Book Review

SWINGIN' THE DREAM: Big Band Jazz & the Rebirth of American Culture By Lewis A. Erenberg
Univ. of Chicago Press 320 pages, $28
Community Relations Director at Nicola's Books

Early on in Swingin' the Dream is a description of hundreds of thousands of teenagers at an outdoor multi-band pop concert far from New York City. The crowd becomes so large that the gates are broken down, the three outdoor stages are almost overrun, and the concert becomes a free-for-all of joyous dancing and intoxication:
The Daily News, noting "the world's largest crowd for a musical event," called the concert "the strangest manifestation of youthful exuberance ... since the Middle Ages' ill-fated Children's Crusade." (page 36)

This is the story of a black, urban music and how it carne to be embraced by white musicians and then by teenagers of all backgrounds. These postwar youth were fed up with a staid, conformist mainstream culture rife with idol singers and corny nostalgia. They wanted something of their own, and found it in this rhythmic, loud and sexy music. They adopted its multiracial slang, its fashions, and its sense of social and sexual liberation. And they danced to it wild, uninhibited, athletic and sexually charged dancing that set them free and set their parents and preachers into paroxysms of outrage.

Many of the older generation considered this music morally corrupting - heathen devil music - its African drumming threatening to unleash primitive passions that would lead inexorably to Communism, the deflowering of daughters and the mongrelization of the races. Some activists on the left, on the other hand, saw it as proletarian and liberating, and worked with musicians to use it as a means of furthering a social justice agenda.

But after its brief, exciting flowering, the music is coopted by commercial forces who "clean it up" and make it less threatening to the status quo. By the end of a long decline it has become an organ of the status quo, going so far as to advertise not revolution but the U.S. army. Does any of this sound familiar?

For many of us, this sounds like a thumbnail (shamelessly undetailed) description of the history of rock music. But the concert described above isn't Woodstock in 1969 but rather the Swing Jamboree in Chicago's Soldier Field 30 years earlier in 1938. And the audience is the postwar generation of not WWII but WWI. They too were baby boomers of a sort, complete with their own social and musical revolutions: Before there was rock, there was swing. As a lyric of the Big Band era puts it, "Seems to me l've heard this song before."

The artists' names and stories are different, of course: It would be a great disservice to cram the work of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman into molds shaped by, say, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, et al., and author Lewis Erenberg never makes the attempt. But the broad outline of how swing went from underground to wide acceptance while carrying for many of its fans an ideology of racial tolerance and social change - well, the similarities are inescapable. Erenberg doesn't dwell on them in the text, but I suspect he intends on our seeing them.
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Erenberg makes it clear that Swingin' the Dream is not a musical history. Rather, it's a history of a time in the 1930s when music was used as an inspiration and rallying cry for social change. Musicians and critics are heard from, but no more often than the youthful jitterbuggers who thrilled to the tunes and times from the dance floor rather than the bandstand. There have been a number of such books about sixties rock (Greil Marcus still makes a living this way). But as Erenberg rightly laments, there has been relatively little said about the social impact of eariier music such as swing. In many studies of jazz as music, swing is quickly passed over as the too-commercial music that happened between Louis Armstrong and bebop. Swing, from this perspective, is the creaky old regime rightly toppled by the bop revolutionaries. It is described primarily in terms of what bop was not: formalistic, constricting, and pandering to mainstream dullards.

Such assessments turn out to be unfair and incomplete. What if all you knew about rock 'n' roll were descriptions of bloated corporate bands in the 1970s, as written by fans of the Sex Pistols and other punks? Or if the only descriptions of Muhammad Ali were of his last years in the ring? Similarly, swing was once lean, hungry, vital in both senses of the word, and utterly captivating. Erenberg presents some needed perspective on its formation, heyday and lasting importance as well as on its decline.

The book is not perfect: A few portions are as dry as an academic Journal (Erenberg is a professor of history at Loyola University of Chicago). Friends with expertise in music and history beyond my own have noted a few minor factual errors as well. Okay, but what Erenberg has succeeded in doing for me is to offer a new way of seeing an era. He documents it brimming with excitement, and with social and musical relevance that I had no idea was there. Maybe l'm ignorant. Maybe everybody else knows this stuff. For me it was an eye- (and ear) opener of the first order. ■