Word: swing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...offstage a few minutes before. Against his will, irresistibly, he grinned. The effect was electric. Irresistibly Doug Fairbanks grinned and leaped his way to stage success as a bounding Lothario, a leaping Lochinvar who made love on the bounce. Hollywood gave him higher walls to scale, longer ropes to swing on, scores more swordsmen to engage in single-handed combat. His first picture, The Lamb, jumped his first ten-week contract, under puttee-wearing Director David Wark Griffith, from $2,000 a week to a three-year contract at $4,000 a week, typed him for life as an acrobatic...
...Stiff" and "relaxed" are two ways of playing Swing. One is termed bad, the other good. What are the two styles, who plays them and why is one better than the other...
...must be understood that the object of good swing is the creation of musical ideas ad lib that have continuity, simplicity, and sincerity (need we add, originality). Any band style of playing that aids this is therefore good; any that hinders it is bad. In the opinion of most musicians, the "stiff" or "power-house" style hinders the above, and is bad whereas the "relaxed" or "colored lag" style is the very essence of that thing swing...
Listen to Gene Krupa's new record of "Hodge-Podge" and you'll hear not only "relaxed" swing, but soles of a sort that are going to make Gene's band one of the top white bands before the year is over. It's easy-flowing, the rhythm "takes it time." As a result, the soles can be slow, and well phrased. It's not easy--it took Gene's bunch this long to learn...
...other words, plays as a unit the same amount behind the beat. That's why all new bands, bands of all-stars, bands mixing two beat and four beat men are bad. You can't have a mixture of ideas about the "proper lag" and get the swing. For unity, a really good swing band must make a football team look like the Tower of Babel...