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EXCERPT:
Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture
The Billy Eckstine Orchestra was a startling, fearless, intelligent, sexy group — the Clash or NWA of its time. To a generation of jazz enthusiasts and musicians accustomed to the infectious dance beats and buoyant riff tunes of the swing bands, the angular rhythms and vertiginous instrumental solos of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, and others under Eckstine were a musical catharsis. "I never heard nobody play that," Art Blakey once said. "The only big band I ever liked was Billy Eckstine, 'cause everybody in that band could play. Now, that is a jazz orchestra!"
There is some film footage of the group, shot in 1946 for the Negro-circuit movie short Rhythm in a Riff. Eckstine looks virilely debonair, swaying on the bandstand so languidly that he's almost out of time, while the orchestra rages behind him. The high musical standard drops only when Eckstine solos on the valve trombone, teetering off pitch. More than fifty years after the footage was shot, the music sounds utterly contemporary, like the jazz being played in a good club tonight.
That is to say, it was unfamiliar and challenging to the public and the critics of its own time. Dance audiences would stand still on the floor, confounded. "We tried to educate people," Sarah Vaughan recalled. "We used to play dances, and there were just a very few who understood who would be in a corner...while the rest just stood staring at us." The idea of sitting down and listening to a jazz orchestra as one would to a symphonic one was not unprecedented, but it was still a novelty and largely reserved for special events in formal settings legitimized by white society, such as Ellington's annual concert at Carnegie Hall.
Eckstine found the cultural terrain too rocky for trailblazing, as he told various interviewers over the years: "We were doing new things. People were used to dancing, and they couldn't dance to it. They just stared at us — some with distaste....We knew we had a great band. But it was a little too new for people....It was...new usages of chords in harmonic structures that had never been done before. And for that, we would get a lot of heat from different critics because they didn't know what the hell we were doing. But the younger people loved us and the musicians were just agog with that band....Most of the jazz critics roasted us. They said the band was out of tune because we were playing flatted fifths and flatted ninths, and it was strange to their ears."