Swing
Swing's meanings have evolved along with the music and often outside the control of musicians. Asked to define swing, Fats Waller offered the formula "two-thirds rhythm and one-third soul," while in Louis Armstrong's opinion, swing was simply "my idea of how a tune should go" (quoted in Stowe 1994, 3). In 1938, Duke Ellington proposed a more technical definition: "Swing is an unmechanical but hard-driving and fluid rhythm over which soloists improvise as they play" (quoted in Walser 1999, 109).
The term "swing" as a musical genre reflected that a band's ability to "swing" was crucial to its success in the Big Band Era. Fundamental to developing that ability was the discovery and subsequent exploitation of techniques that enabled sections of instrumentalists to perform with the relative freedom of soloists and small groups. (According to critics John Hammond and Marshall Stearns, "A band swings when its collective improvisation is rhythmically integrated," a definition bandleader Benny Goodman accepted (quoted in Stowe 1994, 4). A later transition to an evenly-and increasingly lightly-stated four-four rhythmic pulse was also important.
Swing music and big-band jazz are, of course, far from synonymous. The popularity of swing was in decline by the late 1940s. Still, big-band jazz has continued to be performed, encouraged by such developments as periodic revivals of foxtrot-based dancing, most recently in the 1990s. However, not all big bands swing or even attempt to swing; Kay Kyser and Spike Jones's bands come to mind. Likewise, small groups of five or six musicians have played some of the most influential swing music. Often, the musicians that formed those smaller groups came from the big bands in which they worked-Ellington's, Goodman's, Basie's-or from combos led by musicians such as John Kirby and Frankie Newton. But the twin histories of swing and big-band jazz were closely entwined from the start.
A-Tisket A-Tasket
A-tisket a-tasket
A green-and-yellow basket
I bought a basket for my mommie
On the way I dropped it
Don't Worry 'Bout Me
Don't worry 'bout me Forget about me
Just be happy my love