Styles
The musicians in the territory dance bands were primarily jazz musicians. Despite the overwhelming view that New Orleans was the cradle of jazz, the itinerant musicians were the ones who first disseminated it.
The dancing public could actually dance and they knew which bands swung and which simply just played well. Audiences responded with great enthusiasm to the black bands in the Midwest. The East Coast black bands were popular in the 1920s; but "Swing" came to that region in the form of Louis Armstrong joining the Fletcher Henderson band when he went to the Big Apple.
Territory bands were not all swing bands. The Midwest settlements of Europeans of various ethnicities brought their community dancing and revelry with them in the form of very popular polka bands (and also old time waltzes, leandlers, and schottisches). They played at all the ballrooms, Elk Clubs, and the like as well. Here's a short exemplary list:
- Fezz Fritsche & His Goose-town Band
- The Six Fat Dutchmen
- The Babe Wagner Band (Babe later played jazz trombone with the Krupa band)
- Whoopie John — a very successful and famous polka band from Minneapolis
Read more about this topic: Territory Band
Famous quotes containing the word styles:
“Can we love our children when they are homely, awkward, unkempt, flaunting the styles and friendships we don’t approve of, when they fail to be the best, the brightest, the most accomplished at school or even at home? Can we be there when their world has fallen apart and only we can restore their faith and confidence in life?”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)