What are some characteristics of swing music?

Whenever the word Jazz is mentioned to an average person, he or she might think of big band swing music, and that too for good reasons. Swing music had gained humongous popularity back in the 1930s and it was the pop music of the era. The performance was mostly done by big bands consisting of huge orchestras divided into trombones, saxophones, trumpets, and a rhythm section (comprised of drums, piano, bass, and guitar). They played a lot of dance music and it had three basic characteristics like simplicity, clear melodies, and a strong beat.

Owing to these features, big band swing music also had great commercial appeal. It served as a great tool to distract people from their mundane and difficult life. The swing era thrived during the Great Depression, offering an outlet for people to express their dissatisfaction with life, their struggle with unemployment caused by the stock market crash in 1929, and the Second World War, ending in 1945.

The growth of Swing Music (the 1930s) began from the New Orleans Jazz (1910s) and later it evolved into Bebop (1940s).

What are some of the characteristics of Swing Music?

Now that we have introduced Swing Music, let’s take a look at some of the characteristics of Swing Music:

As we have previously mentioned, Swing Music was played by Big Bands, and hence, written-out compositions along with arrangements had a lot of weightage. To make the song interesting, band leaders frequently made use of arrangement techniques. Some of the most common were:

• Tutti is when all the horns played one melodic line in harmony

• Soli is a section was featured by playing a melodic line in harmony

• Shout chorus which is a climactic tutti section played at the end of an arrangement.

• Riffs are short repeated melodies or rhythmic patterns which has two types

• Bluesy riffs

• Call and response riffs (this was often placed between the rhythm section and the horn section)

• Solo where a person improvises with a relatively simple harmony playing in the background

• Big band swing music was also very smooth and pleasant to the ears

• It used simple chords with a clear homophonic texture

• Melodies of swing music were clear, lyrical and highly memorable

• Solid beats in swing music also made it perfect to dance to.

All these features made swing music perfect for commercialization. It gradually became a part of the mass entertainment industry and showmanship grew around it in abundance. Icons were made during this era like Cab Calloway and Fats Waller to name within a list of many others.

Swing music also has two different styles name:

• Sweet swing sang by artists like Glenn Miller that had a lesser number of improvisations, the rhythm was slow and restrained in nature. It was very popular in upper-class dinner parties of white people.

• Hot swing by artists like Duke Ellington also gained huge popularity. It was bold, daring, experimental, and fast, with a lot of improvisation. With a strong rhythmic drive, this kind of swing music left the audience amazed.

Vertical improvisation

Swing improvisation was extremely fluid and vertical improvisation was an interesting and important development that was common during the swing era. Before swing music came into existence, ‘improvisation’ was only limited to playing the music with some embellishments. These embellishments gradually took an adventurous turn and were played by keeping the melody in one’s mind. During the swing era, saxophone player Coleman Hawkins revolutionised jazz music’s approach to improvisation as it went from melody to harmony. Coleman was responsible for creating an entire body of melody that is based on a song’s harmony by arpeggiating the chords. His solos were more complex because of further chord alterations and substitutions. Bebop’s approach was defined largely on the original melody of a song being discarded and new melodies being created on the basis of an established chord progression. This was also known as contrafact.

Until the era of jazz, the piano was largely rooted in the rhythmic section of bands. The work of a pianist was limited to holding on the rhythm and helping to keep the beat. If you take a close look at a pianist playing rhythmically, his or her left hand kept at the chords on the beat, while chords, chord tones and guide tones were created by the right hand.

Conclusion: Big band swing music or jazz music dominated American popular music for a long period of time and led to the birth of luminaries like Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, etc. To this day, swing music remains popular among people. So, the next time you listen to swing music, make sure to pay attention to the intricate melodies and improvisations in the tunes.