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Swing thing

The jazz-pop stardom of Harry James

by Jon Garelick

For a while, during what has become known as "the swing era," jazz held the golden ring. In his 1989 book The Swing Era (Oxford), Gunther Schuller demarcates the period as 1930 to 1945; others isolate August 21, 1935, the night of the Benny Goodman band's appearance at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, as the beginning. With Goodman's nationally broadcast performance and a near-riot on the dance floor, the swing craze had officially begun. It was America's pop music. Big bands proliferated. They offered the accouterments of pop: they featured vocalists; they played pop songs, show tunes, and novelty numbers; and they played dance music ("No band of that era could cut the Fletcher Henderson group playing waltzes," wrote Rex Stewart of one of the bands responsible for inventing swing). But they also made jazz -- slickly arranged numbers with improvised solos.

Any number of elements can help a jazz band cross over to a pop audience, and any other number of factors can turn that audience off. Vocalists and familiar pop songs help and so does that dance beat. It's the rhythm most of all that seems to make a difference. Russ Gershon, whose Either/Orchestra jazz outfit plays in front of both jazz and rock audiences (though it's decidedly not a swing band), names a couple of items in particular that are poison for a pop audience: instrumental ballads with brushes, and the swish and hiss of the ching-chinga-ching swing beat. On the other hand, any combination of African and Latin rhythms will work, or funk -- anything that, as they say, grooves.

But the other phenomenon, and one that Scott DeVeaux cites in his 1997 book The Birth of Bebop (University of California), is that audiences weren't necessarily dancing at all -- in the ballrooms where Goodman and Tommy Dorsey were playing, kids left the dance floor and rushed the stage, to watch and listen. By the end of the swing era, singers like Sinatra had become the focal point, but DeVeaux argues, "Ever since gawking teenage crowds had flocked to the front of the bandstand while Benny Goodman played the Palomar, swing music had sold itself as spectacle. Every band had `flagwavers,' theatrically flashy arrangements that offered instrumental virtuosity as entertainment."

The crossover pop appeal was as much in that spectacle as in dance. A performer like flamboyant, athletic Goodman drummer Gene Krupa was fun to watch. But Goodman's clarinet was also an attraction. The swing beat was a musical language as much as it was something to dance to -- instrumental music with pop appeal.

IT'S INSTRUCTIVE in the jazz-versus-pop argument to consider the career of Harry James (1916-1983). James came to prominence as Goodman's trumpet player, but he became in every way you'd want to measure it a pop star. His biographer, Peter J. Levinson, cites James's 70 Billboard chart hits between 1937 and 1953 (as opposed to, say, the Rolling Stones' mere 41 chart hits from 1964 to the present). But James had more than hits -- he was a tall, handsome man with a pencil-thin moustache whose romantic ballads made him a matinee idol while pyrotechnic showpieces like "Flight of the Bumblebee" contributed to his swashbuckling allure. And at the height of WW2 he married America's biggest female movie star and favorite pin-up girl, Betty Grable.

But James was a first-rate jazz player. No less an authority (or more stringent a critic) than Schuller has written that he was "undoubtedly the most technically assured and prodigiously talented white trumpet player of the late Swing Era and early postwar years, both as an improvising jazz and blues player and as a richly expressive ballad performer." All the same, James's reputation has receded; these days fans would probably put Buck Clayton, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Bobby Hackett, and Ruby Braff ahead of him in the pantheon of trumpeters, and Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, and Stan Kenton as a bandleader. When James is discussed, it's as the bandleader who "discovered" Frank Sinatra.

Levinson's biography, Trumpet Blues: The Life of Harry James (Oxford), is the latest installment in the ongoing reappraisal. Capitol has released a companion volume of James's mid-'50s recordings, and the Mosaic label has put together a seven-CD set, The Complete Capitol Recordings of Gene Krupa & Harry James. There are year-by-year chronologies on import labels, and Levinson has said that we can eventually expect a famous Monterey Jazz Festival 1965 concert of the James band with the leader's favorite drummer, Buddy Rich.

James was born into a family who ran a Texas-based traveling circus. His father was bandmaster and his mother a trapeze artist (famous, says Levinson, for her "iron jaw" act -- ironic when you consider James's legendary chops). He logged hundreds, probably thousands, of miles with them before he was a teenager, learned trumpet at the hands of his autocratic father, and demonstrated virtuoso ability at an early age. The stamina developed during those years would last him his whole life -- he was known for his steel chops (his own "iron jaw"), his reading skills, his uncanny musical memory, and his ability to play in peak form all night even when completely drunk, which in his later years was often.

Levinson's story is rich, if ultimately tragic. Critical analysis isn't his strong suit (instead he cites other musicians and critics like Schuller), and you don't get the session-by-session drama of the working musician that you get from, say, Elvis Presley biographer Peter Guralnick. But as a portrayal of a life in show business, Trumpet Blues has it all, in every depressing detail. And there's no more vivid depiction of life on the road than Levinson's tales of the band bus: the new guy who has to stand because all the veterans park their instruments on the adjacent seats; the head cold that over the course of a couple weeks travels down one side of the bus and then up the other.

James was a compulsive womanizer, gambler, and alcoholic, and by the last third of the book it's difficult not to respond to his willful self-destruction. But despite Levinson's exhaustive research and his own personal relationship with the bandleader, James remains remote. As one bandmember says, "You could be stoned with him, screw with him, whatever, the night before, and then you'd meet him in the lobby the next day, and he'd walk by you like he didn't even know you."

James the musician is even more of an enigma. A consummate professional, he apparently treated his sidemen with respect. In The Swing Era Schuller points out that James reversed the pattern of most jazzmen: he started out as a highly commercial pop bandleader known for vocal features and overblown ballads (featuring his trumpet playing a mile-wide vibrato) and became more jazz-centered as his career progressed. But his reputation never recovered from those early hits. Levinson quotes jazz historian Dan Morgenstern's assessment of the 1941 success "You Made Me Love You": "the record that the jazz critics never forgave Harry James for recording."

Perhaps the most telling anecdote in Trumpet Blues explains how in the '50s James hired the great Basie arranger Ernie Wilkins. James was in love with the sleek Basie sound, and he wanted it. Wilkins offered to tailor a sound to James -- in other words, to create a big-band sound that was as clear and identifiable as Basie's. James declined. He didn't care about sounding like "himself" -- he wanted to sound like Basie.

As you skip through James recordings, it's hard not to be distracted by the "schmaltz" that the critics derided him for. Even on the '50s Capitol/Mosaic sides -- with their Basie-like sheen and good support from soloists like Hodges-style alto-sax Willie Smith and Ellingtonian trombonist Juan Tizol -- there are the full-on excessive ballads with the Al Hirt "Java"-like glissandi and "scooping" notes, and the vocal arrangements with strings. (Although, as Schuller points out, the James band also provided uncommonly good "jazz" vocal arrangements, especially for the great Helen Forrest.)

One reliable CD of James the jazz player comes from the Verve Jazz Masters series -- a compilation of material from James's MGM recordings between 1959 and 1964. On the first tune, the standard "I Surrender Dear," he comes in over a medium-tempo swing beat, playing a lovely abstracted introduction, attacking the theme at an oblique angle as the other horns in the small group gently blow accompanying chords behind him. James's attack here conjures two of his heroes -- the restrained lyricism of his contemporary Buck Clayton and the lucid narrative structure and bebop undertaste of the younger Clifford Brown. At the same time, the tune allows for the bravura upper-register breaks that are a James hallmark.

In the '70s, Levinson tells us, James reverted to playing his big-band hits for his fans -- he became a nostalgia act. What choice did he have? Rock had taken over as the new pop music. The jam-session ambiance of bebop and its complex harmonies and abstracted beat cut jazz off forever from the dance floor. Elder swing musicians like Clayton, Sweets Edison, and Roy Eldridge played record sessions and small-club engagements for connoisseurs. For James, once a major pop star, that probably didn't seem like much of an option.

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