Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The quest for cultural legitimacy
- 1 Before the Jazz Age: professional musicians and good music
- 2 The Jazz Age: professional musicians and the cultivated vernacular
- 3 The swing craze: professional musicians, swing music, and the art of improvisation
- 4 The rise of a jazz art world: jazz enthusiasts, professional musicians, and the modernist revolt
- 5 The New Jazz Age: the jazz art world and the modern jazz renaissance
- Conclusion: The jazz art world and American culture
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The swing craze: professional musicians, swing music, and the art of improvisation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The quest for cultural legitimacy
- 1 Before the Jazz Age: professional musicians and good music
- 2 The Jazz Age: professional musicians and the cultivated vernacular
- 3 The swing craze: professional musicians, swing music, and the art of improvisation
- 4 The rise of a jazz art world: jazz enthusiasts, professional musicians, and the modernist revolt
- 5 The New Jazz Age: the jazz art world and the modern jazz renaissance
- Conclusion: The jazz art world and American culture
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If I should be asked to advise one of these young men what to do to become a front-rank swing player, I would urge him to learn to read expertly and be just as able to play to score as any “regular” musician. Then I would tell him never to forget for one minute of his life that the true spirit of swing music lies in free playing and that he must always keep his own musical feeling free. He must try always to originate and not just imitate.
Louis Armstrong, Swing That Music, 1936: 121Louis Armstrong's autobiography was published at the beginning of a “swing craze” that hit the nation in the summer of 1935. The publication of Armstrong's autobiography demonstrated a new status accorded the jazz vernacular as well as a new status gained by black musicians. To suggest that the literate skill of reading a musical score was insufficient for a professional musician to be a top swing artist seemed radical advice given the obsession with the cultivated skills of music making just a decade earlier. By the 1930s, however, many professional musicians viewed the vernacular art of jazz improvisation as one of the most skilled expressions in American popular music and Louis Armstrong as its greatest practitioner. At the same time, black musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Teddy Wilson also gained recognition among white musicians and white music critics as premier artists in American popular music.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Rise of a Jazz Art World , pp. 96 - 156Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002