Talk Topics...




​BIG BANDS
Starting in the Depression years and into the 1940s, “Swing Era” big bands rocked American dance floors bringing, as the great Gunther Schuller has noted, an “alluring escape from the often depressing real world—into that other romantic world of dancing feet, twirling bodies, and tapping toes.” With the advent of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and a myriad of others, jazz became the music of America.
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But the “Swing Era” didn’t just pop into existence overnight. First, something had to swing. That something was the rhythm itself, and it had started a long time earlier—in New Orleans, the riverboats, the Caribbean, and even back to Africa. It came from dance, work song, and physical movement; it came from pulse, from human life. Not just a “style,” it was an action.
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♬ LISTEN: Duke Ellington Orchestra, 1928
   The Mooche
This Ellington classic comes from the band's early years, but the 11 players foreshadow the Swing Era--a full decade before Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall jazz concert.
Focusing on the big bands of Ellington, Goodman, and Armstrong, this JazzTalk traces the music of each back to its “starting point”—when it first started to swing, to move dancers as never before. It shows the musical structures of the bands—how they played in sections and the sections interwove. And it reveals how large, “organized,” score-reading bands actually got their stuff from the live heartbeat of it all: rags, stomps, and the blues.
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