Tom Scanlan

In The Joy of Jazz: Swing Era, 1935-1947 (1996), Tom Scanlan is unapologetically nostalgic for the music of his youth. As a teen in Washington, D.C., he collected records and danced in nightclubs and went to see the hottest bands in Atlantic City and Manhattan. A longtime jazz columnist for The Army Times and editor at The Federal Times, Scanlan’s style is middle-brow reportage without flourish, emphatically unconcerned with developing a thesis to link music to politics or sociological problems or the culture of the time. Music is for pleasure, he says, not racializing or pontificating. He takes for granted that the Swing Era was a distinctive moment, when jazz was fun and exciting and popular. We can take in Scanlan’s enthusiasm, even as we wish for a little more exposition and analysis.

Scanlan tells us that the Swing Era began in late 1935, with a Benny Goodman gig at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, but, since he does not provide any context, it’s not clear precisely what began then and there. The Goodman band went on to achieve national prominence, and its commercial success opened many new opportunities for jazz musicians. Scanlan acknowledges that Goodman’s career took off after he hired Fletcher Henderson as his arranger, but that begs the question as to what jazz musicians were up to before Goodman hit it big. Scanlan says that swing music really wasn’t new at all; swing musicians—influenced by the great jazz players of the 1920s—were continuing in the jazz tradition, enriching it with superior skills in sight-reading and more sophisticated intonation. ‘Swing music’ was just jazz under a new label, says Scanlan, with an expanded repertoire drawn from Broadway, the movies, and Tin Pan Alley. Not all swing bands were big bands, either; there were combos of all sizes, but what they had in common was playing music for dancing. The two-beat feel of the 1920s gave way to an even four beats per measure, making the rhythm flow, and hundreds of thousands of people couldn’t get enough. The Swing Era was the Golden Age of Jazz, according to Scanlan, when jazz was everywhere, from night clubs to hotel ballrooms, radio, movies and dozens of new magazines.

Scanlan presents a fascinating sampler of jazz performance from across the country in late 1941, as a demonstration of the popularity of jazz at the height of the Swing Era. Billie Holiday at Café Society in Los Angeles, Joe Venuti at the Paramount Theatre in Toledo, Louis Jordan at the 113 Club in Grand Forks. Raymond Scott at the Brunswick Hotel in Boston, Cab Calloway at the New Kenmore Hotel in Albany, Bunny Berigan at Berwick Park in Wilkes-Barre. Jay McShann with Charlie Parker at the Blue Room of the Streets Hotel in Kansas City, Jack Teagarden at the Casa Loma Ballroom in St. Louis, the Earl Hines band in Uniontown PA. Artie Shaw in Oklahoma City, Teddy Powell at the Plymouth Theatre in Worcester, Claude Thornhill at the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle. Coleman Hawkins at Dave’s Swingland, Louis Armstrong at the Grand Terrace Café, and Fats Waller at the Regal Theatre, all in Chicago. And in New York City: Benny Carter and Dizzy Gillespie at Kelly’s Stables, and Zutty Singleton at Jimmy Ryan’s, both on 52nd St.; the Jimmie Lunceford Band at the Strand Theatre in Brooklyn, Count Basie at Café Society Uptown on 58th St., Teddy Wilson and Lena Horne at Café Society Downtown, Wild Bill Davison at Nick’s in the Village, and Benny Goodman at the Hotel New Yorker’s Terrace Room. That is a lot of music to put into one bag.

Scanlan has a journalist’s eye for the odd, incisive bits. To wit:

♫ In the 1934 film “Murder at the Vanities,” the entire Duke Ellington band was machine-gunned down by an irate gangster.

♫ During the Swing Era, every major city buzzed with jazz for dancing. Musicians traveled hundreds of miles between gigs, sometimes for weeks on end. According to a 1941 survey by Music & Rhythm magazine, more than 200 musicians were killed or injured in motor-vehicle accidents during a two-year period (including Cab Calloway’s tenor-sax man, Leon “Chu” Berry).

♫ While jazz music during the Swing Era did much to break down color lines among musicians, race was an ever-present concern with audiences and the authorities. Some black musicians were able to pass for white, even without intending to. Scanlan relates a story told by John Hammond about Earle Warren, who played alto sax in Count Basie’s band. Warren (who was black) was run out of town by the sheriff in Owensboro, KY, for sitting in with a black band. Scanlan tells of how the white trumpeter Kenny Fulcher passed himself off as black while playing with drummer Gene Jones’ band so as not to stir up trouble with an audience in Roanoke.

♫ Many blues singers moved from sacred to secular music, but the reverse course was rare. Thomas A. Dorsey, the “The Father of Gospel Music,” was once known as “Georgia Tom,” the leader of Ma Rainey’s band and a prolific blues writer. He co-wrote and performed on “It’s Tight Like That” with Tampa Red, and he also wrote “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” which Mahalia Jackson sang at the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Joy of Jazz is a book written in retrospect, fifty years on. Tom Scanlan revels in the particular musical sounds of his youth, and the memory is sweeter than anything that came after. In a failure of imagination analogous to that of the so-called ‘moldy figs,’ who dismissed as fake any jazz that did not fit with the New Orleans/Chicago ‘hot jazz’ style, Scanlan hears jazz after the mid-1940s as pretentious, imitative, anti-melodic, and joyless. Poor fellow.… (más)