The Only Jazz That Was Ever Popular : THE SWING ERA : The Development of Jazz, 1933-1945 <i> by Gunther Schuller (Oxford: $30; 904 pp., illustrated) </i>

For those who love the music, still hugging memories of the time, this hefty history becomes the chronicle of record and of records.

The people of the period come alive in musical transcription; author Gunther Schuller offers notation to re-create solos and arrangements. The transition to big bands from small combos--bands covered in his prior history, “Early Jazz”--comes in clear detail. The contribution by black musicians, followed by the commercial success of white musicians playing that music, is documented with care and without sermons. No previous book provides more jazz notes--and footnotes--to visit an American epoch that began in the midst of the Great Depression and wound up with the end of World War II. “The Swing Era” immediately becomes the prime source for serious students of those 12 years in American music.

That said, there is also a curious joylessness here and a lack of passion. Maybe that’s because the often unrehearsed happiness of jazz does not lend itself to formal reconstruction in words or musical measures. I think it’s also because the people don’t come alive offstage, behind the bandstands.

Perhaps scholarly examination militates against inclusion of much personality and perhaps the appreciation of jazz has already suffered from overdoses of the fan magazine approach to music. The world does not need new synopses of Lester Young’s drinking habits or Billie Holiday’s addiction to heroin or Gene Krupa’s marijuana arrest. The bulk of jazz biographies has already wallowed in the private lives of the players even as they celebrated the public playing. But the reader would appreciate a sense of the euphoria that sometimes happened in nightclubs on 52nd Street--then known as “upholstered sewers”--or even in recording studios.

Schuller’s most engaging thesis is that during the swing era, jazz became America’s dominant popular music for the first--and probably last--time.

What made it national, in large measure, was radio. Variety and comedy programs used big bands as musical punctuation marks. The major hotels in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles had ballrooms where big bands played for dinner and dancing; the major radio networks broadcast that music, live, usually late at night, for a whole country to listen to at the same time--”And now from the beautiful Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle, New York, we bring you Les Brown and his band of reknown.” Legitimately jazz-oriented organizations led by Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and Charlie Barnet found audiences on records after establishing their presences on radio.

Yet the biggest big bands were not always swinging and, calculatedly, they were rarely jazzy. Schuller describes how the most popular white orchestras diluted and bowdlerized jazz for popular consumption. The leading orchestras emphasized arrangements over improvisations, vocalists over instrumental soloists and formulas over experiment. For every Glenn Miller “In the Mood,” full of swing’s repeated phrases or “riffs” to please the jitterbugs, there were half-a-dozen “Moonlight Serenades,” slowed down with syrupy saxophones and singers to lull the fox trotters.

And while Schuller traces the influence of black bands on white music, he hardly deals with the musical integration process in terms of artists and audiences. Goodman, for instance, brought pianist Teddy Wilson and percussionist Lionel Hampton into a heretofore white orchestra, just as Tommy Dorsey hired arranger Sy Oliver and trumpeter Charlie Shavers, Gene Krupa hired trumpeter Roy Eldridge and Artie Shaw hired three superior horn players--Benny Carter, Henry “Red” Allen, J. C. Higginbotham--to work with a string section and accompany vocals by Lena Horne. The data are collected. What the arrival of black artists in a white musical context meant--both as stars and as tokens--is essentially ignored. While white music producer John Hammond is repeatedly cited for encouraging the emergence of Henderson, Basie, Holiday and others, the pleasures and perils of breaking old color lines do not appear.

The emigrations of Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas, for instance, are noted but not really explained. Three of the most celebrated tenor saxophonists left the United States for Europe at the height of their powers because they believed a black artist could have a better life on the Continent. Such contrasts--jazz as the most popular music at a time when the finest jazz artists chose to play elsewhere--are part of the swing era history.

Some of what Schuller does include may try the reader’s patience. In more than 100 pages of homage to Ellington, he compares jazz’s most influential composer/conductor to a whole orchestra of classicists. Ravel, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Webern are cited in terms of instrumental sonorities; Delius, Rachmaninov, Scriabin and, again, Ravel, are named for harmonic richness; Bach and Handel are mentioned because they, too, had to compose upon command. Even Beethoven gets into the act when Schuller explains how Ellington could flaunt convention. Putting Ellington in such company, honor by association, seems almost patronizing; the validity of his music has been independently established.

High marks, however, for the author’s catholicity of taste; Schuller manages to convey the virtues--and connections--of unalike jazz forms, from the Dixieland of the ‘20s to the be-bop that began in the early 1940s. High marks, too, for tracing the influence of territory bands that produced playing styles and important players from such unsung cities as Omaha, St. Louis and Kansas City.

Most big bands finally died of multiple causes: a recording ban that kept instrumentalists out of the studios; the expense and hardships of keeping an orchestra on the road; a shift in taste toward singers, including the likes of Frank Sinatra and Doris Day who graduated from swing-era orchestras, and the return to small combo jazz by the moderns--Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk.

The end of the swing era was really the beginning of a new music, freed from many commercial constraints, even freed from the need to be popular. “True jazz,” concludes Schuller, “by its very nature cannot be held to a formula or be based on some stationary perfection. Indeed, the greatness of jazz lies in the fact that it never ceases to develop and change.” Yes, and that it exhilarates as it changes. The next changes will be the substance of Volume III in Schuller’s mammoth American history project.