Forties Swing, Hollywood Flash

This chapter discusses the Hollywood musical films of the Nicholas Brothers under a five-year contract with Twentieth Century-Fox that brought them to the highest level of notoriety as jazz tap dancers in the Swing era. In Down Argentine Way, despite the mere three-and-a-half-minute scene in which the Brothers appeared, audiences flocked to the theater to see them perform the title song. In Sun Valley Serenade, with Dorothy Dandridge, the Brothers’ Chattanooga Choo Choo number was the aural and visual embodiment of swing music. In Orchestra Wives, Harold performed a run-up-the-wall into a backward flip and split that had never before been seen on film. And in their spectacular Jumping Jive number in Stormy Weather, Fayard jumped down one step and landed in a split, Harold leap-frogged over Fayard and landed on the next step into another split, and the Brothers alternately jumped over each other until they reached the bottom of the stairs—a routine Fred Astaire said was the greatest he had ever seen on film.

Placing Django: Narratives of heritage and race in a Parisian exhibition

Django Reinhardt: Swing de Paris, an exhibition that took place at the Cité de la musique in Paris, depicted the life and environment of famed Manouche (French Romani/”Gypsy”) guitarist Django Reinhardt. In this article, I explore how the exhibition performed a spatialized centre-periphery model of citizenship that both reflected and reinforced Manouche marginality in relation to broader French society. I argue that museum exhibitions generate and harness place-oriented narratives to reinforce hegemonic conceptions about ideal citizens. In marking out an ethnoracially segregated imaginary of swing-era Paris, the exhibition reproduced stereotyped ideas about Manouche exoticism and inadaptability to urban modernity. These narratives are not exceptional, but are part of a long-standing project to define national belonging in terms of a normative white identity. As such, they are symptomatic of a much broader problem of state-sanctioned racism in France that is denied through claims to colour-blindness.

Dancing Every Note

This chapter focuses emerges from the author’s experiences dancing at Jazz 966, a weekly “jazz club” night held at the Grace Agard Harewood Neighborhood Senior Center in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. For over twenty-five years, Jazz 966 has run as a weekly venue featuring jazz musicians with strong local, national, and international reputations. At Jazz 966, performers play music rooted in a broad array of post–Swing Era jazz styles including bebop, hard bop, and various forms of Latin jazz while the club has an active dance floor with audience members dancing socially to nearly every song. The club’s dancing patrons reveal the significance of dancing as a form of rigorous, participatory, and sensitive listening where those regarded as the best dancers express in their movement a subtle yet virtuosic musicality legible to other attendees who can see the ways they “dance every note.” Like the venue that houses it, Jazz 966 is integrated into the neighborhood’s community-based nonprofit infrastructure, yet this venue and the community center housing it are facing the same pressures of gentrification and rising property costs that more broadly threaten the social and cultural infrastructure of Black communities in Central Brooklyn. While self-consciously offering an alternative to a problematically romanticized “dying breed” narrative, this case study does emphasize the idea of precarity to articulate resonances between the discursive policing and erasure Black bodies face within jazz historical narratives as well as Black communities’ ongoing fight for sustained access to community spaces in which to move freely and to be corporeally present with jazz music.

The Swing Era

This chapter looks at the dramatic changes in American culture during the 1930s, when danceable swing jazz played by big bands became the most popular music in the United States. The emergence of a more propulsive dance beat in Kansas City jazz, led by the Count Basie band, set the stage for this shift in the public’s tastes. But the rise to fame of Benny Goodman in the mid-1930s was the transformative event that established jazz as the dominant sound of ballrooms and radio broadcasts throughout the country. This chapter looks at Goodman and his clarinet rival Artie Shaw, and the other leading big bands of the era, as well as the seminal work of Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Django Reinhardt, Coleman Hawkins, Mary Lou Williams, and others. The chapter concludes with an account of Duke Ellington’s mid- and late-career music.

Spectacles 1972–1984

Between 1972 and 1984, Hollywood produced several lavish jazz-related films. The failure of Lady Sings the Blues to do justice to the life or music of Billie Holiday is detailed. Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York is a swing-era musical about a clash of artistic temperaments and of musical styles, reinforced by a disjunction between stylized sets and naturalistic acting. Gangsters and musicians mix in Francis Ford Coppola’s film about Harlem’s historic Cotton Club. In the 1970s, low-budget features are also produced: TV biopics of Louis Armstrong (with Ben Vereen) and Scott Joplin (Billy Dee Williams), and the Afrofuturist spectacle Space Is the Place, starring bandleader Sun Ra as an interstellar traveler come to rescue Earth’s black people.

Duke’s Day and First Features 1929–1940

A survey and analysis of films taking jazz as a topic, from early talkies through the birth and development of the swing era. Such films include two innovative 1929 shorts by director Dudley Murphy, one featuring Bessie Smith and the other featuring Duke Ellington. Smith and Ellington play fictionalized versions of themselves. Paul Whiteman and Artie Shaw play their not-quite selves in feature films. Controversy over jazz in the African American community is explored in Broken Strings. Musicians “swing the classics” there and in another film. The 1937 feature Champagne Waltz includes an early instance of a stock jazz-film ending—a big New York concert that reconciles people and/or musical styles in conflict. That ending is tweaked by placing it at Carnegie Hall in 1938’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Other films are also discussed.

Studious drummers, selling drum outfits, standardization, and stardom

Literacy, education, and standardization were key steps forward in consolidating the drum kit’s legitimacy in the 1930s. This chapter examines the biographies of many early drummers and how they learnt to play the drum kit. Arguments over how to play the drum kit were inseparable from the changing form of the drum kit itself, as manufacturers like Ludwig, Slingerland, Leedy, and Gretsch competed to sell standardized, pre-bundled drum kits in their catalogues rather than the hodge-podge, self-assembled drum kits of the past. This chapter discusses the creation of an international market for drum kits through a combination of instrument innovation, education, and old-fashioned hucksterism. Drum manufacturers created their own newsletters as a way of convincing drummers to buy their product. The chapter also examines the career of swing era drummer Gene Krupa, comparing him with African-American drummer Chick Webb, an influential but less well known drumming bandleader.