Big Band

Brass and reeds split into sections that answer each other, as a dozen or more players turn dance music into arranged conversation

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A big band is a line-up before it is a style. A dozen or more players divide into brass, reeds and rhythm, and arrangements make the sections answer each other, turning dance music into organised conversation.

Origins and era

In the 1920s New York ballroom bands expanded the small New Orleans group into three or four trumpets, two or three trombones, four or five saxophones and a rhythm section. Fletcher Henderson began writing by section around 1923, and Duke Ellington turned orchestration into composition at the Cotton Club from 1927. Benny Goodman's August 1935 engagement at the Palomar Ballroom set off the swing craze, and 1935 to 1946 was the golden period. The recording ban of 1942 to 1944 and the postwar decline of ballrooms shrank the bands, though the format survived.

What you hear

Separate the three blocks. Brass uses mutes and unison to make points, reeds lay down five-part harmony, and the rhythm section syncopates piano and guitar, walks the bass and keeps four beats on the ride cymbal. Arrangements trade riffs, brass asking and reeds answering, with a few bars left for solos. Forms are usually the thirty-two-bar song or twelve-bar blues, at any tempo from ballad to fast dance.

Key figures

Fletcher Henderson established the template for section writing, Ellington treated the band as one speaking instrument, and Count Basie built another style in Kansas City from riffs and a relaxed rhythm section. Goodman made the clarinet a star, Chick Webb and Jimmie Lunceford put drums and vocals in the same show, and Glenn Miller reached the widest popular audience.

Lineage

It grew from New Orleans and Chicago dance bands, inherited ragtime's sense of sections, and fed the swing era, postwar jazz orchestras and rhythm-and-blues touring bands. Bebop shrank the group back to a quintet, but big-band harmony and section thinking stayed in the arranging tradition.

Common misunderstandings

A big band is not a genre; it can play swing, blues, Latin or rock, and the line-up and section writing are what define it. Nor is every big band fully written, since Basie's bands relied on riffs and head arrangements. Equating big bands with the 1930s ignores new writing in every later decade.

Sources

• Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era（Oxford University Press, 1989），用于核对编曲手法与乐队编制
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Big band，用于交叉核对年代与人物

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.