I’ve been thinking about elusive concept of
"swing". The best music
textbooks skirt around directly defining “swing”, yet “swing” is an integral
part of jazz*. It is a rhythm and a
musical era—which both have concrete definitions. It is when swing is used as a verb that is becomes
so difficult to define, as in “that person really swings”. For me, “swing” is the feel in music that
makes me want to tap my foot, lean forward in my chair, and grin like a
maniac. “Swinging” is feel and a way of
playing. When I listen to one of the
jazz greats, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker or Cannonball
Adderley, I can instantly say that they swing.
The other night I met a bunch of fellow
Five-Weekers at a pizza parlour down the street. I had a fantastic philosophical conversation
about jazz harmony with a couple of guys.
One of the guys was complaining about how the jazz he listens to gets
repetitive. A guy from New Orleans and I
verbally jumped on him and said that he was listening to “bad” jazz if it ever
got boring, or sounded the same way twice. We kept trying to describe various ways that one
could tell if the jazz was worth listening to when I said, “you have to listen
to jazz that swings, or else it’s not real jazz”. The other guy agreed with me, and then we
launched into a conversation about which jazz cats swing the most.
As
an aside, I love being here, I can talk to people and get misty eyed about the
beauty of jazz and then we can have a 45-minute conversation about how awesome jazz
theory is.
We’ve also been talking about “swing” in
some of my classes. In my “Survey of
String Styles” class we've been listening to great pioneers of jazz violin and
describing their individual styles. One descriptive verb that always comes up is whether or not they “swing”. We said yes to Joe Venuti, no to Eddie South,
and Stuff Smith got the ultimate compliment, “he swings really hard”. Modern violin players “swing” too, any jazz
musician that I want to listen to “swings”.
After this class, I was listening to some
of my fellow string classmates improvise. Some of the most technically advanced
players don’t/can’t swing at all. While
they play good notes while soloing, there is no swing and they sound like
classical musicians playing notes from a blues scale. Some who are novice players swing so hard
that I want to simultaneously get up and dance and go cry in a corner. So clearly, how much someone swings is not necessarily
correlated to skill level.
However, most of the horn players who can
play their instrument swing, regardless of their level. Are horns more conducive to swinging? Or is swing beaten (metaphorically) out of
violinists in the classical tradition? I
love classical music, but it is undeniable that many classically trained
violinists can’t swing.
I hope I fall into the classically trained
but still swinging category. I think I do... in my first private lesson here
my teacher said, "You swing pretty hard for not knowing the correct bowing
pattern". !!!! Thank you? I think?
While I am totally enamoured with jazz,
there is one thing that really bothers me about the genre. When I’m playing
jazz, I’m never allowed to sound like a violin.
I’m always mimicking the sound of a guitar pick strumming a guitar, or
trying to phrase like a vocalist. And I
am always supposed to be recreating the staccato punches of a trumpet, or the
ornaments that come so easily to saxophones.
When do I get to sound like a violin?
When do I get to play long gooey bows with lots of vibrato in the key of
G or D? Please don’t tell me I can only find
that in the orchestra!
*Interestingly, some non-jazz swings as well,
blues, some bluegrass and fusion all come immediately to mind.
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