How Technology Changed Jazz, 1935-1948

Jazz shouldn’t be viewed as music that originated in New Orleans in the late 19th century and simply spread around the country over the next 150 years. While the music dates back to that time thanks to emergence of the blues, ragtime, and brass Mardi Gras and funeral bands, jazz’s evolution has more to do with a range of external events that made different styles possible at different points in time.

These external events included the introduction of new technology, shifting demographics, new cultural interests and desires, business demands and the surfacing of new positions in the ever-expanding music industry.

Two of jazz’s most significant revolutions were the creation and dissemination of swing in the 1930, and bebop in the late 1940s. In both cases, they achieved national fame thanks to new technology and shifts in how the technology reached the mass market.

Let’s start with swing. With the arrival of the Great Depression in 1932, a growing number of black families began moving out of the deep South to escape racial hardship and to search for better-paying jobs in Northern and Midwestern cities.

Downtime was spent at dance halls and ballrooms, and bands in cities such as Kansas City, Memphis and New York began to create a new form of music that incorporated a new style of rhythm, phrasing and section playing that best served dancers. These dance bands combined a loping, triplet-based rhythm, syncopated accenting and a “walking” bass line, Instead of stomping to the music, dancers rode the new hip rhythm.

Black orchestras that played and recorded this music in the early 1930s included bands led by Bennie Moten, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford and Chick Webb. But many of these bands were known initially only in black urban communities due to limited radio exposure and record distribution.

Not until the early 1930s and the establishment of coast-to-coast radio networks was popular music heard across the country in Americans’ homes for free. Early radio networks in the 1920s broadcast to local affiliate stations via AT&T telephone lines.

By the early 1930s, CBS and the two NBC networks—Red and Blue, the latter of which became ABC in 1943—had gobbled up most of the country’s highest-powered stations as affiliates, and soon dominated the nation’s broadcasting industry. Left out of these networks were hundreds of smaller stations that broadcast in rural areas and to ethnic communities.

Swing wouldn’t be heard on a national scale until 1935, when Los Angeles teens celebrated the arrival of Benny Goodman’s band at the city’s Palomar Ballroom on August 21, 1935 for a three-week engagement. Their cheers were aired on the Don Lee Network, a West Coast radio consortium that fed the live performance to the CBS radio network via L.A. station KHJ.

During that L.A. stay by Goodman, swing began to cross over to young white audiences, transforming swing into a profitable national sensation and raising exposure for all bands and band leaders—both white and black. As sponsor dollars rolled in for swing broadcasts, so did live radio remotes by big bands heard at major hotel ballrooms.

Without the rise of radio networks, swing might have come and gone quickly, like many other minor music trends.

Technology also played a key role in jazz’s development after World War II. With the launch of a musicians union recording ban in 1942 against the country’s three major record companies—RCA, Columbia and Decca—recordings by instrumentalists ceased.

When Decca settled with the union in 1943 to make contributions to the Musicians Performance Trust Fund for artists displaced by radio, jukeboxes and records, hundreds of independent labels formed and took the same deal.

With RCA and Columbia stubbornly holding out, smaller labels had a chance to take hold and sign the growing number of black and white musicians who never would have been signed by those larger companies.

As these micro labels began recording musicians pioneering bebop starting in the mid-1940s—music that was faster than swing and wasn’t designed for dance but showed off the individualism of gifted musicians—those records began to be played on small independent radio stations unaffiliated with the major networks.

With the airing of those records, DJs with hip on-air personalities emerged to support the cutting-edge music, creating a name for themselves along with the artists.

Without these independent labels and radio stations and bebop DJs and boosters such as Symphony Sid Torin on WJZ and Fred Robbins on WOV in New York, and Hunter Hancock and Richard “Huggy Boy” Hugg in L.A. along with dozens of others, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other artists may never have been recorded or caught on with the general public.

Early swing and bop radio tracks…

Here’s Fletcher Henderson in the early 1930s…

Here’s Benny Goodman at the Palomar Ballroom on August 22, 1935, a day after his debut there…

Here’s Goodman’s cover of King Porter Stomp in 1935…

And here’s “Symphony Sid” Torin in 1948…