash, but weren't as good at it as he was. One day Ellington found $15 in the street, and they used it for train fare home to D.C.

Three years later they were back, this time as headliners--first at the Kentucky Club in Midtown, and then from 1927 through 1931 as the house band at the Cotton Club. They got the Cotton Club gig by being four hours late for an audition. The owner was four hours late, too, and of the six bands that showed up, theirs was the only one he heard.

"When we started to build a band," Ellington said, "Fletcher Henderson was what we tried to sound like." But he soon found his own sound.

"Our band came along just when Paul Whiteman and his orchestra had popularized the symphonic style," he wrote. "We came in with a new style. Our playing was stark and wild and tense. We put the Negro feeling and spirit into our music. We were not the first to do that, but maybe we added some more."

Ellington's group of the late Twenties was nicknamed the Jungle Band, partly because of the growls and wails coming from the trumpet of Bubber Miley, who was a little too fond of drinking. During gigs, he would sometimes curl up under the piano for a short nap when he felt the need.

That was a part of Ellington's genius--his tolerance of, and musical use of, individuals. "You can't write music right," he said, "unless you know how the man that'll play it plays poker." Sly and elliptical, his idea of disciplining the band was making them solo. If someone showed up late or hung over, Ellington would call for chorus after solo chorus from the offender, either wearing him out or embarrassing him.

Ellington had exhibited his talent as a composer back in the Twenties, writing the music for and appearing in a movie short in 1929 called Black and Tan Fantasy. His composing had been further encouraged by a royal reception for Duke's first tour of Europe in 1933. One critic wrote, "He gives the same distinction to his genre as Strauss gave to the waltz or Sousa to the march." In England, the Prince of Wales sat in on drums at one show. "We both began to get rather high on whatever it was we were drinking," said Sonny Greer. "He was calling me Sonny, and I was calling him the Wale."

Another true jazz genius of the Thirties was Billie Holiday, who was the M.V.P. vocalist of the swing era. To band members, vocalists were a necessary evil, like road food. But musicians on recording sessions and in bands with her considered Holiday a great instrumentalist. She could take the most trivial pop tune and turn it into something moving, into art. Her voice was like one of those delicate but passionate gardenias that she wore in her hair.

She couldn't have had a much harder upbringing, and you can hear it in her singing. But there is also a buoyancy and sunny irony to her as well. If she had the blues, she also had a sense of humor.

"I was a woman when I was sixteen," she wrote in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. "I was big for my age, with big breasts, big bones--a big fat healthy broad, that's all."

Her parents split up when she was still a baby, and Holiday left school forever after fifth grade. When she was ten, a neighbor--named Mr. Dick--tried to rape her. When the police arrested him, they sent her off to a Catholic institution for wayward girls because she had been doing errands for the girls in a whorehouse near where she lived in Baltimore. Instead of payment, she'd begged to listen to records on the Victrola in the front parlor--especially Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, her two biggest influences. "I always wanted Bessie's big sound and Pops's feeling."

At the age of 13, she was a "hip kitty," as she put it. Her mother found herself unable to make it doing domestic work and decided to move to New York where the pay was higher. Things weren't much easier there. Holiday tried working as a maid for a rich white woman who introduced her to the term nigger; they fought, and soon Holiday, barely a teenager, was supporting her mom and herself by working as a prostitute in Harlem. Quickly, she was "strictly a twenty-dollar call girl" with several regular customers--all white. But she had no aptitude for it, she said. "For damn good reason, I was scared to death of sex." When she was 12, "a trumpet player from a big Negro orchestra had had me for the first time on the floor of my grandmother's parlor.... That was rugged enough to finish me with men for a while."

Soon, she was thrown in jail, spending four months on Welfare Island, fending off the ladies who liked her (so she said in her book; others said that she was occasionally bisexual) and cooking her mom's Southern-style recipes for the warden. He enjoyed her cooking so much that he asked her to stay on as an employee.

Since Holiday was on parole and had to stay straight, she and her mom were broke again. Her father was then in town playing guitar with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, and she used to visit the club to bug him for money, which he'd give her quickly and send her away, so that the young showgirls he was hanging out with wouldn't know he had a grown daughter.

But as she tells it in her autobiography, one cold winter day they were out of money and behind on the rent. An eviction notice came saying they had to pay $45 or be out the next morning. Holiday hit the streets, trying the joints uptown on Seventh Avenue for a job. Finally, she got to Pod's and Jerry's and told one of the owners she was a dancer. She wasn't. The piano player "took pity on me" and asked if she could sing. "Sure, I can sing, what good is that?" They did Travelin' All Alone. "That came closer than anything to the way I felt. And some part of it must have come across.... When I finished, everybody in the joint was crying in their beer, and I picked thirty-eight bucks up off the floor. When I left the joint that night, I split with the piano player and still took home fifty-seven dollars." She bought a whole chicken and some baked beans and hurried to tell her mother.

Not long afterward, John Hammond wandered into some Harlem club and found Holiday singing there. In the April 1933 issue of Melody Maker--the 22-year-old impresario was also New York correspondent for the British music magazine--Hammond wrote, "This month, there has been a real find in the person of a singer called Billie Holiday.... Though only 18, she weighs over 200 pounds, is incredibly beautiful and sings as well as anybody I ever heard."

Hammond arranged her first recording session with Benny Goodman. After that came many fruitful sessions with pickup bands, usually led by pianist Teddy Wilson, which produced some of her best work and some of the best jazz recorded during the Thirties.

Holiday's records featured most of the best jazz musicians of the time. She recorded almost exclusively in New York, so if Ellington was in town, they'd use members of his band; if Basie was, they'd use his.

The list of people who backed her is a basic Who's Who of swing-era musicians, including her good pal Lester Young from the Basie band, saxophonist Johnny Hodges and Chu Berry. Additional sax or clarinet players included Don Redman, Harry Carney, Ben Webster, Herschel Evans and Benny Goodman.

Among the trumpeters who turned up on Holiday's records were Buck Clayton, Roy Eldridge, Hot Lips Page, Jonah Jones, Charlie Shavers, Cootie Williams and Red Allen.

Billie's mainstay pianist into the Forties remained Teddy Wilson, but Eddie Heywood or Claude Thornhill or Count Basie occasionally sat in (unfortunately, Basie didn't play behind her often because of contractual problems).

The rhythm section usually consisted of that solid rock from the Basie band: Freddie Green on guitar, Big Un Page on bass and Jo Jones on drums, a line-up Basie trombonist Dickie Wells described as "nothing less than a Cadillac with the force of a Mack truck."

By the mid-Thirties, Holiday was getting work at the better-known New York clubs: the Alhambra Grill, the Hotcha Club, the Famous Door, the Apollo and Connie's Inn, recently moved to Mid-town from Harlem. At Connie's Inn, Holiday was in a lavish show, which she had to leave because of food poisoning. Her replacement was Bessie Smith.

Early in 1937, Hammond, once again playing matchmaker, convinced Holiday to join the Count Basie Orchestra. Hammond brought them together in New York for the first time, since the Basie band was making a shaky start at drawing crowds.

At a recording session Hammond arranged, Holiday had met Lester Young, Basie's great saxophonist. They hit it off right away. As Hammond recalled it: "Their styles fitted, as did their tastes in smoking--the session was nearly canceled when one of the top American Record Company officials walked in and sniffed the air suspiciously." They both remained fond of the evil weed.

Young was born in Mississippi in 1909 but spent his first ten years across the river from New Orleans in Algiers. When he was ten, his family split up and Young moved with his brother and sister to Minneapolis to live with his father, a carny musician. "I really appreciated what my father did for me," Young said. "He'd been a blacksmith, but he studied at Tuskegee and he knew so much. He tried to teach me everything. He could play all the instruments and liked trumpet best. He kept up traveling with carnival minstrel shows and teaching music until he died in the Forties." So as a kid, Young was on the road in the territories every summer, playing drums in his father's band. He switched to sax because the drums were too heavy to lug around--also, dealing with them after gigs interfered with hitting on girls.

At the age of 18, he left home rather than make a tour of the South (with its attendant racist hassles) that his father had booked. He started on alto sax and switched to tenor sax before joining the Original Blue Devils in 1932, and then moved on to Bennie Moten. When Coleman Hawkins left Fletcher Henderson for an extended stay in Europe starting in 1934, Young got the call to replace him. But he was no replacement, he was different, his style more lyrical, melodic, than Hawkins' had been. He only lasted a few months with Henderson before being hounded out of the band for not being a Hawkins clone; he was replaced by Ben Webster, a Hawkins disciple.

Young was playing in Minneapolis when he heard the re-formed Count Basie band on the radio, broadcasting from the Reno Club in Kansas City in 1936. He sent Basie a telegram saying the band needed a real tenor sax player. He got the job, starting an association that produced some of the best music of the era. In Gunther Schuller's opinion, Lester was the most influential horn player after Armstrong and before Charlie Parker.

Lester moved in with Holiday and her mom after discovering "a big dirty old rat the size of my dog" snoozing on his shirts in a hotel dresser drawer. According to all accounts, their relationship was strictly platonic, they just liked hanging out together, smoking a little pot and making the afterhours rounds of rent parties and jam sessions.

Holiday remembered one where Chu Berry, then with Cab Calloway and considered the best, playing a "pretty gold horn," got blown away by "Lester with his little old saxophone held together with adhesive tape and rubber bands." It was he who gave Holiday the nickname Lady Day.

These were some of the happiest days for both of them, before Holiday's heroin addiction and subsequent rounds of jail sentences and harassment until her death in 1959.

The event that best characterized the nature of this musical era may have occurred at the Savoy Ballroom in New York on June 17, 1937. That night there was a battle of the bands between Count Basie and Chick Webb, featuring Holiday and newcomer Ella Fitzgerald as their respective vocalists.

Webb was an excellent drummer, despite a physical handicap resulting from spinal tuberculosis that left him hunchbacked. An operation would eventually kill him in 1939 at the age of 30. In the mid-Thirties, his band was a fixture at the Savoy Ballroom, one of New York's elite jazz clubs, and in 1935, he'd hired Ella Fitzgerald.

Basie won this battle of the bands. As a reviewer then said, "There is more force, personality and sparkle in the Holiday voice than we ever noticed in La Fitzgerald's, and that's going some, for Fitzgerald can sing for us any time of day." Fitzgerald went on to greater success. By 1938, with her big hit A-Tisket A-Tasket, she became far more popular than Holiday would ever be.

Holiday's adventures on the road with the Basie band in 1937 and 1938 were both funny and terrible, sometimes simultaneously. She got along well with most of the band--especially well with guitarist Freddie Green, the only one who became a boyfriend--and even took part in crap games in the band bus between cities. Once--her first go at it, naturally--she kept winning and cleaned the whole band of a week's pay.

Holiday was thrown out of the Basie band in 1938 for unreliability and lackadaisical attitude. On nights when she didn't feel like singing, she'd do a short, perfunctory performance. But almost immediately, she was hired by good-looking clarinetist Artie Shaw to be a vocalist in his otherwise all-white band.

Most of the other white big bands of the time don't bear much listening to now. Compared to the continuing sparkle of Basie, Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford, such far more popular white groups as Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey's, and Glenn Miller's, generally sound flat and dated, belonging back at some Andy Hardy sock hop.

Benny Goodman's was far and away the most popular of these bands, white or black. But he was at his jazziest in the small groups he pulled out of his band and began recording with late in the Thirties; among his big-band records are large patches of totally forgettable renderings of mediocre pop tunes of the day--but then, that was the bread and butter for all these groups. Back then, everybody did versions of new tunes, slugging it out in the record stores and on the new and proliferating jukeboxes. Some weeks the same song done by three different groups would be in Billboard's top ten. It was a practice that only died out in the Fifties, withering down to people like Pat Boone, the Diamonds and Elvis covering good new R&B songs for the white audience.

Artie Shaw was Goodman's rival as a clarinet wizard. His playing was lighter and thinner than Goodman's, but unlike Goodman, Shaw was both handsome and charming--as suggested by his enviable interludes with Lana Turner and Ava Gardner during the Forties.

Shaw was already doing well when Holiday joined in 1938, so he was brave on a couple of counts to hire her, primarily because she was the first well-known black female singer ever to front an immensely popular white band.

Racism back then was more blatant if not more rampant than it is today, and Shaw knew there were going to be problems. He was ready to take them on because he admired Holiday's talent so much, and also because, as a Jew, he'd suffered his own share of discrimination. Also, he and Holiday were attracted to each other, and, as John Chilton discreetly puts it in Billie's Blues, their relationship "was for a time more close and complex than the usual bandleader-vocalist situation."

But the racial hassles proved even tougher than Shaw or Holiday had expected. There were the usual comments. In West Virginia, drummer Zutty Singleton, hired to coach the band, suggested that Holiday get a room at the black hotel he was going to, but she tried going to the best whites-only hotel and was turned away--one of many such experiences. Even in New York. Billie had second billing to Shaw for a run at the Lincoln Hotel--its name another of life's little ironies--but, as she told the New York Amsterdam News in 1939, "I was never allowed to visit the bar or the dining room, as did the other members of the band. Not only was I made to enter and leave the hotel through the kitchen, but I had to remain alone in a little dark room all evening until I was called on to do my numbers."

She left the Shaw band after a year, just as Shaw himself did from time to time. A little too intellectually restless for the business, and bothered by dicey health, he led eight or nine completely different line-ups between 1936 and 1953--the first an odd amalgam of Dixieland and a string quartet ("a soothing, syrupy swing," said reviewer George T. Simon) and one in 1949 that played bebop. During World War Two, he led a Navy band in the Pacific that played "in jungles, in airplane hangars, on decks of ships and even in outdoor areas camouflaged for protection against enemy attack" but left on a medical discharge before his tour of duty was up. Shaw was a searcher, as might be expected of a man who married at least seven times. In 1934 he had been one of New York's most successful studio musicians but left to be a farmer for a while in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In November 1939, at the height of his popularity as a bandleader, he abruptly disbanded and split for Mexico to "think" for a couple months before coming back and forming a new band. He returned to farming in the early Fifties, running his own dairy farm in Upstate New York. He then moved to Spain, where he lived for several years spending his time writing an autobiography, The Trouble with Cinderella. He also wrote one published novel, a mystery called I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead.

During World War Two, big bands began to suffer--though judging from those cheery wartime musicals starring the Andrews Sisters, Kay Kyser and the rest, it would be hard to tell. But the draft was taking good players right and left, creating the swingingest military bands in history but making it as tough for bandleaders to find talent as it was for major-league ball clubs (1945 was the year the St. Louis Browns had one-armed Pete Gray playing the outfield). Gasoline rationing also made it harder for groups to book tours of one-night stands. A wartime strike by the musicians' union lasted for 13 months and put such a dent in recording that the early work of many bop musicians--among them Charlie Parker--went largely unrecorded.

There were also musical reasons for the fading of big bands in the late Forties. They had taken the set of ideas known as swing about as far as they could go. The music was becoming formulaic, overblown and--though this may sound contradictory--too good. As jazz critic Gunther Schuller says in a commentary on Lionel Hampton's 1942 Flying Home, "[It] fulfills its intentions with excellence. Such totally infectious swing in a riff-based big band also indicated a kind of crisis for the music. If the bands had learned to do this kind of thing this well and this winningly, well, there was nothing left for them except to try something new."

It was inevitable that some musicians would begin rattling the cage. Dizzy Gillespie, one of the revolutionary bopsters, organized a big band in 1946 (which a year later included 21-year-old Miles Davis) that tried to put bebop ideas into a big-band context. One idea involved playing at bat-out-of-hell speed, something that had been a natural tendency of jazz players from the beginning, to kick the music up a notch. The beboppers were going about as fast as you could go.

"[This] was the first full translation of Gillespie's and Parker's new bop language into big-band terms," says Schuller, writing on Gillespie's 1946 Things to Come. "The piece had the relentless speed, the frenetic emotional tension, all the new melodic and harmonic inventions that the boppers had developed.... Nothing like it had ever been heard before; it stunned the jazz world and, in its own curious and untoppable way, spelled the end of the swing era."

By 1948 the time of the big bands on the center stage of American popular music was over. In that year, many crashed and burned. George T. Simon's book The Big Bands mentions 450 different groups; almost all were goners by the Fifties.

There were exceptions, most notably Duke Ellington, whose orchestra not only continued to play concert and dance dates, but kept swinging--even in such extended pieces as Far East Suite, Latin American Suite and a collection called the Afro-Eurasian Eclipse.

In 1947 Louis Armstrong dumped his big band, moving over to the smaller All Stars line-up he used for the rest of his career. Benny Goodman, on the other hand, sporadically led a big band well into the Sixties. Besides Gillespie's, a few new "modern" big bands, such as those led by Stan Kenton, Gerry Mulligan and Gil Evans, came along. Charlie Parker, bebop incarnate, couldn't resist the big-band sound himself and recorded sides fronting a fat orchestra.

But by the mid-Fifties, most of the big bands from the Thirties and Forties were as dead as the dinosaurs.

What they left behind were the first big individual stars--both solo instrumentalists and vocalists. The trend toward smaller clubs such as those lining 52nd Street in the Forties was encouraged in part by the emergence of these popular soloists. All you really needed was a rhythm section and the star. It was much cheaper for club owners, who would have fewer salaries to pay and no elaborate shows to mount. A tiny stage, a few tables, a liquor license and you were in business. So the big bands gradually gave way to the small combos that are still a mainstay of jazz.

The swing bands left something else behind: the crooner. Actually, most were croonettes, since a majority of bands had female vocalists.

A few of the female thrushes became more famous after their stints with bands. Cute, brown-haired and chipmunk-cheeked Dinah Shore appeared with Glenn Miller during World War Two. Before climbing up on her horse Buttermilk to become Roy Rogers' sensible sidekick and wife, Dale Evans posed for sexy décolletage publicity stills as vocalist for the otherwise forgotten Anson Weeks band in the mid-Thirties. And Harriet Hilliard was singing duets with Ozzie Nelson in his band at the time of their marriage in 1935, before their radio and TV careers as David and Ricky's square but understanding parents. Collegiate Les Brown, who organized his first band while a student at Duke, had fresh and radiant Doris Day as his singer for a while in the early Forties. It didn't hurt to be cute. Peggy Lee, sultry and then some (both to look at and to listen to), sang with Goodman in 1941. Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald got along largely on talent. As did Sarah Vaughan, singing with Billy Eckstine (formerly a vocalist himself with Earl Hines), whose 1944--1947 big band included Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

The first male crooner of any importance was Bing Crosby, who sang with Paul Whiteman in the late Twenties and was pals with Bix Beiderbecke. Crosby was the first big multimedia star to emerge from a so-called jazz band, but by the mid-Thirties he had already become the all-purpose showbiz personality he remained for the rest of his career.

It was Crosby whom Frank Sinatra wanted to be when he grew up. Sinatra started out singing as a teenager in New Jersey before getting his first break with Harry James, in whose new band he sang for seven months before joining Tommy Dorsey in 1939. Sinatra soon surpassed Crosby to become the ultimate crooner, the heart-throb for an army of saddle-shoed bobby-soxers. He specialized in slow romantic ballads that made teenage girls swoon.

He could sing like no one before or since. His voice and his phrasing are unique. Like Billie Holiday, he could take any song, even the dumbest pop tune, and make it his own. Oddly, jazz critics mainly ignore Sinatra or dismiss him as a pop balladeer. But Sinatra is up there at the top. That he proved to be a fine actor in such Fifties films as From Here to Eternity and The Man with the Golden Arm wasn't surprising--his singing had always been a dramatic presentation, the best of his songs musical short stories. And all the girls thought this skinny adenoidal guy, the opposite of John Wayne or Clark Gable, was adorable.

There had been many male vocalists before him, but Sinatra's enormous popularity while in Tommy Dorsey's band changed the whole game. It had been coming for a while, but from Sinatra on, the singers began to dominate the big bands at the expense of the instrumentalists. The 13-month recording strike of 1942-1943 conspired in favor of vocalists--they could record, but union players couldn't. By the end of the war, singers were the new stars and bands were relegated to the status of backup groups.

This development added a few more logs to the fire of the bop rebellion and its small combos. In bop combos, there were no vocalists.

And other transformations were taking place. By the mid-Fifties, Little Richard was warbling some strange new language and Elvis had started shaking his pelvis.

Rock and roll--jazz's next revelation--had arrived.

I don't stay out late, nowhere to go, I'm home about eight, just me and my radio; Ain't misbehavin, I'm savin my love for you.----Fats Waller, 1933

Once they called it ragtime, and it had its fling; it's the same old syncopation, now they call it swing.----Hersch, De Leath, Cloutier and Handman, 1938

It's too hot for words, there's nothing like relaxation. I can't endure this temperature, if you want to make love, I'm OK.----Samuels, Whitcup and Powell, 1935