Music: The Swing from Swing

There was considerable evidence last week that big brassy jazz bands would have to pipe down or go away. After twelve years in which swing has been king, the crown is now passing to the sweet.

Said Swingman Charlie Barnet, whose white band had been one of the few wild enough to tickle Harlem’s native ear: “Tension music was okay during the war. Now we’re done with it.” He was about to cut down his 21-piece swing band to a smaller, tamer one because loud music hadn’t paid well enough lately. Said he: “I’m one of the worst offenders. I have six trumpet men. Imagine that!”

In the College Inn of Chicago’s Hotel Sherman, one of the “cradles of swing,” teen-agers danced to Claude Thornhill’s sedate, glossy arrangements of Warsaw Concerto, the Nutcracker Suite, and Yours Is My Heart Alone. The Sherman’s smart boss Ernie Byfield let the boys play loud after 10 o’clock, but took newspaper ads to say that there would no longer be din with dinner. In Minneapolis, the late Glenn Miller’s band, still among the big ten under Tex Beneke’s direction, now had twelve strings (Miller’s old swing band had none). Onetime circus Trumpeter Harry James, whose horn is shrillest of them all, had just completed a one-night stand swing around the East and found it necessary to cut his asking price from a guaranteed $4,000 a night to $2,000. In Manhattan, not one of the big hotels was featuring an ear-splitting swing band.

Crosby’s Conversion. Ever since swing began, show business tipsters (and press-agents for sweet bands) had predicted its death with monotonous regularity, but none of the swingsters had paid attention before. Now the No. 1 exponent of pseudo-Dixieland, Bob Crosby (brother of Bing) was packing them in at a Broadway theater with a toned-down band that went easier on the drums and the brass. Crosby late of the U.S. Marines, learned his lesson when leading a service band on Bougainville. He expected the Marines to demand music with hair on its chest. Says he: “They wanted me to sing White Christmas!”

Some of the best of the loud bands that long ago had learned to mix swing and sweet would obviously survive the change, just as Guy Lombardo’s creamy on-the-melody music had stayed on the top all through swing’s craze. In Los Angeles Woody Herman and his noisy “Aw, Your Father’s Moustache” brand of music was the big draw. But the word was spreading: the crowds wanted their music muted.

Maestro Benny Goodman, the daddy of big band swing, summed up the plight of his fellow noisemakers: “The trouble is that they just play too damn loud. A guy who is good doesn’t have to worry about trends.”