Big bands, hotel bands, and the evolution of jazz music helped set the stage for the Big Band era. This part of the discussion will attempt to provide an overview of the many external factors outside of the music itself that not only set the stage for the Big Band era to occur but also helped increase and sustain the approbation of jazz in the public’s eye.
The Big Band era is generally regarded as having occurred between the years 1935 and 1945. It was the only time in history that the popularity of jazz music eclipsed all other forms of music in the U.S. Rightly or wrongly the appearance of Benny Goodman and his big band at the Palomar in Los Angeles in August of 1935 is often referred to as the official start of the Swing era. While Benny Goodman undoubtedly had a great big band, it should be clear by now that his may not have been the “best” or even most original big band playing hot jazz music at the time. Just as Benny Goodman did not start, conceive, or bring to fruition the Big Band era on his own, so no one incident can be cited as its genesis. Rather many circumstances, incidents, conditions, and inventions seemed to all work together and should be taken into account when viewing its conception.
On the morning of “Black Thursday,” October 24th, 1929, a great sell off on the New York Stock Exchange occurred triggering panic by investors. While the market bounced back a bit that afternoon, on the ensuing Monday and Tuesday it plummeted again and soon America was in the midst of the Great Depression. On December 11th, 1931 The New York Bank of the United States collapsed. These incidents helped bring to an end the prosperity, frivolity, and gaiety of the roaring 20's. Money began to get extremely tough to come by. The public was not able to afford to go out and see live music performed or buy records. Work was hard to find for everyone let alone musicians. Record sales were at an all time low. Many talented players worked the studios of radio networks and stations or were hidden in the confines of the few “sweet” dance orchestras able to stay afloat. Enter the free entertainment world of radio.
In the 1930s radio became a household appliance. It is estimated that by 1935, the number of homes with radios was nearly 23 million, the total audience around 91 million. This was the “Golden Age Of Radio” when shows like “The Shadow,” “Amos & Andy,” “Tarzan,” “Fibber McGee And Molly,” and “The Lone Ranger” were at peak popularity. Studio musicians made their money as background instrumentalists both for shows and commercials. Radio executives had learned in the 1920s that music shows were also successful. However, as far as nationally broadcast music shows in the years preceding 1934, dance and “sweet” bands still dominated the airwaves. The general public was still only dimly aware of the great black jazz orchestras. Benny Goodman’s Let’s Dance broadcasts, which aired regularly in 1934, were one of the first such weekly live radio broadcasts of hot jazz music to be aired by a national network on a steady, reoccurring basis.
Given the economic conditions of the time it may be surprising that during this period advances in recording technology, and in particular the microphone, were changing the way Americans could hear recorded music and radio broadcasts. The ribbon or “velocity” microphone was introduced by RCA in 1931, as the model 44A, and became one of the most widely used microphones in vocal recording. Many bands today hoping to achieve a more authentic “vintage” sound still use the 44A. Another advance in recording sound came in 1933 when RCA introduced the 77A, cardioid pattern, dual ribbon microphone. These advances in sound enabled subtle nuances in both playing and singing to be amplified for the first time and made for better live broadcasts. Up until these advances vocalists were required to get up and belt out a song with many of the subtleties in inflection and voice tone being lost.
Advances in the discs that music was recorded on were being worked on and experimented with during the Great Depression as well. By the late 1930s a limited use of vinyl resin to replace shellac pointed the way to quieter records. Lacquer-coated aluminum discs also came into use in the recording process. These had a quieter surface and for the first time allowed immediate playback in the studio for auditioning purposes. This enabled both engineers and musicians the ability to instantly make adjustments of microphone or personnel placement, further refining their recordings. These advances in disc recording, being honed during the Great Depression, had significant impact on the quality of recorded music during the Big Band era. However in the early 1930s these advances were still in their infancy. Live radio broadcasts of music with the new microphones were nearly as good, quality-wise, (assuming the reception was clear) as personally owned recordings, and certainly much more affordable.
In 1933 Homer Capehart sold the Simplex record changer mechanism to the Wurlitzer Company. The jukebox was to become an important tool in the popularity and accessibility of big band swing music, and by the late 1930s one could find them located in speakeasies, ice cream parlors, and even drugstores. The jukebox was at least part of the reason record sales began to show a tremendous increase toward the end of the decade.
The disc jockey, a term not used until about 1940, was also to become a significant factor in getting music out to the public. At first the large U.S. radio networks were against the idea. In the early 1930s they sternly reiterated their policies in a memorandum discouraging the use of recordings in network broadcasts. But the records were already spinning on local programs. Los Angeles radio man Al Jarvis was playing records and talking about them on a successful program called “The World’s Largest Make Believe Ballroom.” Jarvis and his program were very popular on KFWB in the small Los Angeles radio market in the early 1930s. Originally a junior assistant at KFWB, Martin Block, who had moved to New York, borrowed the same concept during the breaks in the high profile Bruno-Hauptman trial on network radio and was met with great success in 1935. Although often controversial to the musician’s union, to jazz writers, to music fans and to musicians themselves, these record jockeys, as they were called, were soon entertaining listeners with discs all over the country through the medium of radio.
While the youth of 30 years later could listen to thousands of stations catering to many genres of music; such was not the case nationally in the early 1930s. Hot jazz in a big band format was instead spreading in popularity through college age kids at Ivy League colleges like Yale. The Casa Loma Orchestra was a favorite of the kids there. In New York a new dance known as the Lindy Hop (named after Charles Lindbergh’s famous Trans-Atlantic flight) was catching on with teens in ballrooms like the Alhambra, the Renaissance, and the Savoy where some of its most significant adaptations occurred. Kids from a new generation were searching for their own identity, searching for excitement, searching for something to call their own, and searching for the opposite sex. Jazz music through its evolution into swing and these new and energetic dances offered the whole package. Although the swing phenomena spread slowly and in small pockets at first, national publicity through radio and publications was about to assist in propelling jazz to the pinnacle of its popularity.
Benny Goodman’s Let’s Dance broadcasts first aired in December of 1934. His was the final of several music features of the night making it a late broadcast on the East Coast. Most high school and college students, who were more apt to like hot jazz music, needed to be up early for school and did not hear these broadcasts. The subsequent U.S. tour by Goodman ending in California in which Benny Goodman was booked following his Let’s Dance broadcasts was largely unsuccessful until he hit the West Coast. The band was met with a tremendous amount of ambivalence and even scorn throughout the Midwest. The reason was the 3-hour time difference of his live broadcasts, between coasts, had enabled many of the youth out West to be tuned in nightly. They were ready and eager to greet and meet the band bringing them this new hot jazz music.
The tour culminated with Goodman’s performance at the Palomar in L.A. Although Oakland turnouts were said to have been good and crowds enthusiastic, the band was not expecting what they were met with in Southern California. What seemed to be the end of the road for the Benny Goodman big band suddenly became the beginning of a new era in American music history when the kids that night, in the summer of 1935, heard the band launch into a hot jazz number and began crowding around the bandstand cheering and encouraging the group.
With the headlines talking about the success of the Benny Goodman big band in California, magazines like Down Beat and Metronome began to print more articles about the music. John Hammond, while known to most for his savvy in discovering artists like Count Basie and Billie Holiday, was writing about big bands in Down Beat as early as 1935. By 1936, when Benny Goodman was performing just blocks away from the magazine’s Chicago offices, articles about the band filled its issues. Jazz in the form of big band swing was now beginning to sweep the nation.
Soon live radio remotes were regularly featuring this new swing music coast to coast as nearly all the major hotels in large cities had a “wire,” as it was called, meaning a line installed for broadcast transmission. Jukeboxes were blaring, kids were dancing, record jockeys were spinning discs and talking about them and the Big Band era had arrived.
