vitanola
I'll Lock Up
- Messages
- 4,254
- Location
- Gopher Prairie, MI
Chas said:It's happened in a lot of places. I used to dance a lot, but the hardcore swing dancers turn up in their jeans, t-shirts and deck shoes demanding a steady diet of "windshield wipers"
It's the perfection of his style of swing music. It's highly debatable and another question entirely if his style is swing perfection. Are you saying that Miller outswings Basie?
Not sure what your point is, Liz. Lots of black-produced music is commercial. Even Ellington pumped out a few, because the bottom line had to be met. Comparing Lunceford to Kyser is pretty laughable, because I've heard Kyser and Lunceford. Lunceford had a show band, and the show was the thing. By your reasoning The Nicholas Brothers were "white". I didn't say that all black jazz was non-commercial, just that white jazz is/was, meaning that the swing music produced by white orchestras (a distinction that worked up to the 1940's) is distinctly different in it's style and content from black orchestras.
Miller himself openly stated "I don't want a jazz band."
Chas, when I was younger I thought much as you do. I read the critical literature and the liner notes, and swallowed them whole. Over the past thirty years, however, I have made a pretty thorough study of the musical output of our recording industry during the first half of the Twentieth Century AS A WHOLE. In my late fire, I lost a 40 cubic yard dumpster of discs, which included a nearly compete run of the Victor 16000 series, the Victor 38000 series, the Black Swan catalog (including the red label Classical series) nearly full series of most of the dime-store labels, a nearly full run fo the D series Columbias, etc. Having immersed myself in hundreds of thousands of these discs and cylinders for many years, I conclude that yes, there are stylistic differences, but they seem to be more geographic and temporal rather than racial. Papa Celestin and Tony Parenti's contemporaneus recordings have a great deal more in common that they they differ.
Some of the differences that you note may be due to the requirements of the different audiences of dancers, some may be due to differing priorities of the bands management. A Fletcher Henderson arrangement may perhaps swing a bit more when played by the Henderson band than when played by the more precise Goodman organisation, but the arranger himself claimed to prefer the discipline of the Goodman group to his own excellent band.