Teach Yourself Jazz - online guidebook

For the beginning player, with sheet music samples

Share page

Visit Us On FB

	CHAPTER ELEVEN SWING AND THE BIG BAND THE ARRANGER APPEARS
	In the heyday of Chicago night life, the hundreds of small clubs and dives made for the emergence of many small bands, each with its own individuality. When the Great Depression swept over the land in the '30s, the clubs closed one by one. Musicians were thrown out of work, and their only means of earning was to fall in with the big commercial interests who were busy turning jazz into a brilliant spectacle that would appeal to the enormous 'bread-and-circuses' mass of the box-office public. But at the same time there was operative the influence of negroes from the Northern States who had had access to a regular musical education and who felt the urge to experiment with European ideas of orchestration and composition. They wanted to use these ideas to extend the somewhat restricted and repetitive vocabulary of traditional jazz. Typical of these experimenters was Fletcher Henderson who managed, over a quarter of a century, to lead bigger bands that turned out a steady stream of the music the public wanted. This was 'head music' 73