Jazz Jargon Swing

"It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!" But just what IS swing and who's got it?

Jon Faddis (jazz trumpeter/educator): If you've got to ask, then I can't tell you! That's the answer Louis Armstrong gave to this question. In jazz, "swing" is a particular style of jazz. But more importantly, swing is a feeling defined by a musical tradition. If the musicians have it, it's what makes people want to dance. There's "sweet swing" and there's "hot swing" like the Count Basie Band.

Tony Zamora (jazz saxophonist/educator/Purdue University Black Cultural Center Director Emeritus): Back in the swing era when big bands performed in ballrooms, many bands played dance music as part of their performance agenda. Many dance bands had outstanding musicians who performed jazz as part of their opener for the audience to listen to because the audience loved the closeness to the musicians. The audience would gather in front of the bandstand and applaud the soloist, etc. After that blowing segment, the band would bring on its dance repertoire for the audience. Well, if folks couldn't dance to the music, then it meant the music wasn't swinging. If you couldn't pop your fingers to it or pat your feet to the music, then you couldn't feel it. Later on, with the advent of the bebop generation, many musicians would play a lot of notes (in terms of speed and the ability to go over their instrument) but here too, the notion of swing and feeling was lost if you couldn't sway or groove with the music. I believe Duke Ellington's band came out with the song "It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got that Swing" in the late 1940s when dancing was the vogue and the music really had to swing if a band wanted to captivate the audience.

Cassiette West-Williams (Creator of the Jazz Literacy Summer Reading Program for Children/Urbana High School reading teacher): When our children do their reading thing, they swing! When our children read about Dizzy, Davis, and Parker, the excitement rises in their voices, as they swing with the story on the page, bursting at the seams for more books about jazz. Seeing the little Ellas, Lenas and Sarahs sing and sway, the style might be old-fashioned to them, but they have learned jazz anyway! "Swing" is transforming itself into the active minds of today's youth, who want to capture the past and fuse their style and finishing touch on jazz in the future. Swing is hip, sassy, phat, from the 'hood, and still evolving into something good. In 2003, that's what "swing" is.

Laurence Hobgood (jazz pianist/arranger): What "swinging it" is really about is the feeling you put into the music, and whether a person is successfully able to really access their emotional side and funnel that into the music and get beyond themselves in the way that they play the music. It's just a question of pure feeling—ebullience, joy, sorrow, that awareness of life.

Morgan Usadel (Figaro's Record Store Manager and jazz addict): Technically speaking, "swing" is something that can't be precisely notated. It involves playing slightly behind or slightly ahead of the beat in order to get a certain illusion of propulsion. If you want to hear "swing," listen to Count Basie and his rhythm section.

Lonnie Clark (WBCP co-owner): Swing is boogie woogie. Swing is the black bottom. Swing is ballin' the jack. All of those are swing. You're dancing, you're flipping, you're scootin' all at the same time. Swing is strictly upbeat. You've got to be in shape for swing. The Count [Basie] could swing. Lionel Hampton was a bad boy. And Artie Shaw—he could kick it. They were some of the best.