The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 (History of Jazz) [Paperback]

Gunther Schuller (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195071409 | ISBN-13: 978-0195071405 | Publication Date: December 19, 1991

Here is the book jazz lovers have eagerly awaited, the second volume of Gunther Schuller's monumental The History of Jazz. When the first volume, Early Jazz, appeared two decades ago, it immediately established itself as one of the seminal works on American music. Nat Hentoff called it "a remarkable breakthrough in musical analysis of jazz," and Frank Conroy, in The New York Times Book Review, praised it as "definitive.... A remarkable book by any standard...unparalleled in the literature of jazz." It has been universally recognized as the basic musical analysis of jazz from its beginnings until 1933.
The Swing Era focuses on that extraordinary period in American musical history--1933 to 1945--when jazz was synonymous with America's popular music, its social dances and musical entertainment. The book's thorough scholarship, critical perceptions, and great love and respect for jazz puts this well-remembered era of American music into new and revealing perspective. It examines how the arrangements of Fletcher Henderson and Eddie Sauter--whom Schuller equates with Richard Strauss as "a master of harmonic modulation"--contributed to Benny Goodman's finest work...how Duke Ellington used the highly individualistic trombone trio of Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton, Juan Tizol, and Lawrence Brown to enrich his elegant compositions...how Billie Holiday developed her horn-like instrumental approach to singing...and how the seminal compositions and arrangements of the long-forgotten John Nesbitt helped shape Swing Era styles through their influence on Gene Gifford and the famous Casa Loma Orchestra. Schuller also provides serious reappraisals of such often neglected jazz figures as Cab Calloway, Henry "Red" Allen, Horace Henderson, Pee Wee Russell, and Joe Mooney.
Much of the book's focus is on the famous swing bands of the time, which were the essence of the Swing Era. There are the great black bands--Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Earl Hines, Andy Kirk, and the often superb but little known "territory bands"--and popular white bands like Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsie, Artie Shaw, and Woody Herman, plus the first serious critical assessment of that most famous of Swing Era bandleaders, Glenn Miller. There are incisive portraits of the great musical soloists--such as Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Bunny Berigan, and Jack Teagarden--and such singers as Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Helen Forest.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Twenty years after the publication of Early Jazz , French hornist, conductor, composer, educator and broadcaster Schuller brings forth this 900-page second volume in his monumental "History of Jazz." He is perhaps better equipped to analyze style and technique than anyone else who has written about this music. No previous critic has delineated in as great detail how the various styles developed and coalesced. Schuller devotes 40 pages to Louis Armstrong, 110 pages and 62 musical examples to Duke Ellington. He identifies the unique characteristics of each of the big bandsamong them, Count Basie, Benny Carter, Lionel Hampton, Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher and Horace Henderson, Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford and Chick Webb; of arrangers Mel Powell, Don Redman and Eddie Sauter; of such soloists as Bunny Berigan, Charlie Christian, Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, Jack Teagarden, Ben Webster and Teddy Wilson; of the small groups of Nate Cole, John Kirby, Red Nichols and Rex Stewart; even of the "territory bands" of the Middle West. He also explicates the contributions of the big white bands of Charlie Barnet, Bob Crosby, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Harry James, Gene Krupa, Glenn Miller and Claude Thornhill, who, by codifying and expanding upon the innovations of their black counterparts, played as crucial a role and brought jazz to millions who otherwise would never have heard any jazz at all. Schuller's evaluations are original, trenchant and even-handed: He discusses shortcomingsstylistic stultification, topheavy sound, exuberant vulgarity, for exampleas well as achievements. And he demonstrates the gradual atrophying of swing by repetition, formularization, the reduction of improvisation and loss of spontaneity. More brilliantly than anyone before him, Schuller has explained a glorious period in the history of American music. Illustrated.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Successor to Schuller's Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development ( LJ 7/68), the present volume opens with three long chapters devoted to Goodman, Ellington, and Armstrong, then focuses on individual black and white bands and influential soloists. In contrast to the proliferating reminiscences and social histories of the big band era, Schuller's concern is purely with the music. His analyses of recordings are thick with musical transcriptions and other graphic representations. Iconoclastic in his critical analysis of the Basie-Young recording of "Lester Leaps In," presumptuous in his reharmonization of Ellington's "Lightnin'," Schuller is never absent from the text. Yet his unparalleled survey is one of the most far-reaching musical studies of jazz; his astute criticism deepens our understanding not only of the period but of jazz itself.William S. Brockman, Drew Univ. Lib., Madison, N.J.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 944 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (December 19, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195071409
• ISBN-13: 978-0195071405
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #603,530 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Monumental accomplishment, November 27, 2004

By 

John Grabowski (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz 1930-1945 (Hardcover)

To get some idea of the achievement between these pages, just stop to think that Gunther Schuller listened to some 30,000 recordings, famous and obscure, from the period between 1930 and 1945, in chronological order for each band or performer. It took him fourteen years.

Now you might think after all that that he would emerge with brain so fuzzy, ears so buzzed, that he could not write intelligently about the music, so submerged had he been for so long. But au contraire--this is the most lucid, the best anthology of any jazz era I've ever seen. No one could argue it isn't the most comprehensive. Schuller analyzes bands big and small, famous and unknown, national and "territory."

Some of his opinions go against the critically-accepted grain, which seems to have ruffled a few other reviewers here, but his point of the survey, I think, was to go beyong "lazy, complacent listening" and evaluate each work afresh. So we have a Count Basie orchestra that, while indisputably fine, isn't quite the jazz sin qua non that it's often held out to be. As Schuller points out--accurately, I think--Basie's band was a triumph because of the magnificent soloists, but frankly the arrangements were often uninspired and formulaic, the tunes undistinguished, the colors and contrasts minimized. This made me realize why I never liked other midwestern territory bands as much as the Count's: they generally didn't have the soloists, and without stellar soloists (and not just "good" soloists) it's hard to sustain interest in riffs and themes which quickly become routine. This may upset the apple cart with some people, but I think Schuller is on the money.

Similar, his assessment of Benny Goodman is generally spot-on, though I think I like some of the band's soloists more than he does and give them more credit than he does. However, he is mostly evaluating BG's studio recordings, and that band was far better live. (All bands are better in front of a live audience, of course, but the difference with BG's 30s group is truly stunning.) But Babe Russin was quite the fine understated tenor soloist, Chris Griffin was very underappreciated on trumpet (as was earlier Goodman trumpeter Nate Kazebier--hope I'm spelling that right). Jess Stacy is one of the unsung heroes of swing piano, especially as an accompanist (some of his best comping is on the 1938 Carnegie Hall Concert). Schuller basically ignores these sidemen. Even Ziggy Elman gets the short shrift, with a focus on his schlocky popular stuff instead of some of his logically-constructed solos. But I guess, even with 30,000 recordings under your belt, some performances are bound to escape your notice.

Schuller's chapter on Ellington could itself be a course at a university. You could indeed buy the book just for this section and play through all the recordings mentioned and come away far more knowledgeable about Duke, about jazz, and about music and composition in general. Discussing Schuller's take on Ellington is beyond the scope of this review, save to say it makes for pages and pages of fascinating reading.

Schuller also manages to cut through the Artie Shaw mystique (more BS than mystique, he feels; Shaw, with his verbal fecundity and limited knowledge of European art, was able to snow some jazz and pop writers, but he's just no match for Schuller). And he makes the interesting observation that Glenn Miller played far more true swing than he is credited for (though it was hardly innovative or even often very exciting swing) and Tommy Dorsey played far less, sticking with the Chicago/Dixieland two-beat style long after it had gone out of favor, until about 1940 (!). A lot of Dorsey's music is actually very hokey--"Mickey Mouse"--yet he is usually taken more seriously as a swing musician than Miller.

On the subject of smaller bands and lesser-known leaders from this period, Schuller points out how underappreciated Cab Calloway, Erskine Hawkins and Jimmy Lunceford were, and how relatively overrated Lionel Hampton, Bunny Berrigan and Louis Armstrong (of this period; the innovative Armstrong of the 20s was covered in his Early Jazz book) were. Again, these views--backed up by extremely thorough analysis and stoic discussion, will ruffle a lot of feathers among emotional keepers of the flame, but I find his analysis to be rather spot-on. Also invaluable is his clear-headed discussion of Art Tatum's strengths and weaknesses.

The book is chock full of examples in music notation, and in some instances whole solos and passages are written out. That may scare off some who cannot read music, but it shouldn't. It will largely help to have the recordings in the CD player, ready to go, so the reader can follow along with the notation. And everyone will not follow every discussion of harmonies, scales and chord progressions--no matter. You don't have to understand everything to get a lot from this work, and repeated readings will benefit you as well. Just don't show it to anyone to whom jazz is a religion, and its players are holy priests; they won't appreciate some of Schuller's deconstructions.

Incidentally, Schuller is supposedly working on a volume III that deals with the bebop era and the development of "modern" jazz. (The first volume of this series dealt with pre-1930s jazz and is also a classic.) Considering how much time the present book required, I hope he lives long enough to finish this magnificent project.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spot-on survey of Swing Era, August 9, 2004

By 

C. Fischer (Bloomington, IN United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 (History of Jazz) (Paperback)

Unlike a previous reviewer, I find Schuller's "biases" quite refreshing. He is unafraid to distinguish the outstanding from the merely imitative or blantantly commercial, whether in comparing bands or musicians or in pointing out the strong points and weak points of individual artists.

While not providing individual biographies, he does manage to put the music into a social/economic context and does better than any other writer in speaking frankly about the interplay between black and white artists during this era without prejudice on either side.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An incredibly informative mess, March 15, 2007

By 

jive rhapsodist (NYC, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 (History of Jazz) (Paperback)

Where to begin? Schuller wants to talk about everything - he doesn't want to miss a single band. It's not like Vol. 1 - Early Jazz where he aims and fires. Here everything is scattershot, all over the place. And two ideas come back over and over in a kind of subconscious fashion: one, the idea that riffing is a sign of knee-jerk, insufficently compositional thinking; two, that innovation in Jazz is connected to being "ahead of one's time". If I had lots of time on my hands, I'd catalog these recurrences - Oxford University Press, you're supposed to catch these things! For all of his knowledge, Schuller is insufficiently scholarly - the chapter on Basie is absurd in its criticisms of Basie for not being a compositional thinker like Ellington. I hate to get all racial, but it seems like Schuller doesn't appreciate many of the blacker aspects of Black music. And it's fine that Schuller didn't do all of his own transcriptions - but he should've at least approved them all. Bobby Stark's solo showing up next to a passionate discussion of Red Allen's solo on Henderson's King Porter Stomp gave that one away...

What did I learn from this book? Well...it made me go out and check out Bob Crosby's band more. The section on Horace Henderson was really informative. The book is filled with great things, but even on the level of basic syntax and sentence structure there are so many problems. Just to pick out one of many tortured phrases - Page 253:"I am referring to the curious fact that Basie's music is rarely memorable thematically ( nor is it in terms of timbre or color ). Nor is it WHAT? In speech, we'd understand: "memorable" . But this is supposed to be a History...how hard would it have been to bring this all in line?

If it weren't the only book of its kind...but it is. Someday there'll be more, and we'll be able to appreciate the good things about this one, and forget about the anomalies and longeurs. I hope I'll be around to see that day.