Swing rescued the recording industry. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift 1935-1937
Within a month of Benny Goodman’s unexpected success at the Palomar, his records stood at #3, #2 and #1 in Californian record stores. He was twenty-six years old and already being billed as the King of Swing. Suddenly his music was everywhere. And Goodman – the reticent son of Jewish immigrants of the slums of Chicago – was becoming a matinee idol. ibid.
In the wake of Benny Goodman’s astonishing success, the sounds of dozens of big bands now filled the air and helped draw millions to theatres and dance halls. ibid.
One of the most popular Swing bands of all time was led by another trombonist: Glenn Miller who favoured tightly controlled arrangements and plenty of vocals and showmanship. ibid.
[Teddy] Wilson was the reserved urbane son of a librarian and a professor of English at Tuskegee Institute. His light touch and seemingly effortless technique perfectly matched Goodman’s own playing ... Within weeks Goodman had brought his drummer Gene Krupa and Wilson into the studio to record together. ibid.
In a run-down bar in Los Angeles he heard Lionel Hampton, the master of a new instrument, the vibraphone. Goodman hired him on the spot. And transformed the trio into a quartet. ibid.
In 1935 Duke Ellington asked a mostly unknown nineteen-year-old singer to appear in a short film called Symphony in Black. Her name was Billie Holiday. ibid.
Although she had a tiny vocal range, just over an octave, Holiday was able to make each song her own. In part by singing just behind the beat. She phrased the melodies in the manner of jazz instrumentalists. And considered herself a musician before she was a singer. ibid.
Holiday was fiercely independent. A woman who had known her since childhood said, ‘She was just don’t-care-ish.’ Billie Holiday would remain don’t-care-ish all her life. Cursing. Drinking. Brawling. Pursuing partners of both sexes. Leading a life so close to the edge that it was a wonder to her friends how she managed to survive. But out of all of it she made unforgettable art. And would eventually become the most important female vocalist in the history of jazz. ibid.
On May 11th 1937 Benny Goodman ventured uptown to challenge [Chick] Webb in what was billed the Music Battle of the Century. ‘Fellers, this is my hour,’ Webb told his men ... The Goodman Band was routed. Gene Krupa bowed down in tribute to the man who had beaten him. Chick Webb, he said, had cut me to ribbons. ibid.
Despite its overwhelming popularity Swing music had not captured the heart of every musician. Or every jazz fan. Some found big bands too stiff. Too regimented. ibid.
On the road and off she [Billie Holiday] was closest with Lester Young. They would be friends most of their lives but never lovers. ibid.
By the 1930 Swing was big business. A national craze that despite the Depression kept on growing. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift 1937-1939
The man who would come to epitomise this new sound and who would bring it to the country, the man who would help return Swing to its roots, was Count Basie. ibid.
Coleman Hawkins’ greatest rival was Lester Young. ibid.
And of all the Kansas City bands none was greater than Count Basie and his Barons of Rhythm. ibid.
Chick Webb, the first king of Swing, died on June 16th 1939. He was just thirty years old. ibid.
Parker discovered a new way to play a compelling solo, based not on the melody of the tune but the chords underlying it. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift 1940-1942
Jazz would soon be called upon to play a new role: as a symbol of democracy in a world threatened by fascism and tyranny. ibid.
Meanwhile, after hours and out of ear-shot of a country still obsessed with Swing, a group of defiant young musicians got together and began to perfect a new way of playing. For the next several years working behind the scenes as World War II raged they would question some of the most basic assumptions of jazz. Their leaders were the gifted trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, a free-spirited virtuoso performer, and the man he called the other half of my heart-beat, his friend Charlie Parker, whose revolutionary style would alter the way a whole generation of soloists played on every instrument, just as Louis Armstrong had done a quarter of a century earlier. ibid.
The house band [Minton’s] included two brilliant innovators: the pianist Thelonious Monk, and the drummer Kenny Clarke who spurred on soloists with astonishing kicks and accents. And cues of his own invention. ibid.
He studied piano and developed a lifelong fascination with theory and composition. Gillespie’s first jobs were with Philadelphia big bands, playing Roy Eldridge-style solos but fast, a fellow musician said. ibid.
He [Parker] was playing stuff we’d never heard before, Kenny Clarke recalled. He was running the same way we were but he was way out ahead of us. He had just what we needed, Gillespie said. We heard him and knew the music had to go his way. ibid.
Charles Parker junior was born in 1920 and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. ibid.
Parker began to drink, to use marijuana, then Benzedrine dissolved in cups of black coffee that allowed him to play without sleep night after night. ibid.
Charlie Parker was seventeen and already hooked on heroin. ibid.
Parker was playing like no-one else now. Soaring so inventively on the saxophone that the band sometimes couldn’t follow him. So fast, one listener remembered, he sounded like a machine. ibid.
The unofficial queen of 52nd Street was Billie Holiday ... In 1941 she married a some-time marijuana dealer named Jimmy Monroe. And began smoking opium. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift 1943-1945
Millions of black fans who had once followed jazz were now dancing to a new kind of music: it was called Rhythm and Blues. ibid.
The Nazis banned the word jazz in the rest of occupied Europe. ibid.
Soon, a third remembered, there was everybody else and there was Charlie. And now for the first time the public would have a chance to hear his music. Charlie Parker’s secret was out. ibid.
A new plague – narcotics – swept through black neighbourhoods dimming hopes and destroying lives. Jazz music would reflect it all. Jazz had always involved risk. To create art on the spot, to step forward and express oneself, had always meant taking enormous chances. But now for some young musicians the time seemed right for freeing jazz from what they considered ‘the tyranny of popular taste’. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift 1945-1949
The singular genius whose startling innovations came to epitomise the new music was Charlie Parker. But those innovations came at a great cost. The jazz audience shrank as young people both black and white found other music to dance to. ibid.
And here and there across the country in small clubs and on obscure record labels the new and risk-filled music was finally beginning to be heard: it was called Bebop. Bebop was as much evolutionary as it was revolutionary. It had grown out of after-hour war-time jam sessions at places like Minton’s playhouse in Harlem. Among musicians schooled in Swing music: Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke, and the eccentric genius of the piano – Thelonious Monk ... The man who spoke the language of Bebop most eloquently was Charlie Parker. Bird. ibid.
Parker’s private life was also filled with risk. He had been addicted to heroin since the age of seventeen. ibid.
Dizzy Gillespie became the public face of Bebop. Everything about him provided colourful copy. His dark-rimmed glasses. His berets. The cheeks that puffed so alarmingly when he played. Gillespie broke all kinds of conventions. One of his trombonists was a woman. Melba Liston. ibid.
A friend remembered leaving Parker transfixed in a Manhattan snow-storm late one night unable to tear himself away from the thumping blare of a Salvation Army band. ibid.
In December of 1949 a new jazz club dedicated to Bebop opened in New York just off 52nd Street – it was named Birdland after the new king of Bop. ibid.
On the bandstand Parker disciplined his fury, his talent ... off the bandstand he was often out of control, insatiable, always wanting more food, more liquor, more women and more drugs. This is my home, he told his friend as he rolled up his sleeve to inject himself. ibid.
Bebop was brilliant but demanding music. Complicated, fast and furious. Familiar tunes and ensemble sounds were beside the point. Everything depended on the inspiration, skill and musical sophistication of the soloist. Some listeners were frankly bewildered. Younger musicians continued to emulate Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift 1949-1955
The one-room apartment of Gil Evans, a brilliant freelance arranger: his door was open twenty-four hours a day. And among the men who stopped by to jam were some of the most gifted musicians in jazz ... Evans’ closest collaborator was the young trumpet player Miles Davis, an impatient relentless innovator who over the next quarter century would continually push the boundaries of jazz ... Capitol eventually released their tunes on a long-playing album called Birth of the Cool. ibid.
Miles Davis too turned to drugs: first snorting heroin then injecting it directly into his veins. To support his habit, to feed the beast as he remembered, he stole from friends, pawned his horn, even became a pimp. Davis was jailed for possession in Los Angeles but managed to beat the charge. ibid.
Like his idol Duke Ellington, John Lewis insisted that his music be presented always with dignity. ibid.
To a good many bebop musicians Louis Armstrong’s music seemed hopelessly out of date. Dizzy Gillespie himself had once dismissed him as a has-been. But bebop had its critics too. And Armstrong in a famous appearance at the Hollywood Bowl made fun of Gillespie’s trade-mark beret and the new music. Bebop and the reaction to it opened a huge schism in jazz politicising the music as never before. Tommy Dorsey denounced Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker as musical communists. ibid.