Posted on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 - 09:01 am:

History often overlooks the role that historically black colleges played in developing the jazz orchestra. Jimmie Lunceford's group was the best to emerge from this scene.

Born in Missouri, Lunceford spent part of his childhood in Ohio, where his father was a choirmaster. This began Lunceford's interest in music, but his epiphany happened in Denver. He became proficient on the saxophone and flute, as well as trombone and guitar. He gained experience in George Morrison's territory band before leaving for New York to study at City College and play with the jazz bands of Wilbur Sweatman and Elmer Snowden. At Fisk University in Nashville he received his Bachelor's of Music.

This led him to a teaching position at Memphis' Manassas High School, where he put together a student jazz orchestra called the Chickasaw Syncopators. They played locally and toured in the summer. The band's first professional engagement was in Lakeside, Ohio, in 1928, and the following year Lunceford brought pianist Eddie Wilcox, alto saxophonist Willie Smith and trombonist Henry Wells into the group, all of whom had played in a band that he had led at Fisk.

In the summer of 1933, while playing in Upstate New York, Lunceford's Orchestra was booked to play opposite Guy Lombardo's Orchestra for a formal at Cornell University. The college kids were ecstatic, New York booking agents were impressed and the band went to work at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem. In January 1934, Lunceford followed Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club -- a gig he held for six months. Subsequent recordings for Decca vaulted him into the swing band elite.

A succession of gifted arrangers blessed the band -- Lunceford himself, Will Hudson, Wilcox, Eddie Durham, Gerald Wilson and most famously trumpeter Sy Oliver, who arranged the signature "For Dancers Only."

Lunceford was a perfectionist and his key members were of a like mind, exemplified by the Willie Smith-led sax section rehearsing on its own. On the bandstand Lunceford was out front, wielding his white baton, leading the polished ensemble through its two-beat swing while soloists Smith, Oliver and trombonist Trummy Young all doubled as infectiously rhythmic singers, separately or as a unit.

By 1947, when Lunceford died of a heart attack on the road in Seaside, Ore., the handwriting was getting ready to appear on the wall for the end of the big band era. Wilcox and Thomas co-led the band for two years: then it was only Wilcox. The group disbanded by the end of the decade. -- Ira Gitler

If any individual embodied jazz energy and spontaneity it was Louis Armstrong, the young trumpet genius who hurtled out of poverty and obscurity in the New Orleans ghetto, working his way up the Mississippi playing on riverboats, to emerge as the star of Joe "King" Oliver's creole jazz band during a legendary season at Chicago's Lincoln Gardens dancehall in 1922. Armstrong was such a powerful player, it's said he had to stand 15 feet behind his partners on a 1923 recording session, to avoid upsetting the sound balance. He improvised lines that were longer and more seamless than any other jazz player of his day, which had the effect of smoothing out the rhythmically clunky ragtime style and planting the seeds of that elusive jazz sensation "swing".

But as the Jazz age boomed, the focus of the blossoming music began to shift from the South and Chicago to New York. Dance bands, many influenced by classical harmonies and instrumentation, already existed, but most were elegant and bland. They seized on the blues-rooted sound of New Orleans jazz as a spicy musical and marketing ingredient – every dance band wanted its own New Orleans-style "hot" soloist, and the music of George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman began to be transformed by jazz feeling.

Louis Armstrong's second wife, the pianist Lil Hardin, felt that King Oliver's rootsy but unsophisticated group was only a stepping-stone for her gifted husband, and that he was ready to play with the fast-maturing Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in New York. Henderson had been a house pianist for the first African-American record company, Black Swan, and he often assembled groups for recording projects. They coalesced into a band, playing in the smooth Paul Whiteman-style at first. But Henderson and arranger Don Redman felt that the dancing public of the Jazz age were ready for a sound with more edge and bite, and they began to experiment with the voicings of the different instrumental sections.

They also brought in Louis Armstrong. His period with Fletcher Henderson from 1924-25 turned the New Yorker's ensemble from a dance band into a proto-jazz big band, and the star soloist's audacious phrasing influenced the writing and arrangements for the whole group. Check the vivacity with which Armstrong springs off the chugging beat of the band on his three choruses on the May 1925 Sugar Foot Stomp.