The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia;

Author:Ted Gioia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Big Bands in the Modern Era

Nowhere was this new separation more apparent than in the obstacles faced by big bands in the postwar years. Working with an instrumentation and vocabulary formed during the period of jazz’s greatest popularity, these large ensembles now battled for survival in the modern era. By the start of the 1950s, singers—many of them former vocalists with big bands—had taken center stage in the world of popular music. Instead of Ellington, Goodman, Shaw, Basie, and Miller, the pop charts were dominated by Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, Jo Stafford, Doris Day, and Perry Como. And other styles and trends were also on the rise. Record buyers were increasingly interested in R&B, Chicago blues, mood music, the folk song revival movement, blockbuster Broadway soundtracks, and the like, none of which required a large jazz orchestra. One era had ended, another had begun.

But the decline of the jazz big band was just as much a matter of economics as shifting tastes. The costs of taking a large band on the road had grown prohibitively high, even as the general public’s interest fell to new lows. An entertainment tax instituted in 1944, which levied a 30 percent surcharge on venues that allowed dancing, led to a decline in ballroom patronage. This created a wedge between jazz music and dance, which widened during the postwar years. As ballrooms shut down, the big bands lost their single biggest source of income, and struggled to find other gigs that might allow them to meet their payrolls. Meanwhile, a panoply of modern technologies and conveniences—television, high-fidelity sound, various newfangled appliances—seemingly conspired to keep Americans at home in the suburbs. In this new environment, music venues of every type and genre struggled to prove their relevance and audience appeal, not just ballrooms but even nightclubs and concert halls. As a result, the contemporary jazz scene of the 1950s was gradually abandoned to the outsiders, the bohemians and beatniks, and the young—those renegades who were still on the prowl to hear live music late at night. For this crowd, the big band was most often viewed as a dinosaur, the retrograde sound of a generation whose time had already passed.

In the face of these daunting circumstances, a few leaders persisted in their efforts to bring the jazz big band into the modern age, to adapt it to the changed circumstances of the day. The most ambitious of these—a Stan Kenton or Sun Ra—sought nothing less than revitalizing the big band as the creative center of the modern jazz world. A noble but, alas, an almost impossible task—akin to reintroducing sackbuts and lutes into contemporary classical music ensembles. But though these attempts did little to return big bands to a position of prominence in popular culture—that is hardly likely to happen again—they nonetheless spurred the creation of a vital body of work, a music of artistry, which served also as a quixotic protest against the marginalization of the jazz orchestra.

Unlike the dinosaurs, the big bands avoided total extinction—but just barely.

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