by Luke Albao

This is a guest article by Luke Albao of Washington, D.C.  He was gracious enough to do a four part series on the Boilermaker Jazz Band, one of the Lindy Hop communities best swing bands.

Introduction

A couple years ago, I met a woman who was a doctoral candidate at a university in DC. When I found out she was writing a book on jazz, I prepared to hit her with rapid-fire questions, as I tend to do when I meet experts in any subject. But, knowing that jazz is a vast category that includes (at least, according to the Library of Congress) both Jelly Roll Morton and Kenny G, I began with a necessary bit of reconnaissance: Was there a particular type of jazz she liked? She closed her eyes and smiled. “Oh, you know,” she answered. “The classics.” The classics, she said! I leaned in. She continued: “You know, Miles, Trane. The good stuff.”

Now, I have never contested the idea that Miles and Coltrane are good. It’s when people spoke of them as if they were without context, as if they popped out of thin air with nobody coming before them, that I took exception. With the righteous indignation I can only call Faltesekian, I used to bemoan such ignorance; I was genuinely sad that jazz fans neglected the genius of pre-War jazz, but this sadness was tempered by that certain feeling of superiority that comes with mistaking a subject’s unpopularity for proof of its esoteric elitism.¹

This was a mystery to me, that, for the most part, the only people I ever met who liked swing-era music were lindy hoppers. Most of the time, when someone says they like “swing music,” they use the same patronizing tone you use to praise a four-year-old’s drawing; and if they don’t, they are almost surely a lindy hopper. I used to wonder why this is the case. Every time I met another person who talked about jazz as though it began in the late 1950s, it highlighted the great schism in the world of jazz. Essentially, it seems, there was the era when it was dance music, and there was the era when it became theater for people with cocked ears and cigarettes: shoe-jazz, and seat-jazz.

And then it seemed obvious to me. It was no coincidence that only lindy hoppers liked shoe-jazz. Once you think of it in terms of how you listen to the music, rather than in terms of time periods, it makes perfect sense that lindy hoppers are swing-music lovers are lindy hoppers. The more you fall in love with dancing, the more you fall in love with the music; and vice versa, back and forth until you don’t know which love came first. The simple reason for this can be stated in the following formula: dancing is how we listen to swing music. Neurologically speaking, this music cannot travel directly from your ear to your brain. Unlike later jazz, swing has to course its way through your whole nervous system, triggering rhythmic responses along the way (note, this has nothing to do with identifiable lindy moves), before it can find your primary auditory cortex. It’s Science.

So it should neither be a surprise nor a disappointment, that non-dancers don’t appreciate swing music. They’re physically unable. For a person used to sitting in a chair and listening to someone blow a string of chromatic notes for six minutes, listening to swing music is like trying to breathe air through gills. They’re not going to get much out of it, because their ear-brain pathway is designed to be stimulated in a very specific (and very different) way. It’s not that the bop aficionado can’t learn to listen to swing music, it’s just that he hasn’t yet. This is not a moral judgment. In fact, it’s the antithesis of the Faltesekian moral judgment: If the best (maybe only) way to enjoy shoe-jazz is to let it get under your skin and swing out, then the mysterious correlation between enjoying swing music and being a lindy hopper is not a mysterious correlation at all; it is one and the same. Which is why we are featuring an interview with a musician on a site dedicated to “discussion of the dance.”

Sidney Bechet anticipated all of this when he said, “Jazz dancers have to have the music in them, and jazz musicians have to have the dance in them, or jazz doesn’t happen.” This has served as a sort of epigraph for this piece, and the reason it comes so late in the introduction is that everything before is a sort of disclaimer, an epi-epigraph, written for people who might mistake the sentiment as an example of the same prescriptivism I have been denouncing. We all listen to and experience things differently. I know that. So, although my taste is obvious here, and I might slip into didactic passages, such as the entirety of this introduction, I have no intention of telling the chair-jazzer that they are wrong. I will, however, openly mock (by means of a smirk and a comment so layered in irony as to be imperceptible as such) anyone who likes smooth jazz.

Part 1

The truth of the matter is, sometimes dancers would rather dance to recorded music than a band. Maybe it’s a band where every member gets to take a solo, after which they sit and sulk because no one stopped dancing to applaud. Most often, you can blame the rhythm section. Or maybe the band is pretty good, and they have a hokey leader who is bent on being a perfect re-creation of some old star. Even that can be a blast. But nothing beats a great live band.

When I think of the best dance bands around, the Boilermaker Jazz Band is always at the top of my list. What sets them apart is their ability to do two things at once. Some bands are full of great musicians; they are professionals; they even play true to the style. Some bands make up for polish with passion; they might not be the best technicians, but everyone’s too busy having a good time to notice. Then there are the Boilermakers, who are always in their groove, whether it’s playing at a black-tie dinner or a late night jam circle. For a band to be so in tune with the vibe of the floor, and to be technically able to match it - and push it - at any level, is something truly special.

Likewise, the whole notion of a dance band is a balancing act for the musician who has aspirations of being something more creative than a sort of Civil War re-enactor. How do you find the balance between artistic innovation and historical integrity? This was one of the questions on my mind when I interviewed Paul Cosentino, the clarinetist who built the band twenty years ago when he was a student at Carnegie-Mellon University. Unfortunately, unsurprisingly, he didn’t have an easy answer. For that, all one needs to do is watch the band play. But it is worth thinking and talking about, for anyone who wants to find their individual voice inside an existent tradition.

Ironically, Cosentino’s great respect for the tradition of the music he plays, and the musicians who came before him, manifests itself in a seeming disrespect. It has been said by some lovers that jazz is “America’s classical music.” But Cosentino dismisses this idea as bullshit. As far as he is concerned, it’s people like this, who try to legitimize jazz by equating it with classical music, that disrespect jazz, for the simple reason that “America’s classical music” was never an honest description.

“Jazz, as an art form, is unique in so many ways,” Cosentino explains. “First and foremost of which is that the music was initially created as dance music, as party music. Nowadays, that concept is forgotten, unfortunately, by a lot of jazz musicians.” The connection between the party and the music cannot be ignored. Early jazz is what musicologists might call occasional music, and the occasion was a getdown. “However,” Cosentino says, “it was never trivial music.” He offers Scott Joplin’s music as an example: “That’s just as serious as a Mozart minuet - which was also the dance music and party music of its day!”

Like all great art, there are different layers to jazz, and different levels of experiencing it. “And that’s quite a trick,” Cosentino says, “to be able to play a composition by Gershwin - who’s as significant as Chopin - but play it in order for people to have a good time.” Hence, the irony: when they are least consciously trying to emulate their heroes of the past, when they are just playing in the present moment, that is when they are truest to the tradition. The Boilermakers don’t keep it real by looking back to their heroes; they do it by keeping an eye on the dance floor in front of them.

Good-time music has always involved dancing. Surprisingly, for more than a decade, the Boilermakers played their special blend of jazz without ever knowing that a lindy hop scene existed. But roots go deep. Never happy with the two-beat dixieland rhythm section, Cosentino had patterned his band after the New Orleans revival bands of the 1940s and 50s, who had the traditional hot sound, but played it over a chunky, four-beat rhythm. “Those bands were playing for dancers all the time, and the dancers were used to dancing to jump-blues records,” Cosentino says. So, from the earliest days, his band was playing dance music, even before dancers came to see them.

The explanation of the rhythm section’s evolution in New Orleans speaks well to the tradition of party music. The dancers influenced the bands, just as the bands influenced the dancers. The players who grew up in the first half of the century were not rock stars, or jazz equivalents, and the drummers were unpretentious enough to say, “Oh, the kids want something with four-to-the floor that swings? Okay!” Keep the party going. That is the tradition the Boilermakers carry. I have never seen a band that appreciates dancers the way the Boilermakers do. ²

For dancers, the Boilermaker rhythm section is second to none. It’s a feel that has grown organically over the years from Cosentino’s own vision for the band, the individual talents of the players, and the way they, the musicians, vibe off the dancers on any given night. Whatever the case, the band has nailed it. Anyone who has heard them will understand when I say that the Boilermakers can swing hard and aggressive without just being fast and loud. Say you’re listening to a second-rate band, and they are playing a mid-tempo number. If you were the leader and you told them to swing harder, they, being second-rate, would either play louder, or they would speed up until they are no longer in the mid-tempo range. The Boilermakers, being first-rate, will just swing that shit harder. The effect is like going downhill. Each step hits harder, and, whether you walk, jog, or run, it’s always takes a little less effort than you would have expected.

Cosentino says that most people aren’t used to hearing such a strong swing from a “New Orleans-style” band. He says that whenever he hires a substitute bass player, they see a banjo and a clarinet, and they automatically think they have to play two-beat rhythm. But that won’t work for the Boilermaker Jazz Band, because rhythm is their business. And they only sell the good stuff.

“I always have to tell them I want four beats,” Cosentino says. “And they are like, ‘Really?’ And I have to assure them, yeah. You can throw two-beat stuff in there, but ninety percent of the time, I want four to the floor and pound it.” Even after this, they still check. Really? That’s what you want? Cosentino reassures them, “You gotta do that, yeah. That’s what makes it go.”

1. The inflated language of the preceding sentence may be proof of my predisposition to esotericism. It is an embarrassing character trait, yes, and I could have just made a reference instead to Comic Book Guy, but I will let it stand, since I have done much to outgrow such douchery [except where excessive wordiness is concerned], and since I believe there might be a point to be made. [↩]
2. Now, I have the awful vision of someone taking this too far, and saying, “Yeah! It’s all about the dancers, man. The bands need to cater to us. And that’s why I want to do swingouts to <insert non-swing genre here>!” And my soul hurts. But I will spare myself the pain and choose to believe that, hey, maybe Kenny G does make some people want to swing out. (And, anyway, why is it safe for me to mock Kenny G, rather than the first five things that came to mind?) Because that’s what we’re talking about. It’s a matter of taste, and as long as there are bands whose tastes match my own, I’ll be a happy lindy hopper. Just don’t ask me to swing you out to Rock Lobster. [↩]

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