[Dixielandjazz] Is Poverty Good For Jazz?

[Stephen G Barbone]

Here's a thought provoking article by Howard Mandel. Excerpted. For  
the full article see:

http://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/2011/08/remember-the-swing-era-is-poverty-and-strife-good-for-jazz.html

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazz band


Remember the Swing Era: Is Poverty Good For Jazz?

Jazz the music will survive the wounds America has self-inflictedin  
the guise of deep cuts in government spending when economic growth has  
already slowed to a crawl. Jazz — as well as blues, rap, hip-hop,  
soul, bluegrass, chamber music and most rock ‘n’ roll — is fairly  
cheap to produce, given workers (musicians) who will accept pennies  
for hours spent doing what they love. So the devil’s advocate is moved  
to ask: “Are hard times good for jazz?” . . . . . .
But remember the Great Depression, aka the Swing or Big Band Era? Or  
more likely reading about it, hearing its stars? The orchestras of  
Ellington, Basie, Goodman, Shaw, Waller, Lunceford, the Dorseys, Glenn  
Miller and many more gave the huddled masses something to dance about.  
Great voices/soloists including Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins,  
Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Charlie Christian, Ella  
Fitzgerald, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Fats  
Waller and so on emerged from the the hoi polloi — seldom the swell’s  
class — to express themselves, conveying life beyond toil and trouble  
even while looking that stuff dead in the eye.
Whether the Swing Era is dated, as Gunther Schuller has it in his book  
of the same name, as starting in 1930 or as Wikipedia says 1935,  
launched by Goodman’s breakthrough three-week stand at LA’s Palomar  
Ballroom, the period encompasses both the lowest years of the 20th  
century in the U.S. and those producing the most enduring achievements  
of our popular arts (besides music, also songwriting, standup and  
slapstick comedy, fiction and the movies). Not that widespread  
depression is a must have for the creation of entertaining diversions  
— there was hot jazz throughout the Roarin’ ’20s prior to the stock  
market crash in ’29; there was cool jazz and an unprecedented  
explosion of other pop forms from the post-WWII late ’40s through the  
early ’70s, when the U.S. withdrawal in expensive defeat from Vietnam  
and a disgraced Republican president’s resignation let to national  
exhaustion (not to say “malaise“). But in the Swing Era, when the  
possibilities of big, fast money earned from bootleggers and their  
best-heeled customers evaporated with the bursting of a financial  
bubble and the legalization of booze, musicians seemed to feel  
liberated rather than oppressed, and set themselves to making life a  
bowl of cherrys, and meaning a function of swing. . . . . . .
During the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s success in popular music was one of the  
few vehicles for personal survival, if not sure upward mobility — and  
strangely enough it proved to be that again in the late ’70s/early  
’80s, when urban youth without ways out of deteriorated city centers  
re-purposed discarded turntables and scratched records in service of a  
musical movement that reflected life as they knew it, not just what  
they saw on tv. Maybe in the 20teens Americans will be thrown back on  
their own imaginations and easily accessed devices, to come up with  
some new music that boosts spirits, overcomes obstacles, soothes  
grief. . . . .
It might be too late for us oldsters who can no longer crash on pals’  
sofas over the course of protracted bus tours, whose disposable income  
is reserved for expensive medicines and treatments not covered by our  
costly health insurance plans, who haven’t the spark that can make  
living joyously without do-re-me seem like a lark. But we’ve had our  
glory years.