Big bands swapped jazz improvisation for written charts and packed the dance halls
Jazz is famous for improvising, but the big bands that ruled it in the early 1940s ran largely on paper. Arrangers wrote out charts for sections of saxophones, trumpets and trombones, and leaders like Basie, Ellington and Goodman became stars while dancers filled ballrooms doing the Lindy Hop.
A big band usually has ten or more players in four sections: saxophones, trumpets, trombones, and a rhythm team of guitar, piano, double bass and drums. Early bands of the 1920s and 1930s were leaner, often with just a pair of trombones at most, up to three trumpets, three or four saxes and a four-piece rhythm section. Groups of eight to ten are sometimes called little big bands, while some 21st-century European ensembles use 29 instruments and a few reach 50.
The music grew out of a change in how Americans danced. Before 1910 the waltz and polka dominated; as jazz moved from New Orleans to Chicago and New York, livelier dances came along. In San Francisco in 1916 the drummer Art Hickman led one of the first bands to play the new rhythms, and his arranger Ferde Grofé split the orchestra into sections that could combine in different ways, a trademark of the form. Paul Whiteman hired Grofé in 1919. Duke Ellington held court at Harlem's Cotton Club and Fletcher Henderson at the Roseland Ballroom.
Swing arrived in the early 1930s with a looser pulse than early jazz's rigid four beats, but it found a mass audience only around 1936, after years of being mocked or seen as a menace. Arrangements typically repeated a twelve-bar blues or 32-bar song structure, introducing the melody before developing it. Some bands, like King Oliver's, worked from head arrangements built up by ear during rehearsal.
Personalities shaped the sound: Count Basie's relaxed propulsion, Goodman's hard drive, Bob Crosby's Dixieland leanings, Ellington's sophistication. Critics split hard bands such as Basie and Tommy Dorsey from sweet bands like Glenn Miller's. Singers added star power, from Frank Sinatra with Dorsey to Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb and Billie Holiday with Basie. Older players had to adapt: Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines formed bands, while Jelly Roll Morton faded from view.
Source: Big band
