`I couldn`t figure why my parents were telling me that jazz was degenerate, unimportant music. Because when I started hearing it, especially Duke Ellington, I knew right away that it was great music-extraordinary harmonies, extraordinary orchestrations, extraordinary rhythms and invention and imagination.”
The speaker is Gunther Schuller, on the phone from Newton, Mass. His new book, ”The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-45” (Oxford, $30), recently has been published, and on this day, he`s talking about his youth, when he discovered jazz as a teenager in New York City. He grew up surrounded by classical music-his father played violin in the New York Philharmonic for 42 years. In fact, in 1943, when Schuller himself was just 17, he was playing French horn in the Cincinnati Symphony:
”I lived in the black dance emporia in Cincinnati more than in my own home. The symphony hall there is a huge brick building, the middle of which is devoted to the orchestra. On one side, there used to be a wrestling arena and, on the other side, was a kind of restaurant-dance place. When the concerts ended at 10:30, I`d swoop next door and there`d be someone like Ellington playing. I heard all the swing bands then: Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, Andy Kirk, the white bands, too.
”I was what nowadays you`d call a groupie, a classical musician hanging around jazz bands.”
It was this youthful love for swing music, which Schuller has maintained over a lifetime of classical music activity-playing, composing, teaching, conducting and directing a conservatory-that led to his writing ”The Swing Era.” It`s a landmark in jazz literature, a big, fat book (more than 850 pages), the sequel to his equally important 1968 study ”Early Jazz” (Oxford paperback). The two books provide the most thorough history of the first half of jazz`s existence that is likely to be written.
The sources of swing, as Schuller shows, were the evolution of the black dance band idiom and the musical language that originated with the great trumpeter Louis Armstrong. In the mid-1930s, the success of Benny Goodman led to the popularity of many other swing bands, black and white, which provided a profusion of the best popular music that America has enjoyed. Above it all stood the endlessly fertile Ellington, with his wonderfully rich-sounding, colorful band and compositions, whose steady expansion of vistas gave the era its highest achievements.
”The Swing Era” is illustrated by hundreds of transcribed musical examples, from Ellington orchestrations to glittering choruses by two obscure San Antonio trumpeters. In fact, Schuller`s chapter on territory bands, those now-forgotten units that were the first jazz outside of New Orleans, Chicago and the major northeastern cities, is especially welcome. There is a chapter on six small groups and a much longer one about 13 major swing soloists. Since Schuller himself is a composer, and thus instinctively fascinated by arrangement and orchestration, it should come as no surprise that discussions of big bands compose about three-quarters of the volume.
The major part of ”The Swing Era” is Schuller`s guided tour of Ellington, and there is a veritable firmament of other delights, too. It`s most pleasing, and rare, to see the Henderson brothers, Fletcher and Horace, discussed separately, or to find Louis Armstrong`s late-`30s recordings and Cab Calloway`s singing and bandleading taken seriously. The joy of young Billie Holiday`s singing, the harmonic adventures that fired Roy Eldridge`s and Lester Young`s romantic sensibilities, arranger Eddie Sauter`s near-success in remaking Benny Goodman`s band into something original, Red Norvo`s unfortunately now-forgotten band, all are uniquely here.
True, Schuller has a few blind spots, including Coleman Hawkins` blues playing and Dicky Wells` music. Moreover, four major figures of the era are discussed either casually or not at all. Most remarkably, he devotes only a half-paragraph to Ellington`s important small groups, followed by a harsh, five-page description of John Kirby`s quite minor sextet.
There are remarkably few of these flaws. Otherwise, Schuller`s investigations are unique for their thoroughness, which justifies his taking 15 years to write the book.
”Sometimes I wonder how I ever wrote it. And a good, huge chunk of those 15 years, I didn`t write a single word. Because basically I`m an active composer and conductor, and there were times when I was president of New England Conservatory for 28 hours a day.”
Schuller had begun composing music at the age of 11, ”which is rather late; I mean, Mozart started at three or four.” In the mid-1940s, about the time he was beginning his 15 years of playing french horn in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, he also became friends with musicians who had worked closely with composer Arnold Schoenberg-”so I got to hear a lot of 12-tone and atonal music long before most people in this country knew it.
”When the great bebop orchestras like Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie came on, I was really in heaven because they were playing in the more advanced harmonic language I wanted to see in jazz, and didn`t except in Ellington.”
Schuller began composing ”third stream music” to unite the jazz and classical streams of music. As early as 1958, he produced a festival of third stream music at Brandeis University, commissioning compositions from classicists such as Milton Babbitt and jazzmen. In the mid-`60s, Schuller and John Lewis founded Orchestra U. S. A., which played both 20th Century classical music and jazz.
During his presidency at the New England Conservatory, 1967-77, Schuller established a third stream department, chaired by the fine pianist Ran Blake, added jazz artists such as composer George Russell and formed a school swing band, a Duke Ellington ensemble, a ragtime ensemble, a Paul Whiteman orchestra and a fiddle band. ”In the case of Ellington, I had to transcribe (the music). Out of the 3,000 pieces he wrote, only four are presently on sale.”
But then, almost from the beginning, jazz has been suspended between the poles of art and commerce, at no time more than during the swing era. Even in jazz`s best times, mediocre ”sweet” bands and novelty music was usually more popular.
”People even as old as I am tend to think that Benny Goodman`s records were hot sellers, and except for one or two of the worst, they weren`t.
”Even swing era jazz, which was once synonymous with being America`s dance music, was situated in a much larger area called `popular` or
`commercial` music. Then you can understand that the record companies, which have stockholders, which want to pay dividends, were constantly pressuring musicians to do something that would sell more.
”You can measure the greatness of the great orchestra leaders by the extent to which they were able to resist those pressures. You can go through the Duke Ellington catalogue and see him recording some inane song because his manager said, `Listen, there`s a few bucks in this for us.` But the other three he`d do on the session were real Ellington pieces. And it`s again a sign of his greatness that he could turn some pop tune into an Ellington composition by his use of interesting harmonies, instrumentation and his special soloists.”
The dictates of commerce played a major role in the end of the swing era. For the swing bands` singers, such as Frank Sinatra, Doris Day and Peggy Lee, went on their own and became more popular than ever. World War II began the steady decline and fall of America`s ballrooms, where the swing bands played. Jazz changed, too: ”You couldn`t dance to Charlie Parker`s `Confirmation.`
But more, along the same lines, the music these musicians were making, they wanted people to listen, not dance. And of course, they reduced all their activity to small combos: Big bands were not economically manageable any more.”
What happened in jazz after that are the bop era and the current, post-Ornette Coleman era. These will be the subjects of the next installment in Schuller`s history of jazz: ”I still intend to write that. I would give it 8, 9, 10 years.” The next book must compete for Schuller`s attention with his record company, GM, which has issued recordings by Ran Blake and Eric Dolphy. Meanwhile, jazz listeners can be grateful to Schuller for ”Early Jazz” and now ”The Swing Era”-books to return to again and again for insights and discoveries.
