John Tumpak

When Swing Was The Thing: Personality Profiles Of The Big Band Era

2008 Marquette University Press 

           During the mid-1930s to the end of World War II, swing was the thing in American popular music. It was an era when jazz dominated the charts. It was a time when fifteen-piece big bands crisscrossed the country by bus, car or rail to play at hotels, theaters, and ballrooms in order to make Depression Era-weary dancers shake away their cares and to turn homes into make believe ballrooms via radio broadcasts. It was the period when jukeboxes reigned supreme. It was the age of the jitterbug, bobbysockers, nickel telephone calls, New Deal projects, gas rationing, the draft, zoot suits, a world at war, and "moonlight cocktails."

Jazz journalist and Big Band Era historian John Tumpak brilliantly captures the magic of these nostalgic times in his newly-published book, When Swing Was The Thing: Personality Profiles Of The Big Band Era, from Marquette University Press. This 329-page attractively produced  hardback tome highlights detailed profiles of some of the Era's under-recognized bandleaders, musicians, vocalists, arrangers, and contributors, many based on personal interviews, and aptly illustrated with 114 photographs.

Some of these musical greats that Tumpak has written about have long left us. Many are still with us, thank God, with the sobering reminder that the ranks of these pioneering musical personalities are rapidly thinning. This printed project is a testament of their lives and legacies while enthusiastically celebrating each personality's unique individual imprint to the history of American popular music.

Tumpak pens the "personal touch" on such stellar bandleaders as Van Alexander, Gerald Wilson, Orrin Tucker, and Alvino Rey; and brilliant sidemen such as Roc Hillman, Jake Hanna, Butch Stone, Paul Tanner, Zeke Zarchy, Milt Bernhart, and even former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, an alumnus of the Big Band Era. Sparkling band vocalists Garry Stevens, Herb Jeffries, Bea Wain, Kay Starr, Martha Tilton, and Jo Stafford are also given equal time, as well as gifted arrangers Johnny Mandell and Frank Comstock, and ubiquitous contributors like Chuck Cecil of radio's The Swingin' Years, and renown Big Band writer/editor George T. Simon.

Every page of Tumpak's work is filled with scholarship, fastidious research, and fun reading. It's living history at its best. It is also, as he wrote, a "labor of love." And it shows! 

This is a must-have book for the library of the Big Band Era aficionado. 

- Stephen Fratallone/Jazz Connection Magazine

Rating:  *****

When Swing Was The Thing can be ordered from Marquette University Press for $35 plus shipping and handling by calling toll free from the U. S. and Canada at 1-800-247-6553; or directly at 1-419-281-1802; or by FAX at 1-419-281-6883; or by logging on to the Marquette University Press website at: www.marquette.edu.mupress

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