MAIN BOOK PAGE | TABLE OF CONTENTS | REVIEWS | AUTHOR BIO EXCERPT An excerpt from: SWING AND ITS DISCONTENTS When the press began predicting the imminent demise of swing in late 1946, longtime contributors like Duke Ellington could be excused for dismissing the rumors as yet another premature epitaph. "As far back as I can remember...some people have been saying 'hot music' was really through," he told a reporter. "The same thing is being said today only now they refer to the corpse as swing. Well, it just happens that a lot of the mourners are not in the music business regularly and their answers aren't so accurate or helpful." Ellington's memory was accurate. As early as 1938, when media attention was at a peak, patrons of "hinterland ballrooms" were showing a marked preference for "sweet" bands and nonswing tunes, according to the New York Times. Older and more affluent patrons were observed to "prefer rhythms to which they can dance without resembling a chimpanzee suffering from delirium tremens." The future of swing was questioned again the following year. Backing away from earlier predictions, Paul Whiteman labeled the music a "fad...on the wane," unsuited to the "deep-seated romantic sentiment" prevalent among college students, who dismissed swing as "high-school stuff." As an experiment, a New York bandleader played a Viennese waltz before a "shagging, jitterbug crowd," and was amazed to find dancers bursting into applause. The experience led him to conclude that "swing music is slowly but surely losing its popularity and form and...will eventually evolve into a more danceable, melodious type of music." The approach and onset of world war deflected public attention from the issue of swing's longevity, but the winding down of hostilities brought further prophecies that swing's demise was finally at hand. After completing a lengthy wartime tour of U.S. service camps, a veteran bandleader predicted a public vogue for ballads and sweet, melodious songs. He based his projections on a long pattern of dialectically oscillating preferences for popular music: ragtime (1890-1900) had given rise to sweet music (1900-1915), which produced torrid early jazz (1917-1925), after which ensued semisymphonic sweet music (1925-1932), and finally, swing (1932-1944). The next sweep of the pendulum would be bolstered by the aftereffects of war. "Returning servicemen, high-strung from their part in battle, demand smooth music to soothe their shattered nerves," he averred; such music had been employed to rehabilitate veterans suffering from nervous breakdowns. The new music, while retaining the more defined prominent beat characteristic of swing, would feature warm, soothing timbres, vibrato, and string sections. All these predictions shared the notion that swing was a static form, while the audience was the dynamic factor that seemed always on the verge of abandoning a music that had ceased to speak to it. Ellington's confident demurral expressed this sense that swing, whatever transitory label it went by, would maintain its musical integrity and retain its true audience. His statement reflected the historical relativism that had earlier enabled the swing community to defend the music by asserting that it was a reflection of its times. But if swing itself was fluid, able to evolve away from its audience, perhaps the historical pattern would be broken. By 1947 the familiar predictions were accompanied by a host of unprecedented and ominous signs. Attendance dropped sharply at hotels, ballrooms, nightclubs, and one-night locations. Many venues cut back from six to four or five nights a week, sometimes to weekends only, while promoters, burned by losses, suspended their operations. Venues known for top-name swing ensembles switched to smaller, lesser-known and society-style bands. Unable to find enough profitable engagements to maintain their large payrolls and high overhead, many big bands dissolved; some reorganized, but with fewer members. During the winter of 1946-47, bands led by Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Les Brown, Harry James, Jack Teagarden, and Benny Carter dissolved, provoking a blizzard of press stories. In May 1947 commercial sponsors abruptly canceled dozens of radio shows, including Goodman's, to protest the allegedly inflated prices of their performers. This time, apparently, the swing industry faced a genuine crisis. In the face of this preponderance of evidence, those who performed, managed, or wrote about swing addressed themselves to two questions: Why had the music's fortunes so suddenly and drastically declined? And could anything be done to resuscitate the business? Because swing presumably could not be revived unless its malaise were properly diagnosed, responses to the second question depended on answers to the first. For the first time, the swing community confronted the possibility that the problem lay not on the demand side, with the audience, but with the musical product itself. If swing had fallen victim to the general postwar economic malaise that had hit the entertainment industry especially hard, its recovery depended on fluctuations of the business cycle over which it had no control. But if its failure was the result of inflated salaries and a talent glut released at the end of the war, its survival required letting the market adjust to conditions in the music industry. If swing's declining audience was due to inevitable shifts in popular taste or to demographic change--the aging of its core audience of high school and college students, and the unwillingness of potential new consumers to take up an "old" fad--then prospects for saving swing were limited. But if these problems were caused by big hands betraying their audience by playing undanceable tempos or facing their charts with the controversial modernisms of what was coming to be called bebop, swing could rescue itself only by returning to the musical conventions practiced by its most successful ensembles. A number of explanations for swing's collapse were advanced, all stressing changes in the audience or in the media that distributed the music. But big-band jazz itself had changed since Pearl Harbor. Ensembles had grown larger, more assertive. The typical prewar aggregation of sixteen had increased by ten or fifteen pieces with the inclusion of string sections. Larger frequently meant louder, and sometimes faster tempos. More subtle were the changes in swing's cultural status. Since Goodman, swing artists had aspired, at least occasionally, to the cultural legitimacy accorded by the concert hall. But the enormous demand for wartime entertainment, in the opinion of some critics, had caused band leaders to lose touch with their dancing audience in favor of the enthusiasts who clustered rapt around the bandstand. Ironically, this increased emphasis on swing as a listener's music made swing more vulnerable to the exigencies of the market. With the rise of bebop, the cycle of swing came full circle. Just as swing had been defended by its early proponents as merely an updated version of once-scandalous dance crazes, bop was explained as an appropriate response to the times: "the hair shirt with which [its fans] will meet an atomic world," as Newsweek put it, suggesting that swing's mellifluousness no longer fitted the Cold War mood. If, as signs suggested, bop was to become the postwar equivalent of swing, forward thinking bandleaders would be well advised to adapt to the new trend. Many did, but only briefly. For it soon became clear to most in the musical community that bop would never achieve the mass popularity of swing; in fact, bebop was eventually blamed by many for the postwar decline of swing. Rather than a radical departure from swing, bebop is better understood as a variation of swing that emerged at an inopportune historical moment, whose brief cultural trajectory reveals as much as swing's longer ascent and decline. Swing's postwar predicament illuminates a larger debate about the relative power of the culture industry and the consumers of culture. Some have followed the Frankfurt school in emphasizing the power of a monolithic mass culture industry to impose its productions on a passive audience; others stress the ability of consumers to exercise choice and exert a countervailing force against the impulses of corporate culture. In the study of popular music, this issue has pitted those in the Adornian tradition of suspicion toward technology and the market (which are in this view fundamentally linked) against those who follow Walter Benjamin in stressing the utopian potential of technology. The contemporary debate over swing's decline underscores the problems inherent in bifurcating cultural production and consumption. The music industry of the late 1940s was both responding to the changing tastes of its audience and working to redefine those tastes. Rather than being seen as opposing forces, swing's producers and distributors and its audience should be understood as joined in constant dialectic exchange. Copyright © 1994 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.