At 3:31 PM -0500 1/31/10, David W. Fenton wrote:
What period is he talking about? My experience is that "stage band" was current up to c. 1990, though certainly "jazz band" was in use even when I was in high school (late 70s). Maybe it was the age of my high school band directors that mattered!
Probably. I'm talking late '40s, early or throughout the '50s. Multi-thousands of GIs were returning to civilian life and taking full advantage of the GI Bill to get the first college degrees in their families. and they were needed as teachers for the baby boomers. And David's correct; I'd forgotten that "dance band" was actually the preferred term, but those high school jazz bands did NOT necessarily play for dances, which is another reason that "stage band" crept into the literature. But at the time we were pretty well stuck with stock arrangements, which were pretend jazz arrangements published for exactly that market, while the real big-band arrangements were considered proprietary and never published because they WERE the sound of each band.
By the early 60s Kenton was already leading his summer workshops at Indiana, and I don't think they bowdlerized the term "Jazz" by that time, because big-band and symphonic jazz was becoming socially acceptable, and small-band jazz combos were definitely following close behind, although they were still associated with night clubs and bars. But even in the early '60s, I know a sax player (who was on Kenton's band) who studied at Eastman, and he said that they hid their saxes in their lockers and didn't admit to their teachers that they played them! And I'm told that it was the same at Indiana, outside the Kenton workshops. But introduce a term into the school scene--especially the school music publishing scene--and it has an almost infinite half-life.
John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[email protected]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
