Swing Era’s Jazzing the Classics: Pro et Contra

Abstract

The birth of jazzing the classics – the practice of jazz transcriptions of classical music – dates back to the Swing Era (from the second half of the 1920s to the first half of the 1940s). The most pronounced trend in jazzing the classics of the era of Swing was the transformation of themes from classical musical compositions (mostly, of a song-like romantic nature) into pop song and dance compositions. The high classics were losing their status of music for serious performance and listening, turning into “foot music” and a commodity for the music business. At the same time, some of the musical samples from the era from the 1920s to the 1940s anticipated such fundamental features of the practice of jazzing as a new stage in the history of jazz, which began at the turn of the 1950s and the 1960s, namely: the involvement of baroque and classicist music, concert types of performance, and the preservation of the entire music of the original composition in the resultant music.

Despite its widespread distribution, jazzing the classics has long remained in the shadow of research attention. Meanwhile, it can become the subject of a multi-vector study – from techniques of transcription to major issues of a socio-cultural nature. The present article focuses its attention on expanding the documentary and historical base. An analysis of materials from the American periodicals from the 1920s to the 1940s makes it possible to recreate the pro et contra situation of the Swing Era in relation to jazzing the classics. The scholarly originality of the article lies in the expansion of the factual base associated with the history of jazzing the classics, the introduction of previously unknown names, compositions, and other materials of the American periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s into Russian musicology, and the identification of the influence of the jazzing practice of Swing Era on its subsequent stages.

Keywords: jazz, jazzing, swing era, jazz arrangements, Chappie Willet, Jack Hylton