Though this was its most popular period, the music had actually been around since the late 1920s and early 1930s, being played by black bands led by such artists as Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Bennie Moten, Cab Calloway, Earl Hines, and Fletcher Henderson, and white bands from the 1920s led by the likes of Jean Goldkette, Russ Morgan and Isham Jones.
An early milestone in the era was from "the King of Swing" Benny Goodman's performance at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on August 21, 1935, bringing the music to the rest of the country.
[1] The 1930s also became the era of other great soloists: the tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Lester Young; the alto saxophonists Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges; the drummers Chick Webb, Gene Krupa, Jo Jones and Sid Catlett; the pianists Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson; the trumpeters Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Bunny Berigan, and Rex Stewart.
It brought to fruition ideas originated with Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Jean Goldkette.
On the other hand, the easy melodic quality and clean intonation of Goodman's band made it possible to "sell" jazz to a mass audience.
Several factors led to the demise of the swing era: the 1942–1944 musicians' strike from August 1942 to November 1944 (the union that most jazz musicians belonged to told its members not to record until the record companies agreed to pay them each time their music was played on the radio), the earlier ban of ASCAP songs from radio stations, World War II which made it harder for bands to travel around as well as the "cabaret tax",[3] which was as high as 30%, the rise of vocalist-centered pop and R&B as the dominant forms of popular music, and the rising interest in bebop among jazz musicians.
Though some big bands survived through the late 1940s (Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Stan Kenton, Boyd Raeburn, Woody Herman), most of their competitors were forced to disband, bringing the swing era to a close.
Released a few months before Benny Goodman triggered the national craze known as swing, the song offered a foretaste of the coming deluge.
Jo Jones inverted that relationship, making the high hat the primary timekeeper and using the bass and snare drums for accents and lead-ins.
Change came gradually in the late 1920s, once word had gotten around about how well the string bass worked; many tuba players realized that they'd better switch instruments or lose their jobs.
With Walter Page's bass replacing the tuba in Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, the way was laid clear for the band to develop the kinetic style of swing it would show under the leadership of Count Basie.
Listeners felt the combined sound of bass, guitar, and drums as a sonic force that pushed through cavernous dance halls.
[5] Lester Young, whose influence on saxophone playing became dominant towards the end of the 1930s, cited Trumbauer's linear, melodic approach to improvisation as his main inspiration for his own style.
Goodman was quite skilled at setting the perfect dance tempo for each song while alternating wild "killer dillers" with slower ballads.
Unlike Duke Ellington, who went out of his way to hire unique individualists, and Count Basie, who came from a Kansas City tradition emphasizing soloists, Goodman was most concerned that his musicians read music perfectly, blended together naturally, and did not mind being subservient to the leader.
It was the sound of the ensembles, the swinging rhythm section, and the leader's fluent clarinet that proved to be irresistible to his young and eager listeners.
Another hit was "King Porter Stomp",[7] a ragtime piece by Jelly Roll Morton that became radically simplified, shedding its two-beat clumsiness and march/ragtime form as it went.
He wrote only a few choice choruses, leaving the remainder of the arrangement open for solos accompanied by discreet, long-held chords or short riffs.