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scowl
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#76 Post by scowl » Fri Nov 18, 2005 5:00 pm

I hope that someday I'll stumble across a decent record made by some obscure pre-neo swing band who played swing music before it got popular again.

I have found some recordings by pre-neo swing big bands (for example, David Murray Big Band and the Blue Wisp Band) but oddly most of their records have tons of reverb that completely suck the life out of the songs, like you're listening to them in a huge empty auditorium all by yourself. Even some more recent recordings (like Mainstream Power Band) just kill their songs with fluffy overblown production. These bands should be kicking your butt with their songs, not floating over you like twenty angels.

But then came neo-swing and suddenly it sounded like every horn was turned up to 11 and pointed straight at your ears. Lots of New Morty Show songs bug me like that. It's kinda sad when fifty year old mono recordings sound better than stuff recorded a few years ago.

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Eyeball
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#77 Post by Eyeball » Fri Nov 18, 2005 10:43 pm

Toon Town Dave wrote:I think you hit the nail on the head when you say the muscians were clueless. Our jazz community here tends to favor modern, concert style jazz where the trumpet player likes to toot his own horn for 32 or 64 bars of solo with the expectation of a standing ovation afterward. The particular folks I'm thinking of still hold an annual dance, as long as I've been dancing (6 years) they've always scheduled their event the same night as a big ballroom dance or the annual big band night at a nearby dance hall. I've been told that before I started dancing (in '99) that this group didn't even like playing for dancers. Since then I think they clued in to the fact that a competing big band gets regular gigs that actually PAY real cash money.

We have a strong blues community, those musicians tended go with the fad because they play a lot of jump blues sort of stuff, not that far removed from the neo-swing stuff. The blues musicians tend to appreciate the dancers, I think the mutual respect encouraged dancers to support their gigs more than jazz muscians.
My limited experience with college jazz bands is that they have been heavily geard toward 'concert jazz' for a very long time now.

Our local junior college had a genuine swing big band a few years ago and they were quite good. But they only played one public and underpublicized dance a year.

All the big rehearsal bands as jazz musicians call them are riddled with stodgy charts from the 1950s of standards that dont have much in the way of style. They look down on swing charts. They mock things like IN THE MOOD, but when they try to play it, they fail miserably. Their attitude towrds dancers isn't even an attitude pro or con. Some dancers are here? OK. Whatever. Dance if you'd like to. Then they play Fly Me to the Moon.

A totally different world for them. I actually had to try and explain what a swing arrangement was to a big band leader. I thought he was kidding me at first, but he was serious. He didn't know the difference between music that swings and Swing music.

He may be playing a local gig soon hereabout. I gotta go hear this. It is at a dance venue that draws Lindy fans. Should be interesting.

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Eyeball
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#78 Post by Eyeball » Fri Nov 18, 2005 10:49 pm

scowl wrote:I hope that someday I'll stumble across a decent record made by some obscure pre-neo swing band who played swing music before it got popular again.

It's kinda sad when fifty year old mono recordings sound better than stuff recorded a few years ago.
There were still lots of big bands playing Swing music in the pre-neo era. Most of the ones I know of were old school bands that were still around, but los of the stuff is very well recorded in either hi-fi mono or stereo.

Lots of the stuff was recreations of earlier charts, but there is some decent stuff from as far back as the 1950s that still has the feel of real swing....maybe b/c the eras were still pretty close together and other styles of playing had not overly influenced the musicians.

It is really hit and miss.

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scowl
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#79 Post by scowl » Wed Nov 30, 2005 10:39 am

Eyeball wrote:There were still lots of big bands playing Swing music in the pre-neo era. Most of the ones I know of were old school bands that were still around, but los of the stuff is very well recorded in either hi-fi mono or stereo.
Please name some titles. I'll buy them immediately.

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#80 Post by julius » Wed Nov 30, 2005 5:05 pm

Eyeball wrote:It begs the question - Why didn't actual jazz musicians get involved in the 'swing craze' of the late 90s?
Because the bands that made the craze what it was were shitty-ass musicians, comparatively speaking. Sure, there was money, but you would have had to compromise your artistic integrity to make the music that the people wanted to hear. I saw Setzer's big band in concert. The arrangements were so freakin boring any high school horn player could have blown them in his sleep. And Setzer took all the solos on his overly loud distorted electric guitar.

About the closest I ever saw a real jazz musician get to the 'swing revival' craze was Duke Heitger featuring Johnny and Cari (SF instructors) on the cover of one of his albums. Poor album artwork, fantastic, honest to god swing music inside. Mostly overlooked by the fad.

(The album is titled Rhythm Is Our Business)

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#81 Post by julius » Wed Nov 30, 2005 5:07 pm

scowl wrote:I hope that someday I'll stumble across a decent record made by some obscure pre-neo swing band who played swing music before it got popular again.
Pretty much every band on the trad jazz festival circuit has been around for a billion years, and they all have albums that predate 1998. Might want to check out the bands and artists listed on sweethot.org if you want to find some good music.

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#82 Post by LindyChef » Wed Nov 30, 2005 9:24 pm

julius wrote:About the closest I ever saw a real jazz musician get to the 'swing revival' craze was Duke Heitger featuring Johnny and Cari (SF instructors) on the cover of one of his albums. Poor album artwork, fantastic, honest to god swing music inside. Mostly overlooked by the fad.

(The album is titled Rhythm Is Our Business)
I actually never really liked that album ... I personally felt the quality of the horns was subpar.

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#83 Post by JSAlmonte » Wed Nov 30, 2005 10:35 pm

julius wrote:Because the bands that made the craze what it was were shitty-ass musicians, comparatively speaking. Sure, there was money, but you would have had to compromise your artistic integrity to make the music that the people wanted to hear.
I stumbled onto this thread on Allaboutjazz.com. I think this quote in particular on the second page sums up a lot of musicians' attitudes.(emphasis mine)
Daniel Loeb wrote:Yeah, well that makes sence to me. I didn't think you were looking for In the Mood in the first place, but you seem to be lacking a bit of understanding for the musician, which is the problem we have in the first place. It's not one-dimentional to not want to compromise music for a dancer. Pretty few musicians don't want to be side men as they prefer being group leaders. I love being a side man. I've learned so much by playing with the very talented and wise musicians I've been lucky enough to play with and be directed by. But why would I want to give up my freedom and range of motion and expression in my music to someone who doesn't know anything about my music, and has nothing to teach me? I've worked with interprative dance a bit and done things along the lines of a dancer reacting to a musician input and a musician playing with a dancer for a muse, and then tried to communicate simultaniously. That was pretty fun, but still would have been better if any of the dancers were into jazz. But I would not be willing to work with a dancer who told me things like, "you have to keep a swinging or sustained tempo every second and you can't stretch out at all." When it gets stretchy like that, that's what I'm looking for. When you start to feel that with a group and you have to stop and be reserved on account of a dancer, it's annoying. You start to feel resentful and like the dancer doesn't care about your music at all and you're supposed to care about their dancing. You start feeling like a tool.
It sucks if you have to restrain yourself for a gig at a resteraunt or something and play quiet and in, but its all the more frustrating when the person telling you to keep it in is an artist. That seems contrary to the artistic pursuit and it makes for some very heated and amusing (in retrospect) arguments
. Try to keep your mind open to the private and professional goals of the musician and you'll realize that hiring them for your needs is not helping either of those pursuits. Somebody responded tersly "dance to salsa music", which I thought was kind of rude to state alone. But seriously, if you found some musicians that like to play in a style that would work for you, everyone would be much happier. A musician is not going to want to change his style of music any more than you'd like it if a musician said, "well, we're going to stretch out at times, so you should just break into some interprative dance to go along with it, and I don't really care if that's your thing or not. I mean, it's pretty one-dimentional of you to not want to change your artistic expression for the benefit of mine." Get it? Find some group of musicians that you click with naturally.

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#84 Post by LindyChef » Thu Dec 01, 2005 1:26 am

In the context of the thread, though, I don't think that there's enough distinction between jazz and swing ... and it seems to me that the musicians there don't have an understanding of seeing a huge room full of lindy hoppers dancing, really dancing, to live bands ... wonder if seeing something like Y6A's Basie Centennial Ball with 1200 people dancing would have changed some minds.

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#85 Post by Campus Five » Thu Dec 01, 2005 5:50 pm

Here is the an important point. 99.999% of jazz musicians don't realize or don't care that Swing (with a capitol S - i.e. the genre) is not regular straight-ahead jazz. Half of those 99.999% do know there's a difference but consider the old style tragically unhip, and feel it is beneath them to play that "simple", outdated style. So, even those guys who could or might be able play the style won't. What you get is guys who don't know the difference between playing late 30's Benny Goodman and playing 50's Frank Sinatra; or guys who think you should always play everything (including "Roll 'Em" or something like that) like Frank Sinatra in the 50's.

More specifically about neo-swing:
The neo-swing era had two big camps. First, regular people who wanted to go back in time and re-discover the old music. RCR strikes me as a good example - they were very interested in the old school sound, and had to learn it from scratch, not necessarily being school jazz musicians at the time. They didn't know how to put chords together the "right" way, but they tried to get that sound. They ended up with a sort of cartoon version of swing, but the later RCR albums, showed some more maturity and depth of understanding. Danny Glass's book on swing drumming (while not even close to the understanding of Hal Smith, Josh Collazo, Brooks Tegler, et al) showed a bit more than something totally cartoony - i.e. BBVD.

The other side was modern jazz musicians "moonligting" as swing cats. This is who I'm talking about in the first paragraph. I feel like this is the "wedding band" school. They basical played old tunes but with no intention of playing them old style - like playing Robert Johnson though Marshall Stacks. (Yes, that worked for Cream, but nobody called them delta blues). Brian Seltzer is an example of this. A bunch of his musicians play also play in Gordon Goodwin's Big Phay Band - which is probably one of the biggest big bands around. But they are completely removed anything resembling swing music, and have no intention to go back. Those same cats moonlight in the Seltzer band like its just another gig, but a lot of them look down on the music. Clearly the BSO is not great music anyway, but the point remains.

So either you have the good-faith guys trying but failing to real play swing music, or the bad-faith pro musicians moonlighting and failing to play real swing music. That's one of the big reasons neo-swing didn't really feature very good music or musicians.
"I don''t dig that two beat jive the New Orleans cats play.
My boys and I have four heavy beats to the bar and no cheating!
--Count Basie
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#86 Post by Eyeball » Thu Dec 01, 2005 9:44 pm

Wow.

Good quotable quotes from Julius and Jonathan and Daniel Loeb on All Music.

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Eyeball
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#87 Post by Eyeball » Fri Dec 02, 2005 8:37 pm

scowl wrote:
Eyeball wrote:There were still lots of big bands playing Swing music in the pre-neo era. Most of the ones I know of were old school bands that were still around, but los of the stuff is very well recorded in either hi-fi mono or stereo.
Please name some titles. I'll buy them immediately.
Sorry....I missed this post.

There is a pretty good LP by Nat Pierce who used to sub whenever they needed a Basie style pianist. He did an LP for RCA called "A Night At the Savoy" or something like that. Studio recordings, but very 'swing'.

George Williams did a 'tribute' to Jimmie Lunceford LP for RCA. All I can find are the EPs. He also did some sides for UA circa 1960 - big band stuff in stereo.

The British Ted Heath band did 2 LPs in Phase4 Stereo on London called "Swing Is King". Some good stuff on there.

Quite a few of the Harry James recordings from the 50s still sound like HJ recordings from the 40s.

I will try and think of more.

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#88 Post by julius » Fri Dec 02, 2005 9:37 pm

Yeah there's two Harry James albums I particularly like which didn't descend (mostly) into the vast ocean of cheese he recorded in the 50s.

Dance Parade/Your Dance Date

and

Original Studio Radio Transcriptions (how's that for a contradiction in terms?)

The latter is mostly mono and probably would be considered low sound quality, but the former is stellar. Comparatively speaking.

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#89 Post by Eyeball » Sat Dec 03, 2005 12:38 am

Yeah...those 2 you mentioned are pretty good and pretty early in the 50s, I think.

His 50s stuff is pretty good, though his band takes on a Basie type style...but good, not the wall of sound that some really later Basie sounds like.

James in the 60s got really commercial...just hokey concept albums. "Country Western Favorites" It might be good, but I don't feel like gambling on it. He had one pretty good LP done live in NYC, but the whole thing ran less than 30 minutes for the whole album.

BUT...thanks for reminding me. He did a few albums on MGM that there pure big band 40s things. One was "DOWN BEAT FAVORITES" and another was something similar. This stuff is all controlled by Polygram now, so if they are on CD, that's where they will be...or on Verve.

I have not heard the really later things he was doing on direct-to-disc LPs. They may have been good.

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#90 Post by CafeSavoy » Sun Dec 04, 2005 6:19 pm

Here's a list of some of the recordings already listed and a few more. Some are better than others.


Duke Heitger, Rhythm Is Our Business
Nat Pierce, Big Band at the Savoy Ballroom
Harry James, Dance Parade/Your Dance Date (note. some of the sessions are from 1939)
The Big 18,
----Live Echoes of the Swinging Bands
----More Live Echoes of the Swinging Bands
Rex Stewart,
----The Big Reunion
----The Big Challenge
Ed Polcer, The Magic of Swing Street
The Widespread Depression Orchestra,
----Boogie in the Barnyard
----Downtown Uproar
Dan Barrett,
----International Swing Party
----Harlem 2000
James Dapogny, Hot Club Swing, Small Group Swing
George Kelly, Plays the Music of Don Redman
Buddy Tate All-Stars, Jive at Five
Buck Clayton, Jam Sessions from the Vault
Henry Red Allen, World on a String
Jess Stacy, A Tribute to Benny Goodman
Mark Shane & Terry Blaine, With Thee I Swing
Ken Peplowski,
----Last Swing of the Century
----Tribute to Benny Goodman with the BBC Big Band
Johnny Otis, The Spirit of the Black Territory Bands
Rex Allen, Keep Swingin'
Franz Jackson & the Salty Dogs, Yellow Fire
The New York Allstars, Broadway

The Prestige Blues Swingers, Outskirts of Town
The DMP Big Band
----Carved in Stone
----Salutes Duke Ellington
George "The Fox" Williams, Rhythm Was His Business (wasn't all that moved by this cd, but the album art is pretty good)
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