Sunday 14 April 2019

Hot swing, cool videos

Swing is music with a particular rhythm  four beats in the bar but played in a in ONE-two ONE-two way that cannot really be notated satisfactorily - and for a decade or two 'everybody' in the US and Europe went crazy for it. Swing bridged between the early 'Dixieland' type of 'folk' Jazz and the 'modernist' chromatic-pulseless intellectualism of Bebop.

First some early swing by the Benny Goodman quartet - ridiculously fast! - but tremendous fun, four genuinely great musicians messing around:


A bit later in the era, a bit more serious - Jack Teagarden and the Bobcats (featuring Gomez from The Adams Family on drums) -  you can see swing moving towards bebop, but (thank heavens) still retaining its rhythm and melodiousness at this point. This is just great playing - as soon as I finished I went back to listen again, and again:


And now something more modern (less genius); electro-swing from Caravan Palace - a clever and amusing video, and some very enjoyable sophistico-pastiche swing:

4 comments:

dearieme said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSx1iL-3Hg

a_probst said...

According to YouTube commenters on the Jack Teagarden video, the drummer was Ray Bauduc, not John Astin of "The Addams Family".

Then again, maybe you were pulling a "Ha! made you look!" joke on those of us who would go to Wikipedia or imdb.com to see if John Astin is also a musician. }:-{D}

Bruce Charlton said...

@ap English humour eschews emoticons.

a_probst said...

Humour may eschew emoticons but humor doesn't-- I'm American. I added the parodic emoticon because of the brace key: Heavy brow, mustache, goatee-- it was a Bauduc-Astin-themed emoticon!