Swingin’ Jazz

Apr 16, 2016 @ 7:00pm

A screening of The Girls in the Band (2013) about the Sweethearts of Rhythm followed by a Q&A. Music performed by The Stomp Station Swing Band. Come early for the opening of the South Bronx Culture Trail’s Jazz festival, Lookin’ Up in the Boogie Down, featuring Bobby Sanabria & the Multiverse Big Band.

Swing music, or simply swing, is a form of American music from the jazz tradition that developed in the early 1930s that was the pop music of its day. Swing is characterized by a strong rhythmic drive with the rhythm section maintaining a vibrant dance beat. Big bands using saxes, trumpets, trombones as well as the drive of drums, bass, piano gave the music its power and propulsion and made dancers go crazy. The bands of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, Count Basie, Jimmie Lundsford and Tommy Dorsey began to blend the rhythms of New Orleans to the dance music found in the jazz clubs in places like Kansas City and Harlem. In 1932 Ellington recorded the hit song, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” thereby giving this new sound a name. In 1935 bandleader and clarinetist Benny Goodman brought swing music into the mainstream for white audiences. Goodman’s band included the amazing talents of Gene Krupa, Lionel Hampton, Peggy Lee and Stan Getz (born in the Bronx!). By integrating black musicians into his band he began the process of integrating the music industry. Swing music appeal grew in the 1940s when USO shows provided swing band performances and was so popular during wartime that workers attended “swing shift dances.” When Hitler banned jazz and swing, the music became a national symbol.
As World War II began, opportunities opened up for female musicians to perform in public (in Cuba all-female bands had been popular since the early 1930s with Orquesta Ensueño, Renovación, Ilusión and the most famous, Anacaona, where Machito’s sister, Graciela got her start). When their male colleagues joined the military (it is estimated that every band lost 25%-50% of its personnel), they took part in all-female bands. These musicians fit right in with the strong female figures which were inspired by the country’s wartime patriotism, from the government’s campaign of Rosie the Riveter to Wonder Woman’s arrival in comic books—she debuted in the winter 1941-1942 issue of All-Star Comics just as the U.S. entered WWII (coincidently like real women during WWII, she spent the war years doing her patriotic duty, and following the war, was relegated back to domestic duties). Women musicians became part of a cadre of ensembles known as “all-girl bands,” a term which denigrated their virtuosity and professionalism, and added to the image of them as novelty acts, as opposed to a “normal” band comprised of all men. They crisscrossed the country in tour buses, and since Jim Crow was alive and well in many part of the U.S., the groups were either all-black or all-white musicians. Some of the African-American bands were the Prairie View Co-Eds, the Darlings of Rhythm, Harlem Play-Girls, Dixie Rhythm Girls, Queens of Swing, and Eddie Dunham’s All-Star Girl Orchestra—and they were usually completely ignored in swing history narratives. White bands such as Ina Ray Hutton’s Melodears, Sharon Rogers All-Girl Band, Ada Leonard’s All-American Girl Orchesra, Platinum Blonds of America, Pollyanna Syncopaters, and Phil Spitalny’s “Hour of Charm” Orchestra would get the occasional nod. Though they were treated with disdain as well. On an episode of I Love Lucy, Ricky Ricardo tells his (male) bandmembers, “The first guy who looks like he’s playing in his sleep gets traded to Phil Spitalny.”
One of the most famous of the female bands was the International Sweethearts of Rhythm which formed in the 1930s to play a fundraiser for Mississippi’s Piney Woods Country Life School (for poor and orphaned black children). The band was an African-American band, but in 1943 they were the first band to hire a white musician.
In fact they included “International” in their name
because there were members of the band that were part Asian, Latina and Native American. The band remained together until 1949. By the late 1940s many of the large ensembles had broken up but musicians who wanted to keep performing remained on the scene in smaller combos, and many went into careers in music education. There is even a Bronx connection with the Sweethearts of Rhythm (there is always a Bronx connection!). Edna Smith, who was the group’s bassist following WWII, later became an educator, receiving degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and Teacher’s College. She taught music at JHS 140 across the street from where Maxine Sullivan lived at Ritter Place. That school produced such musical alumni as trumpeter Jimmy Owens, percussionist Benny Bonilla and the Chords (of “Sh-Boom” fame).