Word: swing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...swing, v. To achieve the buoyant beat that is the essence of all jazz...
...Swing in the '30s put Chicago jazz into large bands with massed rhythms and careful arrangements. In the late '40s bop became briefly fashionable, with its air-splitting protests against swing stereotypes, but bop's own offbeat, spastic rhythms quickly palled. The jazz style called modern does not protest against anything very much except dullness. At its best, it swings as vigorously as any of its predecessors, but once it starts swinging, it seems to move on to more interesting matters, such as tinkering up a little canon à la Bach or some dissonant counterpoint...
...firm believers in what musicians call polytonality. Some tunes, like On the Alamo and Let's Fall in Love, stimulate the Brubeck crew to new and fancier flights, month after month, then drop out of the repertoire when they begin to bore the men. The quartet may swing into These Foolish Things, which seems to remind them of lots of other things (including Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Lazy River), or into Fare Thee Well, Annabelle, which begins with a polytonal fughetta and is interrupted by a hoarse dissonance that sends the whole band into a fit of laughter...
...colloquialisms evolve slowly. "Jag," "tops," "dude" stayed around for decades before they began to lose their freshness. But jazz lingo becomes obsolescent almost as fast as it reaches the public ear. A term of high approbation in the swing era was "out of this world," in the bop era it was "gone," and today it is "the greatest" or "the end." Similarly, a daring performance was "hot," then "cool," and now is "far out." These are the terms currently most often used by modern jazz addicts: ball, n. A good time; having a ball; enjoying oneself...
...swing, n. Antique kind of jazz...