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About two years ago, jazz suddenly be came salable again in the U. S. The Jazz Revival occurred almost simultaneously with a series of Columbia records which spectacled Clarinetist Benny Goodman & band made in the winter of 1933, including such latterday masterpieces as Ain't Cha' Glad?, Riffin' the Scotch, Georgia Jubilee. While the big hotel and ballroom jobs still go to the big conventional organizations, small "hot" bands have lately been springing up in saloons all over Manhattan and Chicago. And whereas before 1932 the phonograph companies could count on selling only 1,000 copies of a '"hot" record in the U. S. to 7,000 in Europe, the distribution is now more evenly divided.
The fact that jazz was once more immensely popular in the land of its birth was illustrated last week not alone by the insane vogue of The Music Goes 'Round And Around. Black pianist Thomas ("Fats") Waller, who can swing with the best of them when he wants to, arrived in Manhattan from Hollywood, gave a "recital" of jazz music 'at a midtown hotel under the auspices of Twentieth Century-Fox, for whom he had just helped make King of Burlesque, and who were anxious to cash in on the notoriety attending the burgeoning jazz movement.
In Chicago, his home town, Benny Goodman was making a sensational stay at the Congress Hotel, was somewhat ambiguously lauded in a full-page advertisement on the back page of Variety as the possessor of an "individual hot-sweet 'swing' style, " had just played a Sunday afternoon recital to 800 Chicago jazz academicians who would no more have thought of dancing than they would of gavotting at a symphony concert. Clearly, Goodman, who played his first professional date in short pants on an excursion boat, was the Man Of The Hour to thousands of jazz fans.
The fans in turn, were busily forming amateur Hot Clubs in New Haven, Birmingham, Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. They were modeled after the group of more than 1,000 English, German, French and Dutch clubs formed a decade ago for the practical purpose of purchasing and pooling "hot" records from the U. S. In the U. S. the purpose of the clubs is to revive old masterpieces, organize "jam sessions" like Goodman's Chicago concert, discuss their hobby in terms which often sound like highflown nonsense.
* "Swing," is to jazz what the poetic spirit is to poetry. Its exact definition, however, has given jazzmen many a troubled hour. Author Hugues Panassie of the classic Le Jazz Hot tentatively explains "swing" as "une sorte de balancement dans de rythme et la mélodic qui comporte toujours un grand dynamisme." To black Bandmaster Chick Webb of Harlem's Savoy Ballroom, swing "is like lovin' a special girl, and you don't see her for a year, and then she comes back it's somethin' inside you."