Let's dance: the democracy of 'swing.'(Column)

Between 1935--the year of Benny Goodman's first, extraordinary triumph--and 1950--when Dizzy Gillespie decided to hang it up with his first, legendary big band--something unique happened: America became, for a while, "America." The republic, that is, actually lived up to its dream of itself. But no; that's too much. The republic, for all its deep scars of racism, economic inequity, and crass commercialism, really believed that it might live up to the dream. A generously multiracial culture; a capitalist/collectivist society allowing each person adequate freedom of the self; and a nation of noble, triumphant populists: these ideas were a heady drug to Walt Whitman in the 1850s, and in the 1990s sound like the cliches of our discredited (and which of them is not?) leaders. But once--honest, folks!--people really thought it was going to happen.

Now, historian Lewis Erenberg has written a wonderful book, Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (University of Chicago Press, $28, 320 pp.), that indicates how much of "what was about to happen" was incarnated in the structure and culture of the great swing bands.

First of all, "swing" democratized jazz. Regarded during the twenties mainly as the music of urban blacks and the wealthy white elite those who could afford taxis to Harlem--in the thirties, swing became what critic James Lincoln Collier calls, "The American Theme Song." Goodman's theme song, as everybody ought to know, was "Let's Dance," and the subjunctive, "Let's," is what the tune and the time was all about: Everybody could, was invited to, get up and dance, jitterbug, lindy-hop to the music in a pseudo-ecstatic (or ecstatic) celebration.

But celebration of what? Well, as Whitman writes in the very first poem in Leaves of Grass, "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse." Erenberg doesn't cite Whitman, but that's the gravamen of his case, anyway. The essential structure of swing music--ensemble passages punctuated with solo improvisation--is a paradigm of democracy, at least in its New Deal incarnation. I can never listen to Goodman or Artie Shaw or Count Basle without thinking of the WPA, Steinbeck, and the immense, willed optimism of those just-before-I-was-born years.

And Erenberg is splendid on the subject of the political self-consciousness of big-band jazz during its heyday. Swing "has the spirit of American democracy in it," Goodman said at the music's floodtide. The major jazz critics and promoters of the era, Leonard Feather, Barry Ulanov, and especially the enormously influential John Hammond, who "discovered" Goodman, Lionel Hampton und so welter, and decades later the young Bob Dylan, were all what George Bush would call "card-carrying liberals." Their passion was for the music, but also for the music's symbolic valence as an instrument and metaphor for social change. The big bands "integrated" more than a decade before professional baseball did, and most of the musicians and the critics--even the regally aloof Ellington--at one point or another got involved with the socialist/democratic Popular Front. And some--like Artie Shaw--would pay for that involvement during the looney-tune days of Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare.

But after WWII the kids who had jitterbugged in the '30s and killed guys in the '40s, came home, and their priorities were to marry Sue-Ellen and raise a family, not to mosey down to the malt shop for another listen to Glenn Miller's "In the Mood." And the black kids who came back, who thought they'd found the way to end discrimination (swing had been integrationist, sure, but only on whitey's terms), found that they still had to use separate drinking fountains, separate johns. And there was a new music, played by blacks for blacks, difficult and brilliant and nonorchestral and stunning, and it was called bebop. And--how many "ands" does it take?--the Congress of the United States was seriously--seriously!--concerned with the jazz music business as a possibly hidden bulwark of Communist infiltration into American society. The players all smoked dope, don't you know? (Well, yes, they did.) In other words, a combination of societal anxiety, political paranoia, and artistic evolution combined to wreck the idyll that had been the big band age.

And the big bands died.

Oh, Basle, Ellington, and Goodman survived, in their ways, and so did the splendid Woody Herman and the problematic Stan Kenton: but only after a fashion. The intimate relationship between performers and audience that had existed before the war was, in various ways broken, never to be mended. The early fifties were probably the most insipid years in the history of American pop, begging for the revolution that was rock and roll. But rock, for all its brilliance, was the institutionalization of anarchy--rebels without a cause--not of the benevolent, cheerful socialism of the age of swing.

I've been a big fan of Erenberg since his first book, Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930, appeared in 1981. He's a historian of popular culture who is also a historian, and a splendid one, of the national self-image. With Swingin' the Dream he extends his history of the way we play (and therefore the way we are) another twenty eventful years. I can only hope this sensitive and articulate scholar decides to continue his exploration into the age of Elvis and beyond.