The rise of the Big Bands - Paul Whiteman King of Jazz
November 27th, 2008 | by Tom |Paul Whiteman: The King of Jazz
The more I worked with jazz, the surer I was that its authentic vitality would take root and develop on what I called a symphonic basis.
Paul Whiteman, from Jazz, 1926
Few famous bandleaders have been the cause of more critical controversy than Paul Whiteman. To many Americans in the 1920’s and 1930’s, this avuncular, rotund figure, waving a baton, and with a wry grin under his pencil moustache, personified jazz.
Paul Whiteman Orchestra - Markush Tango 1932
Whiteman was beloved by his musicians, whom he treated fairly and generously. They nicknamed him “Pops” or “Fatho“, and the majority of them shared saxophonist Arthur Rollini’s view that he was “truly a great man with a quick wit”.
By no means everything his band played could be called jazz - from arrangements of the light classics to settings for singers - but particularly in the period from 1927 onward, his big band included in its ranks many of those who have come to be regarded as the finest white soloists in the history of the music, from Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden to Frank Trumbauer and Jimmy Dorsey.
Further more, his ambition to bring jazz into conjunction with European symphonic music resulted in the composition of George Gerschwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which, while not jazz itself, draws heavily on aspects of it and is one of the most enduring and universally popular pieces of American concert music of the twentieth century.
Paul Whiteman played the leading role in influencing the kind of arrangements played by such bands of 10 pieces or more
- white and African-American - during the early 1920’s, by supplying a functional and effective pattern for composers and arrangers to follow. His concept of brass and reed sections, and how to voice to parts they played, was the important aspect of his innovation.
Whiteman was successful because he developed his approach at the very time when big bands were making the transition from the instrumentation and ragtime-derived ensemble approach to the modern style of big band typified by Fletcher Henderson, and subsequently, Duke Ellington.
Tags: big bands, duke ellington, paul whiteman
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