the Club Imperial in St. Louis, 1956
In his recorded interview for the 1986 memoir I, Tina, nightclub owner George Edick said, "By that time the big bands had all become small bands...."
The book's co-author Kurt Loder discusses that:
------------------ [excerpt] ------------ There was a new kind of music playing by 1954: rhythm and blues. The intermingling of black and white music in America had begun in slavery days, when African rhythmic sensibilities were plopped down amid traditions of song and harmony that had originated in Europe.
The subsequent welter of black field hollers and spirituals and backcountry dance music (often performed on improvised instruments) had evolved by the turn of the century into intriguing new hybrids.
The blues - a raw secular outgrowth of the call-and-response style of black gospel singing - spread throughout the cotton fields and turpentine camps of the South by itinerant singer-guitarists.
At the same time, the cakewalk, a dance initially done to the strut-inducing rhythms of black marching bands, became a vaudeville craze and paved the way for the rise of ragtime, an intricately syncopated piano style forged in the all-night milieu of black saloons and bordellos.
In New Orleans, Dixieland bands combined the harmonies of the blues with the rhythms of ragtime, then added a spirit of improvisation and began (along with musicians in many other cities) to create jazz, the soundtrack of the Roaring Twenties.
By the thirties, jazz music - now played by both black and white ensembles - had become one of America's most popular exports. With the breakthrough of Benny Goodman in 1935, the swing years began.
As swing music exploded, jazz bands grew bigger, and arrangers were called upon to organize the interplay of the ever-increasing number of instruments - a development which tended to limit freewheeling improvisation. Gifted bandleaders such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie maintained an improvisational spark, but in the hands of more pop-inclined white orchestras jazz was processed into simple dance music.
With America's entry into World War II, many swing stars began departing the scene for military service, and the swing era began to ebb. Black jazz musicians began reclaiming the field with hot black R & B groups that applied the horn playing of the big bands to stripped-down combos led by frantic saxophonists and blues-shouting vocalists.
The result, on a good night, was pandemonium - and hit records, at least in the circumscribed "race" market to which such music was consigned.
Live radio shows were piped out over the "Delta Network" across Arkansas and Mississippi. ... -------------------------- [end / excerpt]
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(In Bob Dylan's book, Chronicles, he recalled listening to blues music from a radio station far away that only came in at night - from New Orleans, I think - during the 1950s when he was a young teen in Hibbing, Minnesota, a small town up on the Iron Range.
In that same time period, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were seeking blues and rhythm-and-blues music to listen to and learn from. But of course those Southern radio stations in America were not powerful enough to reach across the Atlantic to England - not even at night!, ha - so they had to go looking for records, mostly 45s, wherever they could buy them, sometimes even having to send away for them from stores in the U.S.
Life before the Internet....)
