Swing is the jazz style that emerged during the early 1930s and emphasized big bands. It spilled into the late 1940s and then remained popular in recordings, film, and television music long after its main proponents had disbanded. Most swing-style groups had at least 10 musicians and featured at least three or four saxophones, two or three trumpets, two or three trombones, piano, guitar, bass violin, and drums. Guitarists, bassists and drummers offered repeating rhythms that were sufficiently simple, buoyant, and lilting to inspire social dancers, the style's largest audience. Musicians strove for large, rich tone qualities on their instruments.

Solo improvisers did not seek intricacy in their lines so much as lyricism and a hot, confident feeling that was rhythmically compelling. For these reasons, the musical period of the 1930s and 1940s has been called the swing era and big-band era. Not all dance music played by big bands of the 1930s and 1940s was jazz. A large segment of the public, however considered almost any lively, syncopated popular music to be jazz.

Journalists and jazz fans drew distinctions between bands that conveyed the most hard-driving rhythmic qualities and extensive solo improvisations and those that conveyed less swing feeling and improvisation. The former were called swing bands or hot bands (for example, the bands of Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Andy Kirk and Duke Ellington). The latter were called sweet bands (for example the bands of Glenn Miller, Wayne King, Freddy Martin, and Guy Lombardo). Many listeners, however, did not make such distinctions. They considered all the big dance bands to be swing bands. This is not surprising because all the bands (even Guy Lombardo's) did play some jazz and even the honest of swing bands (like Duke Ellington's) featured some sweet numbers. Conversely, some of the biggest hits by Glenn Miller's sweet band contained brief jazz improvisations and conveyed quite danceable swing feeling. An instructive illustration for this confusion regards Tommy Dorsey's immensely popular bands of the 1940s. The groups had first-rate jazz oriented accompanists, swinging arrangements, and a number of top-notch jazz improvisers. Yet huge portions of their repertory were composed of ballads and vocal features. Therefore, though jazz historians don't usually give Dorsey's bands much attention, jazz musicians generally confer high respect upon them.

Though there were large dance bands before the swing era, big-band music as a concept for music fans developed most firmly during this era and persisted for decades thereafter. This has caused ambiguity in labeling because, for example, record store clerks often catalog big-band music as though it were a single style, despite the many different harmonic and rhythmic approaches that new ensembles of similar instrumentation have used dance the swing era. Large ensembles have performed almost every kind of jazz: swing, bebop, cool, hard bop, free jazz and jazz-rock fusion. Not all big bands are swing bands and so big-band style should not be used routinely to designate the jazz of all large ensembles. But many consider big band to denote an idiom, not just an instrumentation. Also note that there were important jazz improvisers in the swing era, such as Art Tatum and Django Reinhardt, who did not earn their reputations in the context of big bands and there were others, including Lester Young, Charlie Christian, and Coleman Hawkins, who often made their best recordings in small-band formats, though most of their livelihood and exposure came initially as soloists in big bands.

Swing Style

Progressive Swing: