The Swing Book Read online

  While the big bands were effectively over, however, swing wasn’t totally in eclipse. Driven by the influence of Count Basie’s fast-moving blues sound, a new musical form grew out of swing. You could catch a glimpse of it in 1942 when Illinois Jacquet honked and wailed his way through his sax solo on the Lionel Hampton tune “Flying Home.” By the end of the forties, it even had its own name, jump blues, a powerful, hard-rocking mix of jazz arrangements and solos with the deep soul of the blues. The saxes blasted and the horns keened like never before. The singers shouted the lyrics, and a strong backbeat pushed the music. And it was all firmly rooted in swing. Jump blues’ most famous artist, Louis Jordan, who sold millions of records after the war, had been a saxophonist with Chick Webb. The trumpeter Louis Prima had written “Sing, Sing, Sing” for Goodman. And singer Wynonie Harris had performed for Lucky Millinder’s swing band. “Whether you are stompin’ or you’re jumpin’ or you’re swingin’ …, you’re talking about the same type of beat, the same type of groove, and the same type of tempo,” says Albert Murray in the documentary Bluesland. But Jordan—whose smash hits included “Caldonia” and “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” —led the way in paring down the size of the orchestras, finding a big sound with his new seven-piece combo.

  In doing so, he was a decisive catalyst in the creation of both rock ’n’ roll and R&B. Back in the day, promoters began using the terms swing and rock fairly interchangeably to describe jump blues bands like Jordan’s. Recalls Claude Trenier, leader of the jump band the Treniers, who sang with the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra: “We went to the Blue Note in Chicago and the owner said what kind of music was that and we said we’re just having fun. It’s swinging. But he put on the marquee ‘The rock and rollin’ Treniers.’ They just changed the name.” Once the rock era exploded in the mid-fifties, Jordan’s influence was still pervasive. Rock legend Chuck Berry has said, “I identify myself with Louis Jordan more than any other artist.” “He was everything,” James Brown once said, as quoted in John Chilton’s Jordan biography Let the Good Times Roll. And while rocker Bill Haley never acknowledged Jordan’s influence on his music, Jordan himself claimed, “When Bill Haley came along in 1953 he was doing the same shuffle boogie I was.” Indeed, in the last few years there’s been a major reevaluation of rock’s pioneers afoot. It’s clear that as much as Haley and even Elvis were rocking, they were swinging too. Adds bandleader Bill Elliott, “What people forget is that all through the fifties, even though there was rock and roll, the dancing was still essentially swing dancing.” By now, everyone knows the story of how white musicians and record labels repackaged black R&B and created rock in the fifties. But it’s possible to trace a line from rock back to R&B and then further back to swing. And that’s exactly the path that today’s neoswingers took to find their musical roots.

  Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. (MARK JORDAN)

  CHAPTER 2

  The Rebirth of Swing

  Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: swing wasn’t brought back by a Gap ad. The origins of the swing revival date back at least two decades. It began on a grassroots level and has slowly, steadily, and within the last several years, furiously grown and deepened into the full-fledged movement it is today. A true rediscovery of the dance, music, and style of the original era, the resurgence first sprang up among small pockets of like-minded but isolated people scattered in cities all across the world. Dancers from Stockholm and London to New York and Los Angeles began learning and falling in love with the real Savoy-style Lindy Hop, the crazed jitterbugging and dangerous aerials that once had social critics in apoplexy. Musicians up and down the West Coast searched for and embraced the hotter facets of swing, the screaming improvisational jazz riffs and licks that back in the day had shocked the establishment. And also out in California, scenesters started once again wearing the most defiant and colorful fashions of the forties: the zoot suit, an outfit that had once incited riots (see chapter 6). Who are the people who brought back swing? In the best of ways, they’re a motley crew of jazz aficionados, former punk rockers, rockabilly and ska fanatics; hard-edged greasers and squeaky clean nostalgics; street-kid dancers and ballroom refugees; history buffs; and best of all, some of the era’s original musicians and Lindy Hoppers. What they all had in common was a desire to go back to the roots of swing, and what they found was that it could have a freshness and power all over again.

  Fresh was not what you would call the swing that was hanging around before the revival happened. Swing, of course, had never really died out. For years it was kept alive by society dance bands across the country who trotted out old chestnuts like “In the Mood” over and over again at weddings, charity benefits, and golden anniversary parties. The average kid growing up in the seventies couldn’t be blamed for equating swing with a graying Guy Lombardo trying to liven up New Year’s Eve on television. Or, even worse, with the bubbly schmaltz of The Lawrence Welk Show. By the eighties and nineties, however, even those saccharine reminders of big band’s glory days had exited the stage. No less a person than Duke Ellington’s foremost modern-day champion, Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, has said that when he was young the name Ellington called to mind “old people and Geritol.” Adds Jack Vaughn, president of the neoswing label Slimstyle Records, “The swing music of old was marginalized by movie soundtracks and car commercials. It became background music.” And the dance was in even worse shape. Most ballroom studios around the country, while still teaching swing, promulgated a watered-down, lifeless version of the dance that was short on improvisation and big on routine. “It was often just a basic six-count East Coast,” says dance teacher and historian Margaret Batiuchok, one of the people most responsible for bringing back the Lindy.

  Over the years, a number of new singers, from Bette Midler to Harry Connick Jr., have helped popularize the era’s standards, though often the choice of material has focused on the sweeter, more conservative songs. Think of Midler’s rousing cover of the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” in 1971; Midler also sang with the Lionel Hampton band on Broadway in 1976. Around the same time, the Manhattan Transfer’s jazzy vocals brought back hits such as the Glenn Miller classic “Tuxedo Junction.” In the mid-eighties Linda Ronstadt recorded a slew of old-fashioned tunes on a trio of albums produced by famous Sinatra arranger Nelson Riddle. And in 1989 swing got an enormous boost with the release of the hit soundtrack from When Harry Met Sally, featuring a then-twenty-two-year-old Harry Connick Jr. crooning in full Sinatra mode. Starting in the mid-eighties, a traditionalist revival, led by Marsalis, also began making its mark on the jazz world.

  What made the swing scene take off as a certified cultural movement, however, was when musicians began looking back to swing’s hardest-driving music. In London in the early eighties, swing, or more correctly, swingin’ jump blues, experienced its first modern-day comeback. Ray Gelato, as part of the Chevalier Brothers, and Joe Jackson, who released a before-its-time album of Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway material called Jumpin’ Jive in 1981, started to bring back the best of the jump blues sound. London’s scene was a harbinger of today’s swing craze. “There were swing dance nights and a lot of bands playing the music over in England, and they used to wear the zoot suits and the two-toned shoes. I think there was a big cross-pollination with American people coming over and seeing the thing here,” says Gelato. (For more information on Gelato and other neoswing musicians highlighted in bold print in this chapter, see individual entries in chapter 5.)

  While swing’s popularity in London eventually died down, the Brits were certainly out there before anyone else. But can they or any handful of people really be credited with reviving swing? Today everyone and his daddy-o likes to lay claim to that distinction. Almost every band points out how long they’ve been around (1989, 1991, or even 1993 are considered far-back years in the history of the revival). Answering the question, however, is as tough and controversial as saying who invented jazz in the first place. No one owns the musi
c and the dance. Nevertheless, the musicians like to think they made it popular and new again, while the dancers believe that they get short shrift from the music side, which wouldn’t have become so big without them. The Europeans, meanwhile, feel overlooked by the Americans for their contribution. And in many ways all of them are right. But two people truly do stand out as the greatest modern-day, Goodman-style popularizers of swing. Appropriately, one of them, the Royal Crown Revue’s Eddie Nichols, is from the music world, while the other, Frankie Manning, hails from the dance side. The pair couldn’t be any more different.

  A MUSICAL REDISCOVERY

  The founder of the influential band Royal Crown Revue, Eddie Nichols is one of the few neoswingers who can use old-time lingo and be taken seriously. “That guy’s got a thousand-yard stare” he says of one hard-luck friend. Nichols himself could have ended up the same way. A singer and percussionist who grew up in New York City, Nichols moved out to Los Angeles in 1984 and quickly fell into the city’s thriving hard-core punk rock scene. At one point he was unemployed and lived on the streets. He did find a job, cleaning toilets at a filthy punk club called the Cathay de Grande. In the late eighties he started playing in a rockabilly band, but he also started abusing heroin around the same time, a habit he didn’t kick for almost a decade. All in all, he was one of the most unlikely people you’d ever imagine being drawn to “Geritol” music. “I was truly ignorant of the whole thing when I started doing it,” says Nichols, who claims he stumbled onto the sound by just jamming and playing around with chord changes. Suddenly he realized the music sounded retro, really retro.

  Nichols and the other founding members of the group—who also included the Stern brothers from the punk band Youth Brigade—began listening to the jump blues of Louis Prima and Louis Jordan, just like the Brits had done. “You couldn’t go out and buy the complete works of Louis Prima on Rhino back then,” says RCR’s guitarist James Achor. “I would buy 78s from this Goodwill for a nickel apiece. I would buy them one hundred, two hundred at a time and I’d go home and listen to them. It wasn’t like I went to the record store. I had to get the shovel out and dig for it. It was archaeology of all this American music. For some reason it had been lost. As a kid you didn’t hear about Louis Jordan or Louis Prima.”

  For them and for other early swing musicians—part of a generation that had been raised solely on rock—it was as if they were hearing this music for the first time. By the late eighties, the great pioneer Louis Jordan was far from a household name. In fact, he’d almost been forgotten. Many of these musicians were newcomers to jazz and refugees from the raw, aggressive punk scene (Scotty Morris, founder of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Vise Grip of San Francisco’s Ambassadors of Swing were both ex-punkers). They were, however, becoming increasingly disenchanted with rock, with both the late-eighties hair-metal-guitar bands like Guns n’ Roses and the developing grunge movement. Remarkably, they found something in swing that spoke to their punk sensibilities. “Here was this music and it rocks just as much but with a little more refined energy,” says RCR trumpeter Scott Steen. Eddie Reed, a member of the LA rockabilly scene and later the founder of the popular Eddie Reed Big Band, remembers being bowled over the first time he listened to Artie Shaw. “I heard an eighteen-year-old Buddy Rich slamming the drums at breakneck speed and shouting like some punk rocker in the background exhorting Artie Shaw into this pyrotechnic clarinet solo,” he says. The music that really turned on the scene, adds Steve Lucky of the neoswing Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums, was “the really hard-swinging, gut-punching, jumping stuff.” If your main exposure to the big band era was a song like “Stardust,” then the fact that this ferociously spontaneous music existed at all was a revelation.

  The wild showman Cab Calloway, the bluesy Count Basie, and, of course, Prima and Jordan became the guiding inspirations of the new scene. By contrast, at this point in the revival the more traditional big band leaders, such as Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and, pointedly, Glenn Miller, were not. Looking back, it’s easy to see why. For ears attuned to rock but yearning to get back in touch with America’s musical roots, jump blues was the natural entry point. “The late forties is the most entertaining period to me,” says Nichols. “It was like a crossroads where there are aspects of jazz and rock and rhythm and blues. It’s when there were still a lot of interesting chord changes but the beat started rocking too.”

  These revivalists, while searching for the roots of rock, found swing unexpectedly. And in the process they began to question whether the supposed great divide between the two genres is really as enormous as most of us have been taught, the idea that before rock came on the scene nothing else cool ever existed. They began to discover that not only did jazz have an influence on early rock but also swing music could be just as wild and energetic. Instead of focusing on the differences between swing and rock, they began to hear similarities and see progressions. To today’s ears, bands like Bill Haley and the Comets have begun to sound very swing. The distance between Lionel Hampton’s 1946 hit “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop” and Gene Vincent’s 1956 hit “Be-Bop-A-Lula” doesn’t really seem so far. “To me, swing encompasses band, jump blues, and the beginnings of rock and roll. The current term swing has become a convention for talking about retro dance music in general,” says Carmen Getit, vocalist and guitarist with Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums.

  Intriguingly, the rockabilly revival of the late seventies and eighties had taken modern musicians back to the sound of the fifties and tantalizingly close to the brink of jump blues. Inspired by such rebellious rockin’ fifties singers as Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, and Eddie Cochran, early eighties bands like the Blasters and Brian Setzer’s Stray Cats made hits of such songs as Little Richard’s “Keep A-Knockin’” and “Rock This Town,” respectively. The rockabilly rebirth helped bring back partner dancing too. “That’s when kids started couples dancing. They were doing the jitterbug, which is like a fifties mishmash. I called it sling dancing. It was just grab your girl and spin her around,” says Reed.

  By the late eighties and on into the early nineties, the rockabilly scene in Los Angeles had become a vibrant “roots” music movement. Centered around such clubs as the King King and the Palomino, the roots scene included musicians looking back toward traditional country, western swing, and even Louis Jordan. “It was a great crossroads moment. It was very diverse,” says Royal Crown Revue guitarist James Achor, who recalls going to performances by Chris Isaak, Dwight Yoakum, the rockabilly and Western swing band Big Sandy and his Fly-Rite Boys, and a ska-type band fronted by Joey Altruda. “They were the first band I really saw do a Jordan song,” says Achor. Exploring the musical past was suddenly hip. “Once kids started getting into vintage Americana,” says Nichols, “there was more of a tendency to enjoy other styles like swing and rhythm and blues.”

  From all this inspirational ferment, Royal Crown Revue—which officially formed in 1989—created a sound they call “hard-boiled swing,” or “gangster bop.” The Stern brothers and Achor brought their punk attitude to the music. Nichols brought in his experiences in both punk and rockabilly, while the band’s saxophonist, Mando Dorame, had grown up listening to the doo-wop and blues albums of his sax-playing father. They tracked down and met Sam Butera, Prima’s colorful saxophonist and arranger. The band members were all watching old film noir movies and reading gangster novels. Everything went into the jazz and rock stew, purists be damned. “What would happen if Duke Ellington had had James Brown and the Sex Pistols to listen to? Who knows what he would have sounded like,” says RCR trumpet player Scott Steen. Adds Nichols, “I thought, let’s try to put something a little newer, a different energy into it and make the lyrics a little darker. When I started the band though, I thought, Well, maybe we’ll just play for grandmas. I didn’t know who the hell was going to go to our shows. And all of a sudden there were these young kids getting into it.”

  Granted, Royal Crown Revue wasn’t the only band exploring the swing and jump blues era at this tim
e. Groups such as the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies in Oregon, the Senders in Minneapolis, and Beat Positive, an early incarnation of New York’s Jet Set Six, were starting to jump too. Steve Lucky even had a jump blues band back in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the early eighties. The Roomful of Blues, an influential Rhode Island band that started playing jump material in the early seventies, was perhaps the earliest harbinger of the swing revival. Clearly this was in the air—everywhere. “A lot of bands, mostly within the same age group, started around the same time, and none of them had any idea that anybody else besides themselves was trying this kind of music,” says Michael Moss, the publisher of San Francisco’s Swing Time magazine, the first periodical devoted to neoswing. “Something was going on in the culture where hundreds of young musicians started gravitating toward this swing idea.”