Big Band Swing Artists will refer to a jazz group of 10 or more musicians, typically featuring at the minimum of 3 trumpets, 2 or more trombones, 4 or more saxophones, and “rhythm section” of accompanists who play some blend of guitar, piano, drums, and bass. “Big band music” as an idea for music fans is identified mostly with the swing age, even though there were jazz-oriented, large dance bands prior to the swing age of the 30s and 1940s, and massive jazz-oriented concert bands following the swing age.
Category difficulties arise as stores shelve recordings by every large jazz ensemble as if it were one style, in spite of the changing rhythmic and harmonic approaches employed by newer ensembles of likewise instrumentation which have formed since the swing age. By grouping the music of every large jazz band together, marketers will overlook the various types aof jazz which larger groups have performed: swing (Count Basie and Duke Ellington), cool (Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans, Shorty Rogers), bebop (Dizzy Gillespie), free jazz (Sun Ra’s work following the 50s), hard bop (Gerald Wilson) as well as jazz rock fusion (Don Ellis’ & Maynard Ferguson’s groups of the 70s).
Not all of them include “swing bands.” Most listeners think big band denotes an idiom, not merely an instrumentation. For them, the plans of soloing and arranging which were set up within the 30s link all larger jazz ensembles more than the various harmonic and rhythmic concepts distinguish the ones of one age, for instance bebop, from the ones of another, for instance the ones of jazz-rock. An additional critical consideration is that jazz fans and journalists of the 30s and 1940s drew distinctions in between bands which conveyed the most hard-driving rhythmic qualities as well as constant solo improvisations, and the ones which portrayed a less pronounced improvisation and swing feel.
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