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Big Band Leaders Who Helped Shape R&B

© Barney Quick

Rhythm & blues grew out of swing. For most mainstream audiences of the thirties, swing was a peppy yet safe form of musical entertainment, played primarily by white aggregations. Sixty-plus years of hindsight show us a more detailed picture. The genre’s development was driven by black players and leaders. White swing dissipated into the tepid pop of the late forties. In black swing, we can see the seeds of the mighty music with which this site deals. Below are profiles of some of the most visionary helmsmen of the era that spanned crippling depression and cathartic world war. When the swing era was over, American culture was more robust and distinct than ever before, thanks to the groundwork laid by these supremely hip gentlemen.

Count Basie – Plucked from the territory-band circuit by the titanic record producer John Hammond, this former house band at Kansas City’s Club Reno took Fifty-second Street by storm in 1936. All the key elements of the fertile hinterland environment came together in this collection of talent. Guitarists Freddie Green and Eddie Durham, drummer Jo Jones, bassist Walter Page, and especially supremely cool tenor man Lester Young and the impish and rotund blues shouter Jimmy Rushing gave the world a gift that rocks us to this day: the riff.

Lionel Hampton – He started as a drummer for Paul Howard’s orchestra on Central Avenue in Los Angeles in the late 1920s. Once again, John Hammond played a hand in moving American music along by suggesting to his brother-in-law Benny Goodman that he hire Hampton to play vibes. (He also got Goodman to hire Oklahoma guitarist Charlie Christian.) In the early forties, Hampton formed a band whose sound was characterized by a series of tenor sax honkers, beginning with Illinois Jacquet and continuing with Arnett Cobb and Earl Bostic. A whole lot of r&b squealing can be heard in the wartime work of this rocking organization. Hampton also launched the career of the Queen of the Jukebox, Dinah Washington.

Lucky Millinder – This impresario and music lover didn’t play a note himself but was completely at home fronting the Mills Blue Rhythm band and then his own outfit. Both bop and r&b benefited from the Millinder apprenticeships of Dizzy Gillespie, future “Honky Tonk” organist Bill Doggett, the boozed-up and impossibly handsome singer Wynonie Harris, and even early Atlantic star Ruth Brown (although it’s generally acknowledged that Millinder treated her poorly during her brief stay with his orchestra). Arranger Henry Glover took many of these luminaries to Cincinnati when he became the King label’s first a&r man.

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