1930s
The American economy, which spun off the road in 1929, had jazz reeling.
The ambitious Austin High Band from Chicago lived on baked beans.
Sydney Bechet took up shoeshining and assisted trumpeter friend Tommy Ladnier with his tailoring business.
In the Midwest and Southwest, 'territory bands' played, literally, for peanuts.
Prominent musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins escaped to Europe so that they could continue to play.
Fletcher Henderson, the chemist who did so much to bring swing into the big band, by using Louis Armstrong, had difficulties too.
But a way out came when a record company scout set him up to provide arrangements for a young classically schooled white bandleader and clarinetist named Benny Goodman.
Goodman was one of 12 children from an East European Jewish family, whose father saw his talents as a way out from the ghetto. He became a full-time professional by age 14, and the family breadwinner soon after.
In August 1935, Benny Goodman's band, which included powerful performers like trumpeter Bunny Berigan and drummer Gene Krupa, played at the Palomar Ballroom at Los Angeles - the final leg of his band's lacklustre coast to coast tour.
He started the gig by playing soft dance music - and the audience was as unimpressed as those right through the tour. So, as a sink-or-swim gesture, he launched into Fletcher Henderson's arrangement of Jelly Roll Morton's 'King Porter Stomp' - and the audience loved it. Goodman was on the way to being dubbed the King of Swing.
Within five years of his California success, Goodman was an international star who even took jazz to the classical concert halls with the famous Carnegie Hall 'Spirituals to Swing' show.
Benny Goodman was also instrumental in bringing about mixed-race bands when he hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraharpist Lionel Hampton and guitarist Charlie Christian. Goodman's open-mindedness developed by listening to the New Orleans pioneers in Chicago and working with musicians such as Coleman Hawkins and Billie Holiday.
Following in the wake of this success were other white bandleaders like Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Bob Crosby and Glenn Miller.
But Goodman's style of flawless, tightly disciplined jazz was not the only music benefiting from the new swing boom.
Duke Ellington's rich, impressionistic, painterly music was also being unfurled over a compelling pulse learned in the competitive atmosphere of ballrooms. (Ellington's band would eventually reach its full maturity in the 40s when bebop would be making other jazz orchestras obsolete.)
Cut to Kansas City. Here, a simpler, riskier, bluesier, more riff-centered music has been flourishing since the 20s. Notable among the bands is the Bennie Moten outfit which included saxophonist Ben Webster and pianist William 'Count' Basie.
After Moten's untimely death during a tonsillectomy operation, Basie took over, and took the band to New York. His band soon became almost as popular a swing band as Benny Goodman's - but displaying a relaxed, flowing rhythm and sublime soloing strength from the likes of Buck Clayton, Herschel Evans and Lester Young.
Basie began to influence the repertoire and approach of the King of Swing himself.
But Goodman's music wasn't all that Basie's band influenced.
Basie's drummer Jo Jones' technique pointed towards a new route for percussion and rhythm playing. The graceful four-four beat made room for an improvised music of greater intensity without bluster, and Count Basie's own dabbing left hand and quietly eloquent right became a model for more restrained keyboard work.
There are many reasons and ingredients which led to the rise of the bebop movement which followed. But the inspiration of Count Basie is acknowledged by musicians of every generation and taste.
