The King of Swing.

A while back, I asked my bandmate, Bob Parsons, if he could recommend some good reading on big bands.  He suggested that I check out "The Swing Era" by Gunther Schuller.  It is the send in a series about Jazz.  I am only a very short way into the book and already I am captured by it.  Schuller is a great writer.  That combined with his insight into Jazz as performer, composer and arranger make his book somewhat difficult to put down.  While I did spend several years in music school at a fairly respected music school, one thing that I never did get much exposure to was the history of Jazz.  Most of that I have come across on my own, and by catching the occasional TV show, or by reading Jazz by Ken Burns (not cover-to-cover, of course.)  I also have the Smithsonian Jazz history collection on vinyl.  Just noticed a cool site for Smithsonian Jazz too.  All that said, I am learning a great deal from Schuller's book.

So far, the book has focused on the "King of Swing", Benny Goodman.  I really was not all that familiar with Goodman despite the fact that I started out on Clarinet.  It is fascinating to read about how Goodman really didn't feel that Jazz was all that commercially viable despite his own success.  It is also interesting to read about the many players and writers (Gene Krupa, Harry James, and Fletcher Henderson to name but a few) that had some involvement with Goodman.  I was also astounded to read about Schuller's assessment of Benny's Bass playing brother, Harry.  In Schuller's opinion, Harry Goodman was not that great a bassist.  In fact, the writes about how he feels that Krupa had to do a good deal extra to compensate for Harry's effort.  It is very difficult for me to hear the bass in some of the those old recordings due to several factors, and so I guess I never really thought about it much.  I also feel like the rhythm section in those old recordings are really not as developed stylistically as the other sections seem to be.  Most of the time it just seems like "chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp".

At any rate, I would highly recommend Schuller's book if you have any interested in Jazz.  I am already learning a good deal about the subject.  I should have probably read the book years ago!

That is all for now.  My charts have arrived for the Pat Metheny clinic.  More on that next time...