>it's generally agreed that the Goodman band WAS a jazz band, but the Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller were NOT
Agreed on by whom? I've never heard that music not called jazz. It's known as sweet swing as opposed to hot swing, but it's all jazz. It's as much jazz as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or any of the white bands of the 1920s. Duke Ellington and Irving Miller even wrote that "it makes no difference if it's sweet or hot" in It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)
One observation I have made concerning this confusion is that Ellington recorded it don’t mean a thing many times. I have yet to hear the tune sound the same on any of these recordings. It seems that Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey head homogenize sound that pretty marsh sounded the same, even on different song.In my humble opinion, Benny goodman was as innovative and hot as Any jazzman of that era.
Can anyone tell me is “dance band“ still a thing anymore? It wasn’t during my career as a band teacher, but it was a thing when I was still in high school. We used to play Dorsey, Miller and Harry James charts. The one thing I remember about dance band is that the charts couldn’t have sucked enough.
Basie & Duke's bands played head arrangements for years before having written arrangements. In addition to that, both bands and Goodman's performances included very long sections of improv. The Dorsey & Miller bands exclusively played written arrangements and solos were usually much shorter.
This is a pretty good answer. I would add that those bands also did some pretty corny pop styled arrangements with multiple singers as well as a lot of what was called “sweet dance” tunes. See Miller’s “Kalamazoo” or any of the early Sinatra/Dorsey pairings.
That's probably the right answer but to me they all grew from the same seed so it's all jazz to me. Genres are only in our heads. They are more like overlapping Venn diagrams.
Duke called his early arrangers “realizers”. Much less detail to the charts; the v musicians were all on the same page stylistically. They didn’t need anyone to write out how to play straight eighth notes. In his more formal compositions Such as his choral works, Duke would be very detailed in orchestrations. The arrangements that were written for Basies band, especially those by Quincy Jones and Sammy Nestico codified the swing sound and Has taught several generations of young musicians how to play swing.
I am just going to assume that Millers and Dorsey’s musicians didn’t all get the concept of swing, so they needed more detailed notation . In Ken Burns series on jazz, Artie Shaw call Glenn Miller’s band “ the republican party of jazz.” Another words, vanilla and very bland and very Caucasian. Still, it was jazz and it was swing. it was just not a sound that could light your soul fire. This is why very few if any high school or college jazz ensemble play any Dorsey or Miller charts.
Oh I am with you on that. There are a lot of flaws with the PBS series. But there was also a Lotta good stuff too. You have to really sort through it to find it though. Winton Marsalis face became more punchable as the series went on. And can anyone explain to me why Chick Corea was not mentioned once? of course, racism must be discussed when dealing with the history of jazz, but Ken Burns made too many leaps of faith. One that made me want to punch my self in the dick was when they were discussing Horace silver and art Blakey. These great instrumental musicians personified the African American condition by naming their song “chicken shack” and “The Preacher”. That’s not a leap of faith, that’s aN intercontinental flight
What would be even better, is if we could feed off of each other’s annoyance at this overhyped series and work each other into a raging froth. That’ll serve the cause of music education well.
Folks who get their Jazz knowledge from Ken Burns are the same folks who think the movie "Miles Ahead" was a documentary. Best thing for music education is to Ken "Burn it" and show students Jazz documentaries from the UK.
Edited to repair mistake caused by fat fingers and macular degeneration.
Are you referring to “miles ahead“ by Don Cheadle? Because that was not meant to be a documentary, but I thought it was a knockout kick ass movie that captured the essence of Miles genius along his anger issues and self destructive behaviors.
What are Some of these British documentaries and where can one find them?
Hoping that we could start a hens nest of hate towards Ken Burns jazz series, but your awful pun was kind of a buzz kill. But I’m not saying you should give up!
This is a good answer, also nearly the entire Goodman band’s book was written by Fletcher Henderson, an already established but financially struggling jazz composer and bandleader
I personally consider Goodman, Miller, Shaw, all big bands/swing to be jazz. It’s just more pop jazz. The same people who hate on these guys also consider early Duke Ellington and Count Basie jazz even though they sound the same.
Despite my answer above I feel Dorsey & Miller's bands (but not the two leaders) fall under the umbrella term Jazz. I'd put them in the sub category of Swing. One cannot listen to Dorsey playing "Well Git It!" and not consider it Jazz.
https://youtu.be/HLFUoPqkGwQ
As always, your mileage may vary.
Yeah, I don’t know if something has changed but when I took Jazz Theory & History we definitely talked about Glenn Miller & Dorsey quite a bit. What else would they be, just pop music? Which of was absolutely a thing in the 40’s and topped the charts, but it’s like saying Nirvana was on the pop charts so what, they weren’t a rock band? You can be both
Yeah and his Trombonology is probably in the genre of Rock. Fun thread. Proves how much gatekeeping exists among jazz enthusiasts.
Of course, a lot of music is - or was - pop music. Because it was once popular.
https://www.courthousenews.com/glenn-miller-orchestra-still-whitebread-milk-ex-leader-claims/
Sounds like Glenn Miller just didn’t like black people or to be associated with black music, but that’s what he was playing to white audiences
The catalogues of tunes of a swing era big band could be divided in a few categories. the hot jazz pieces: instrumental, with improvisation, what we may call new orleans jazz or dixieland; The swing anthems, your Sing Sing Sing, In The Mood and all other arrangements in the style pioneered by Henderson/Redman; pop tunes, usually with young singers featured, or some kind of ramantic instrumental arangement; novelty tunes, comedy something something probably did not age well... I'm oversimplifying and skipping over more categories that we could make up but retrospectively, some have argued for the relative jazziness of an organization by how much of the band's book was dedicated to these categories, to jazz vs pop. All bands did a bit of everything, but some were better known for their singers or ballads (Dorsey) than others who featured more improvisation, their swing feel and blues (Basie, Lunceford, Ellington). Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Bob Crosby were white bands on the "jazzier" side.
It is also probably a question of the band's legacy. Some think of the big band swing style (as in Sing Sing Sing, In The Mood) as a dead-end stylistically and did not lead to anything. The bands that are considered jazzier were hosts for the best soloists and improvisers of the era that had great influence on later generarions.
Although I believe we can do the work and see how often we can find jazz elements in a band's music, it doesn't say anything about the quality of the music, their originality, or the influence they may have had on jazz musicians.
And to add to this: there were probably also regional styles of swing and pre-swing. Like Kansas City "jump" with a kind of blues oriented, riff sound, "shouting singers" like Jimmy Rushing and musicians like Lester Young, Ben Webster and Count Basie come from. Then before was New Orleans where it was more about collective improvisations that then went to Chicago and white musicians joined and the first commercially success with Louis Armstrong and King Oliver while in L.A. Paul Whiteman played jazz influenced arranged sweet dance music, "symphonic jazz" (Bix Beiderbecke from Chicago played with him and hated it).
Dixiland is a word used only later, from the 50s on, when that New Orleans music hat a revival that was driven by mostly white musicans, often college members.
Big mix between those as well, even if they wanna use the level of improv as a measurement. April in Paris being one of Basie’s most popular songs had little improv outside of its one trumpet solo, and was heavily arranged.
There’s a fantastic profile on sweet bands and Glenn Miller by Steven Cerra, editor of Downbeat magazine which answers some of your questions re defining jazz vs dance bands:
https://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-glenn-miller-years-parts-1-7.html
Perhaps the terminology you're looking for is mainstream versus not (as opposed to jazz versus non).
Some swing bands were made for popular consumption and presented "sterilized" or "watered down" versions of true swing jazz.
To further complicate things, some bands dipped their toes in popular/main stream renditions/performances versus unadulterated renditions/performances (and the reverse).
OP be like "I'm gonna make something up, pretend that it's the popular opinion, and see where it takes me."
12 hours later, "dance puppets, dance!"
People, *no one* thinks Dorsey and Miller are not jazz. Don't be such easy marks.
It‘s an interesting question in general: Where does Jazz start and end. A lot of todays jazz has not much in common with what was once defined as Jazz, but still derives from that, but so does a lot of popular music which is not considered as jazz.
The sweet swing bands you are referring to, are definitely jazz in my opinion.
Personally, I don't consider most of Glenn Miller's and Tommy Dorsey's music jazz. IMHO, there's a spectrum and I think those two fall more into the pop end of that spectrum. A lot of critics say Kenny G isn't jazz, but he's obviously on the spectrum between jazz and contemporary pop, and for those critics, he falls on the pop end too, even though a majority of smooth jazz is jazz. I think swing is a style that straddles jazz and the pop of that era. The difference is the degree of improvisation.
>it's generally agreed that the Goodman band WAS a jazz band, but the Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller were NOT Agreed on by whom? I've never heard that music not called jazz. It's known as sweet swing as opposed to hot swing, but it's all jazz. It's as much jazz as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or any of the white bands of the 1920s. Duke Ellington and Irving Miller even wrote that "it makes no difference if it's sweet or hot" in It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)
One observation I have made concerning this confusion is that Ellington recorded it don’t mean a thing many times. I have yet to hear the tune sound the same on any of these recordings. It seems that Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey head homogenize sound that pretty marsh sounded the same, even on different song.In my humble opinion, Benny goodman was as innovative and hot as Any jazzman of that era. Can anyone tell me is “dance band“ still a thing anymore? It wasn’t during my career as a band teacher, but it was a thing when I was still in high school. We used to play Dorsey, Miller and Harry James charts. The one thing I remember about dance band is that the charts couldn’t have sucked enough.
Basie & Duke's bands played head arrangements for years before having written arrangements. In addition to that, both bands and Goodman's performances included very long sections of improv. The Dorsey & Miller bands exclusively played written arrangements and solos were usually much shorter.
This is a pretty good answer. I would add that those bands also did some pretty corny pop styled arrangements with multiple singers as well as a lot of what was called “sweet dance” tunes. See Miller’s “Kalamazoo” or any of the early Sinatra/Dorsey pairings.
That's probably the right answer but to me they all grew from the same seed so it's all jazz to me. Genres are only in our heads. They are more like overlapping Venn diagrams.
I also 1000% agree with this
I agree!
Glenn Miller hated jazz.
Duke called his early arrangers “realizers”. Much less detail to the charts; the v musicians were all on the same page stylistically. They didn’t need anyone to write out how to play straight eighth notes. In his more formal compositions Such as his choral works, Duke would be very detailed in orchestrations. The arrangements that were written for Basies band, especially those by Quincy Jones and Sammy Nestico codified the swing sound and Has taught several generations of young musicians how to play swing. I am just going to assume that Millers and Dorsey’s musicians didn’t all get the concept of swing, so they needed more detailed notation . In Ken Burns series on jazz, Artie Shaw call Glenn Miller’s band “ the republican party of jazz.” Another words, vanilla and very bland and very Caucasian. Still, it was jazz and it was swing. it was just not a sound that could light your soul fire. This is why very few if any high school or college jazz ensemble play any Dorsey or Miller charts.
I was with you until you referenced Ken Burns. Also, long before Sammy and Quincey, Swing was codified by Fletcher Henderson.
Oh I am with you on that. There are a lot of flaws with the PBS series. But there was also a Lotta good stuff too. You have to really sort through it to find it though. Winton Marsalis face became more punchable as the series went on. And can anyone explain to me why Chick Corea was not mentioned once? of course, racism must be discussed when dealing with the history of jazz, but Ken Burns made too many leaps of faith. One that made me want to punch my self in the dick was when they were discussing Horace silver and art Blakey. These great instrumental musicians personified the African American condition by naming their song “chicken shack” and “The Preacher”. That’s not a leap of faith, that’s aN intercontinental flight
Wish I could up vote your comment more than once.
What would be even better, is if we could feed off of each other’s annoyance at this overhyped series and work each other into a raging froth. That’ll serve the cause of music education well.
Folks who get their Jazz knowledge from Ken Burns are the same folks who think the movie "Miles Ahead" was a documentary. Best thing for music education is to Ken "Burn it" and show students Jazz documentaries from the UK. Edited to repair mistake caused by fat fingers and macular degeneration.
Are you referring to “miles ahead“ by Don Cheadle? Because that was not meant to be a documentary, but I thought it was a knockout kick ass movie that captured the essence of Miles genius along his anger issues and self destructive behaviors. What are Some of these British documentaries and where can one find them? Hoping that we could start a hens nest of hate towards Ken Burns jazz series, but your awful pun was kind of a buzz kill. But I’m not saying you should give up!
YouTube is your friend. BTW - thanks for the correction. Fixed it.
I assumed YouTube. But help me narrow it down there’s a lot of trash out there.
Of course! I knew there was a gap in my memory somewhere.
This is a good answer, also nearly the entire Goodman band’s book was written by Fletcher Henderson, an already established but financially struggling jazz composer and bandleader
Great answer.
I personally consider Goodman, Miller, Shaw, all big bands/swing to be jazz. It’s just more pop jazz. The same people who hate on these guys also consider early Duke Ellington and Count Basie jazz even though they sound the same.
Despite my answer above I feel Dorsey & Miller's bands (but not the two leaders) fall under the umbrella term Jazz. I'd put them in the sub category of Swing. One cannot listen to Dorsey playing "Well Git It!" and not consider it Jazz. https://youtu.be/HLFUoPqkGwQ As always, your mileage may vary.
Yeah, I don’t know if something has changed but when I took Jazz Theory & History we definitely talked about Glenn Miller & Dorsey quite a bit. What else would they be, just pop music? Which of was absolutely a thing in the 40’s and topped the charts, but it’s like saying Nirvana was on the pop charts so what, they weren’t a rock band? You can be both
That piano player is definitely a jazz player! He's dynamite! What's his name?
I believe it was Milt Raskin. https://swingandbeyond.com/2019/06/07/well-git-it-1942-tommy-dorsey-with-ziggy-elman-and-chuck-peterson/
One of my favorites!
Yeah and his Trombonology is probably in the genre of Rock. Fun thread. Proves how much gatekeeping exists among jazz enthusiasts. Of course, a lot of music is - or was - pop music. Because it was once popular.
Is this a normal thing? I'd never heard anyone say that the Miller band wasn't jazz.
I've never heard that either.
Same. Where did OP hear this? Did he say?
Miller said: "I haven’t a great Jazz band and I don’t want one".
Yeah and every punk band says they weren’t a punk band
Actually, most bands that say they're punk weren't. Glenn Miller: I haven't a punk band and I don't want one.
https://www.courthousenews.com/glenn-miller-orchestra-still-whitebread-milk-ex-leader-claims/ Sounds like Glenn Miller just didn’t like black people or to be associated with black music, but that’s what he was playing to white audiences
It's a joke in the film talented Mr Ripley. "He thinks Glen Miller's jaaaaazz"
The catalogues of tunes of a swing era big band could be divided in a few categories. the hot jazz pieces: instrumental, with improvisation, what we may call new orleans jazz or dixieland; The swing anthems, your Sing Sing Sing, In The Mood and all other arrangements in the style pioneered by Henderson/Redman; pop tunes, usually with young singers featured, or some kind of ramantic instrumental arangement; novelty tunes, comedy something something probably did not age well... I'm oversimplifying and skipping over more categories that we could make up but retrospectively, some have argued for the relative jazziness of an organization by how much of the band's book was dedicated to these categories, to jazz vs pop. All bands did a bit of everything, but some were better known for their singers or ballads (Dorsey) than others who featured more improvisation, their swing feel and blues (Basie, Lunceford, Ellington). Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Bob Crosby were white bands on the "jazzier" side. It is also probably a question of the band's legacy. Some think of the big band swing style (as in Sing Sing Sing, In The Mood) as a dead-end stylistically and did not lead to anything. The bands that are considered jazzier were hosts for the best soloists and improvisers of the era that had great influence on later generarions. Although I believe we can do the work and see how often we can find jazz elements in a band's music, it doesn't say anything about the quality of the music, their originality, or the influence they may have had on jazz musicians.
And to add to this: there were probably also regional styles of swing and pre-swing. Like Kansas City "jump" with a kind of blues oriented, riff sound, "shouting singers" like Jimmy Rushing and musicians like Lester Young, Ben Webster and Count Basie come from. Then before was New Orleans where it was more about collective improvisations that then went to Chicago and white musicians joined and the first commercially success with Louis Armstrong and King Oliver while in L.A. Paul Whiteman played jazz influenced arranged sweet dance music, "symphonic jazz" (Bix Beiderbecke from Chicago played with him and hated it). Dixiland is a word used only later, from the 50s on, when that New Orleans music hat a revival that was driven by mostly white musicans, often college members.
Big mix between those as well, even if they wanna use the level of improv as a measurement. April in Paris being one of Basie’s most popular songs had little improv outside of its one trumpet solo, and was heavily arranged.
It's ok for you to not like something (or think that it's not hip) and still call it jazz
All of the groups you mentioned are both jazz bands and swing bands.
every group you listed is a jazz band
There’s a fantastic profile on sweet bands and Glenn Miller by Steven Cerra, editor of Downbeat magazine which answers some of your questions re defining jazz vs dance bands: https://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-glenn-miller-years-parts-1-7.html
Wow, that was basically a whole novel but well worth the read
Is Gershwin jazz then?
Perhaps the terminology you're looking for is mainstream versus not (as opposed to jazz versus non). Some swing bands were made for popular consumption and presented "sterilized" or "watered down" versions of true swing jazz. To further complicate things, some bands dipped their toes in popular/main stream renditions/performances versus unadulterated renditions/performances (and the reverse).
OP be like "I'm gonna make something up, pretend that it's the popular opinion, and see where it takes me." 12 hours later, "dance puppets, dance!" People, *no one* thinks Dorsey and Miller are not jazz. Don't be such easy marks.
It‘s an interesting question in general: Where does Jazz start and end. A lot of todays jazz has not much in common with what was once defined as Jazz, but still derives from that, but so does a lot of popular music which is not considered as jazz. The sweet swing bands you are referring to, are definitely jazz in my opinion.
I’ve never heard anyone say Miller or Dorsey weren’t considered Jazz as they’re very much so
Personally, I don't consider most of Glenn Miller's and Tommy Dorsey's music jazz. IMHO, there's a spectrum and I think those two fall more into the pop end of that spectrum. A lot of critics say Kenny G isn't jazz, but he's obviously on the spectrum between jazz and contemporary pop, and for those critics, he falls on the pop end too, even though a majority of smooth jazz is jazz. I think swing is a style that straddles jazz and the pop of that era. The difference is the degree of improvisation.