The Influence Of Swing Music In The 1930's

The swing era took place from 1935-1945. It took place during a time that the Great Depression was going on. People argue that the time during the Great Depression made a shift from the “hot syncopated dance music to a type of sweeter ballroom dance music. (Star, 2013) In this paper I am going to discuss how the Tin Pan Alley and Swing are similar, how Tin Pan Alley and Swing are different, and lastly why the Swing era lasted so much shorter than the Tin Pan Alley.

Jazz became the most popular form of music for the youth. Many younger generations loved the feeling of having freedom on the dance floor. Many Jazz bands played at dance halls one known to be place was the Savoy in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago.

     The music called Jazz was born sometime around 1895 in New Orleans. It combined elements of Ragtime, marching band music and Blues. What made Jazz such a different perspective of traditional music was its act of improvising. There was a widespread use of improvisation often by more than one player at a time. Songwriters would write the music down on a piece of paper, and then the Jazz musicians would try their best to play the music. Usually in a Jazz piece, musicians would use the song as a starting point to improvise around. Jazz musicians would play a familiar song to the audience, and by the time they were done with the piece they would stir up a totally different feeling away from the

This view of women was widely accepted before World War I, but was rejected by most women in  the 1920s, which was partly due to the success of the eighteenth and nineteenth constitutional amendments. Women rebelled against their traditional roles as daughters and mothers. Women wanted to be seen as individuals outside of their familial roles. Jazz provided an outlet for rebellion in several ways. The dance halls, jazz clubs, and speakeasies were  places where women could escape from the traditional roles that were demanded of them by a rigid society. Here, women were allowed greater freedom in their language, clothing, and behaviour. Like the Freudian psychology that was rampant in the 1920s, jazz also encouraged "infantile" behaviour; Flappers who frequented these establishment were often referred to as "Jazz Babies." Jazz encouraged primitive and sexual behaviour through the uninhibited and improvisational feel of the music. Jazz music was rejected by the older generation, and therefore, jazz music and jazz dancing were ideal ways for young women (and even men) to rebel against the society of their parents and

Harker, Brian. “Louis Armstrong, Eccentric Dance, and the Evolution of Jazz on the Eve of Swing.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, University of California Press Journals, 1 Apr. 2008, jams.ucpress.edu/content/61/1/67. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.

There were many ways in which swing music and popular culture were interrelated during the time known as the swing era. Jazz became the cornerstone of popular culture during the period known as the swing era. The swing era influenced clothing styles, retail marketing, fashion, dance, and even language. Swing fans had their own clothing style and built a social phenomenon around it. With many dances coming and going the swing fans kept on dancing.

Out of the streets of New Orleans, a new form of music arose. This new type of music was not known as African or European, but simply American. It was jazz. In 1900 jazz first developed, but it wasn’t until the

Jazz is a music genre that has complex characteristics and history of development and thus many musicians and scholars face troubles in defining what jazz is. In general, jazz is believed to have born in New Orleans. Jazz developed for the pleasure of the social dancers. According to the “Understanding Jazz: What Is Jazz?” of John F. Kennedy center for the Performing Arts, Jazz was created mainly by Afro-Americans, and had elements of European and Afro-American culture. Also, it emphasizes few elements of Jazz, which are swing-feel, syncopation, and improvisation. These different culture and elements of jazz may be explained by how jazz

Swing can be traced back to a style called Dixieland jazz which was created by African American musicians in the later 1920’s in New Orleans. It became the most popular and a successful kind of music during the 1930’s, being played by band leaders such as Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Bennie Moten, Cab Calloway and Fletcher Henderson. The instruments found in a swing band are very similar to the instruments found in a jazz band. Both contain a brass section that have trumpet and trombone, a rhythm section with bass, piano and drums and a wind section with saxophone and clarinet. But the swing band very occasionally used the string section unlike jazz bands.

Also called “swing” bands, they formed huge crowds that listened to either long musical pieces or shorter popular tunes (Shindo). Projects like these helped jumpstart people the Multiple people were noticed and made known in the early 1900s and 1930s. A. Charlie Chaplin 1. He grew up with unstable parents in the theater business.

At the start of the 40's the era of "Big Bands" became very popular and swing dance was easily adapted to this style of music giving that fast percussion beats in this genre. It brought about new styles such as the St.Louis shag and the Carolina shag and even stayed very popular till the end of the 1940's. In the 1950's after WWII brought about the rebellious generation that sparked the creation of Rock & Roll and Rhythm and Blues, swing dance was still popular

Pbs.com Ken Burns states that just like all music jazz went through it trial era of music. The swing era was very popular through the early 1930’s into the late 1940’s. The swing style type of music consist of large number of band member featuring at least three to four saxophones, two or three trumpets, two to three trombones, a piano guitar and a bass violin. Not including the lead vocalist of the groups. Swinging was a life style that lifted anyone

Swing was the dominant idiom of the 1930s and much of the 1940s. Basically, it was a form of dance music played by a large band, and was the medium through which most white Americans first heard Jazz (Schuller,1989). Although the decade 1935-45 was called the Swing Era, swing arrangements had been played by large bands beginning in the 1920s. Bandleader-arrangers Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and, later, Count Basie, worked out arrangements for their 10 to 12 piece bands, which, unlike traditional jazz bands, were divided into instrumental sections.

Other developments led to the ``trumpet-piano'' style of Earl Hines and Teddy Weatherford and to the swing style of Duke Ellington. Some Historians consider ragtime to be the very first jazz style. Although it cannot actually be classified as jazz, ragtime is definitely a very influential part of jazz. In Louisiana at this time there was music everywhere. Ragtime bands and marching bands were joining together. Mexican bands were also and influence especially in the way the trumpets and horns were played. All this merging of different band sounds was important in the creation of jazz. Eventually the instruments used in marching bands crossed over into jazz instruments. The drums and clarinet filled in for the marching band instruments. New Orleans was such a melting pot for music and culture but it was also a party town. This party scene was also a part of how jazz was molded. The demand for fresh new music was high, which caused musicians to alter and elongate their styles. All the new creations and variations on the music in the end fused into jazz.

Jazz was inspired by African-American folk music, Blues and Ragtime in the early 20th century and introduced in New Orleans. According to the text book “Discovering Humanities”, “Jazz was “the” American music, and was almost as popular in Paris and Berlin as it was in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans” (468). The first feature of Jazz is improvisation, when a song was played there is no specific arrangement, it is spontaneously elaborated around a specific song (Listen, 386). A second feature is that there is a rhythmic style that involves highly developed syncopation. Syncopation occurs when accents in