Word: swing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Stanley Brown and His Crimsonians," a twelve-piece outfit composed of members of the University Band, will attempt to trace the growth of swing music in a program to be given in Sanders Theatre Tuesday under the auspices of the Widener Theatre Collection...
Many musicians consider the above to be a good description of the way in which the Basic band plays. There is a sense of almost overwhelming power about the band, due to its great rhythm section and general ability to relax, that creates immense swing without being noisy. This is typical of what is known as Kansas City swing (Andy Kirk and Jimmy Lunceford are bands of the same style); whenever you hear a band playing with that feeling of being just behind the beat, but not worrying too much about catching up, and brass with great solidity...
...Broadway, as in Chicago, the swing Mikado became overnight a smash hit. But Broadway was not seriously shaken. For in spite of all temptations to run wild with syncopations, the Federal Theatre's Mikado remains an English one. Four times the show's husky-duskies break out into a rash of swing, but otherwise they play The Mikado straight. They provide a pleasant, professional performance that can stand on its own legs; but with the D'Oyly Carte troupe providing a subtler and more finished show a few blocks away, daring would have been better than diffidence...
...what The Mikado loses on the roundabouts it never quite makes up on the swing. The audience got what it came for only when the Three Little Maids from School strutted what they had learned there, when the Mikado (Edward Fraction) bust out into a cakewalk, when the flowers that bloomed in the spring gave way to a jamboree that had nothing to do with the case, but proved mighty, mighty tra-la. The Federal Theatre boldly moved The Mikado from Japan to the South Seas. It should have been bolder still and moved it, shag and shaggage, to Harlem...
...Manhattan, on Washington's birthday, newshawks discovered Elizabeth Washington, onetime vaudeville actress and direct descendant of his brother John Augustine, cheerfully playing a fiddle in Manhattan's WPA Federal Theater. Said she: "There must be thousands of Washington descendants. The family was enormous.* . . . Just say I swing a mean crinoline...