Fats Waller - Ain't Misbehavin' - Stormy Weather (1943)

SWING SOLOISTS

In the 'Thirties, jazz became for the first and only time a truly world-wide popular music form, with all problematic aspects of adjustment to the taste of a wider public and with the fact that elements of jazz rhythm, phrasing, improvisation and arranging techniques were being adopted by Euro-American dance orchestras and adapted to their own style. The steady levelling out of the sound of swing orchestras and the ease with which the music could be copied had at the same time - as it were, as compensation - stimulated soloists to the most individual interpretations. The more the orchestra approached the standard of a well-oiled machine, the more urgent it became to play individually in solos. The orchestral swing period, was therefore also the era of the great jazz soloists - Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, Erroll Garner and Harry James, Buck Clayton and Gene Krupa, Lionel Hampton and Stan Getz.