Posted: 8/28/17 at 8:05am
Gaveston. Always a pleasure. Someone who usually has answers.
I've become quite fond of Bandstand, but I wonder if I'm being too forgiving of its flaws because the young cast is so ingratiating, they worked so hard at promoting the show, and as a not much better than average trumpet player in high school I'm a little in awe of actors who can play their instruments on stage while in character.
As they say, or maybe only I say, 90 percent of selling something is marketing. Lin Manuel said nothing about swing when he tweeted "Best jazz score since either Jelly's Last Jam or City Of Angels, take your pick. INCREDIBLE score." Jazz musicians, and jazz generally, always seem to be treated with great respect, even if one doesn't care for what they are playing. Mastery of the instrument and ability to improvise.
But what is jazz and what is swing? I see Duke Ellington described as one of the originators of big band jazz. Is Billy Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train" jazz or swing? I think that most people, especially if they knew Duke Ellington's band was performing it, would call it jazz.
What about Benny Goodman? The "King of Swing" is described in bios as a jazz clarinetist. "Sing Sing Sing" seems just as worthy as 'A' Train to be labeled jazz.
Glenn Miller and "In the Mood" are most likely to be labeled swing. He was a hit machine but most of his pieces were soft or even bland compared to the Goodman and Ellington tunes.
If you look for a more technical distinction, swing can be called a form of jazz involving a larger ensemble of players improvising much less and reading music much more.
The swing era was the last great flowering of jazz before its period of harmonic experimentation. At its best, swing achieved an art of improvisation in which current harmonic conventions counterbalanced the stylistic individuality of its great creators. The swing era also coincided with the greatest popularity of dance bands in general. But when singers who began as swing stylists, such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, and Sarah Vaughan, became more popular than the swing bands they sang with, the swing era came to an end. The harmonic experimentation of the late swing era, evident in, for example, the Woody Herman and Charlie Barnet bands of the early 1940s, presaged the next development in jazz: bop, or bebop.
The reason that I got into this morass was my wondering if Bandstand had been labeled "the new American jazz musical" then a lot fewer of its mailers might have not been immediately tossed, but instead the recipient would have gone on to read the rest of it.
). The one thing that I thought was too much was Julia's obsession with the way Michael died. It didn't quite ring true to me, and felt like it was only emphasized as much as it was in order to trigger that moment of honesty from Donny and a crisis in his relationship with Julia. 
Seriously, I don't think it's about finding a "replacement," it's more about missing the experience of love and hoping to find it again.
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