Swing

Swing refers to the dance-oriented big-band jazz that dominated American popular music from roughly 1935 to 1946. Tempos run from 120 to 200 BPM. The standard band is 15 to 17 pieces: four or five saxophones (alto, tenor and baritone), three or four trumpets, three or four trombones, plus a rhythm section of piano, guitar, double bass and drums. Songs are typically three to four minutes long and follow a 32-bar AABA chorus form, played two or three times with brief solos in between. The swing feel — eighth notes shaped as long-short triplet figures — sits at the centre of the rhythm. Featured vocalists (Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb, Frank Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday with Count Basie) often took a chorus.

The big-band format developed through the 1920s in Harlem (Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club) and Kansas City (Bennie Moten, then Count Basie). Benny Goodman's January 1938 Carnegie Hall concert is widely cited as the moment jazz was admitted into the American mainstream cultural establishment. Glenn Miller's civilian and Army Air Forces bands produced the era's biggest commercial hits (In the Mood, Moonlight Serenade); Artie Shaw, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Cab Calloway, Earl Hines and Lionel Hampton ran competing bands. The Swing Era collapsed after 1946 under the pressure of bebop's small-group economics, a wartime 20 percent cabaret tax on dance venues, and the 1942–44 union recording ban. Lindy hop and jitterbug dancing, which had grown up alongside the music, were revived in the 1990s and have a continuing global subculture.

Listen for the call-and-response between sax section and brass section (trumpets plus trombones), the foundational technique of big-band arrangement. The rhythm guitar plays four-to-the-bar chord chops, locked with the walking bass to drive the swing. Drummers keep time on the hi-hat opened on 2 and 4; the bass drum is felt rather than heard on most records of the period. Solos are typically a single chorus and tightly framed by the arrangement.

Benny Goodman's Sing, Sing, Sing (1937), with Gene Krupa's extended drum solo, is the genre's signature single. Count Basie's The Atomic Mr. Basie (1958) is the late-career masterwork. Duke Ellington's Ellington at Newport (1956) — particularly the 27-chorus Paul Gonsalves saxophone solo on Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue — is the definitive live document. Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington's Côte d'Azur Concerts (1966) is the canonical vocal pairing.

The 1942 American Federation of Musicians' recording ban, called by union president James C. Petrillo over royalty disputes with record companies, ran from August 1942 into late 1944. Vocalists, who were not members of the AFM, could keep recording with a cappella backing — which accelerated the transition of vocalists from band-feature roles to standalone solo stars (Sinatra, Crosby) and helped end the era of the band-leader as the central figure.