Saxophonist, composer, bandleader and educator Bill Kirchner writes from New Jersey:
I’ve read all the comments with interest–fortunately, they all come from thoughtful persons. Otherwise, discussions like this can be insufferable.
My favorite rejoinder in such discussions comes, I believe, from drummer Paul Wertico: “It don’t mean a thing if all it does is swing.” I can think of some truly stupid music I’ve heard that swings quite well. The moral is that jazz–and all good music–needs to do something *besides* swinging.
In recent decades, there have been jazz artists who have used the term “swing” almost as a weapon, with a kind of phallic posturing. As critic Larry Kart perceptively wrote: “Warmth, soul, and swing are among the hallmarks of a Ben Webster or a Dexter Gordon, but for them these things seem not be sought after in themselves. Instead
they are an inevitable byproduct of the act of playing jazz, virtues that arise as a matter of course when one makes musical and emotional contact with the material at hand.”
The Dizzy Gillespies and Miles Davises of the world never indulged in phallic posturing about swinging. They simply played great music, and it worked on all levels, including swinging. And there are many different ways to swing–not just boom-chicka-boom. Miles’ 1970 LIVE-EVIL, for example, swings mightily to my ears (considerable
thanks to Jack DeJohnette, among others), even though it comes from a period of Miles’ career that some doctrinaire folks refuse to regard as jazz. We’re still discovering new ways of swinging, thank God–at
least, many of us are.
If you are new to this discussion of swing and what constitutes jazz, you can go here to catch up and follow the links back through the previous postings.