"Do The Big Bands Stand A Ghost Of A Chance?"

Written by Music Librarian Christopher Popa 

 

The Count Basie Orchestra, now directed by trombonist Bill Hugdes,

and featuring Butch Miles on drums. 

In 1947 Sy Oliver commented that "People were always talking about "Ghost Bands", asking me if I didn't think this was a Macabre. I knew Tommy {Dorsey}very well, and he's the last person who have wanted his music to die - he put too much into it. Too many people enjoyed it."

"Big Bands led by elderly men in the names of dead men are big business," Leonard Feathers, wrote in 1988, "While new bands played new and exciting music (such as Toshiko Akiyoshi Orchestra which won countless polls) having trouble getting three months work in a year."

The leader of the band may die leaving his melodies to linger on, with a so-called Ghost Band - that is, an ensemble that, following his death, bears his name and plays his music (and sometimes, newer music in his style), but is fronted by someone else.

The one exception to the rule was, for a long time, The Artie Shaw Orchestra, Artie Shaw was hardly a Ghost, living well beyond the 1983 formation of a new band using his name. And I don't intend to comply," he once quipped.

How ever the grim reaper eventually reached him, and he passed away in 2004 at the age of 94 before their deaths, certain leaders, including Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton and Wayne King specifically forbade any orchestras to carry under their name. Goodman remarked, "I absolutely don't want it.....anything under my name should be me. I am the product. 

THERE WILL BE MORE ADDED

The Big Band Era & "Where did it start?"

Ragtime is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity in the 1897 to 1918. the main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or ragged, rhythm. It began as dance music in the Red-light Districts of American cities such as Saint Louis and New Orleans years before published as popular sheet music for piano. Ragtime fell out of favor as Jazz claimed the public's imagination after 1917. There has been numerous revivals since the music has been re-discovered. First in the early 1940's and many Jazz bands began to include ragtime into there repertoire and put out ragtime recordings on 78 rpm. A more Significant revival occurred in the 1950's, 1971, 1973.
Jazz was started in the Southern part of the US in the African American communities. What I understand is that Jazz is the mixture of Classical music and modern music of that time of history. Jazz can be improvised along with  Bee-bop, but you can not put your finger on any part of jazz and say this is where we got jazz from. Jazz is wild and it will always be wild. Jazz has a ( special relationship to time, defined as swing.
Swing Music also known as swing jazz or simply swing. It is a form of jazz music that developed in the early 30's and became a distinctive style by 1935 in the United States. Swing uses a strong rhythm section of double bass and drums as the anchor for a lead section of brass instruments such as trumpets and trombones, woodwinds and saxophones and Clarinets, sometimes stringed instruments as violins, and guitar, medium to fast tempos, and a "lilting" swing time rhythm.