American swing era 40s to 50s 2013

American Popular Music – Up to

40s

• Overview up to ww2.

• Musicals and Broadway

• Country Music

• War Years

• Post War and the move to Bebop

• Dizzy Gillaspie and Charlie Parker

Readings

• Burkholder, Grout and Palisca, pp. 844-864

• Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz, pp. 3-54

• Ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, The

Cambridge Companion to Jazz, CUP, 2002,

pp. 9-32

• Gunter Schuller, Early Jazz, 1968, pp. 63-

133

American Popular Music Genres

• Importance of black genres - jazz forms

especially

• Movie industry and its impact

• Broadway stage

• Country Music

• Big bands

• Solo Performers

Impact

• 1920s the ‘Jazz Age’.

• Phonograph, gramophone and radio all in place by 1920s. Tin Pan Alley still important and lots of music was transcribed and sold as sheet music.

• Dance craze of the era. Blackbottom, stomp, Charleston, etc. Records allowed people to dance at home.

• Musicians throughout the world aware of Jazz -world wide impact.

• Gerswin’s Rapsody in Blue 1924. Big impact in Paris and on French composers. I

Records

• By 1909 12 million dollars of records and

cylinders sold in USA, by 1921 thus had

increase 4 fold.

• Jazz arrives as a recorded product in the

early 1920 and is our main source of

knowledge of the genre from then on.

Radio

• Early records - 78 had to be 3 and half minutes.

• No electric microphones before 1925 so sound

quality was poor and the recording process crude.

• Radio preferred to a have a live band - often a

house ensemble to produce music on tap.

• Quality of sound on radio was better than on

record in general - early shellac records

deteriorated quickly and were easily broken.

Move towards Big Bands and

Soloists/Leaders

• Armstrong was clearly a more virtuosic player

than Oliver - who saw Jazz as collective and inter-

dependent. Armstrong was constrained within the

band.

• Individualism of Armstrong calls attention to

itself.

• Death knell of New Orleans style - and arrival of

big band format. In place by 1925 and in full flow

by 1930.

Paul Whiteman and Bing Crosby

1930s The Popular Singer

• The microphone meant that a singer could dominate a big band.

• Popular singers became stars in the their own right - Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole.

• Females - Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Patty Paige

• Huge record sales for some singers from the 1930s onwards.

• Big link up with movie world.

• Bessie Smith – St Louis Blues

Billie Holliday

Sinatra and Lena Horn

Burlesque - Vaudeville

• American equivalent of Music Hall.

• Bigger emphasis on music and novelty - less on stand up comics.

• Lots of acts blacked up as minstrels. Banjo players and nonsense and novelty songs. Also dancing troupes and solo singers.

• Less important than in Europe perhaps because of the importance of the movie industry and musicals - Zeigfield Follies - Gypsy Rose Lee.

• Judy Garland - singer who moved from Vaudeville to Broadway to Films.

The Musical • Revue and vaudeville with a storyline and an

integrated show.

• The Black Crook 1866 - an epic bringing together music and melodrama plus specialty acts and dancing.

• Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern came together with Show Boat 1927 bringing together European operetta tradition with American Vaudeville.

• The Gerswins developed the style and form towards serious art music.

• Oklahoma the breakthrough as it was meant both as a show and film. 1943.

Showboat 1927 – Film 1935

Rogers and Hart 1935-43

• Revitalised Broadway – returned 1935.

• Hits until the mid 40s

• With Babes in Arms – they wrote the songs

and music, and the storyline and libretto.

• Used child actors and no stars.

• Lorenz Hart increasingly difficult to work

with – unpredictable and unstable

Broadway 1935 Rogers and Hart

Oklahoma

• First Rodgers and Hammerstein production.

• Broadway production on 1943.

• Built on success of Show Boat – Songs and

Dances fully integrated into the drama and

action.

• Fully evolved dramatic action and use of

motifs for people and things.

• 1955 Film version..

Series of Broadway Success -

Films

• Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949, The

King and I (1951), The Sound of Music

(1959).

• Other shows include the minor hit, Flower

Drum Song (1958), as well as relative

failures Allegro (1947), Me and Juliet

(1953) and Pipe Dream (1955).

Oh What a beautiful morning

Country Music

• The white equivalent to Blues.

• Associated with the white south - Appallachians and Virginia, Tennessee - Hilly Billy Folk -playing old dances up tempo and singing styles that involved yodelling. Bluegrass styles.

• Some huge stars - Jimmy Rodger, Carter Family.

• Centred on Grand Ole Opry of Nashville.

• Moved after the war from country to urban setting (Honky Tonk) with new stars - Hank Williams (1947-53) Country Blues

Big Band Swing

• Throughout the 1940s and much of the 50s

the big band sound of swing dominated

popular.

• Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Benny

Goodman, Glen Miller.

• New generation of White Bands with

commercial success

Fletcher Henderson

Benny Goodman

Glen Miller

Pennsylvanian 65000

Jazz and the War• Swing Jazz was for many the sound track to

the war years.

• Many bands served within the military.

• America did not enter the war until 1942 –

After Pearl Harbour Dec 1p41– but the draft

had been introduced long before.

• Served to bring Swing Jazz – American

style to Europe and Britain in particular.

• Band leader became hugely famous.

Jazz in the War Years

Koko

The beginings of Bebop

• Musicians from the big bands became

frustrated by the regimentation and

commercialism.

• Started afterhours improvisation sessions.

• Thelonius Monk, Kenny Clark, Dizzy

Gilespie, etc

• Gave rise to a new apporach.

• Fast, uncompromising, harmonically agile.

Minton’s Club Harlem 1940

• After hours club that attracted improvisers.

Dizzy Gillespie

• Theorist and teacher to new of 1940s

generation

Parker - Bird

• Tragic life story and early death.

Charlie Parker

• Individualist who was able to create a new

approach based not on melody but on the

underlying chords.