What is the difference between dixieland jazz and 30s and 40s swing jazz?

Question

I'm doing a report on music, jazz as one of my sobcatergories, but I don't know the difference between swing and dixieland.

Answer 1

Dixieland is the earlier style. It evolved in New Orleans in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. A typical Dixieland band has one horn playing the melody, with the other instruments improvising around it. It's that mass improvisation that gives it much of its distinctive sound.

Swing is characterized by swing rhythm - a sort of 8-to-the-bar rhythm where the first of each pair of 8th notes is held longer than the second. The style of playing is also much different. There's a lot of unison playing, with individual solos in between.

Answer 2

Dixieland generally sounds cheesey. The band usually consists of a clarinet, trumpet, trombone, banjo, string bass and a small amount of percussion. They generally don't amplify their sound. The music is very much improvised. It usually starts off with the theme being played by the trumpet say, while the clarinet plays a fast, high improvised solo over it. Then after that, it jus sounds like everyone is improvising at the same time. Everyone usually gets the chance to do a solo, but its always fast and high.

30s and 40s swing jazz was really the big band era. Glenn Miller style. The band usually consists of 5 saxes - 2 altos, 2 tenors and a baritone, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, keys, guitar, bass and drums. The music sounds way more organized, with a few clear tutti sections, maybe a sax, trumpet or trombone soli section, solos, then the tutti sections repeated.

Answer 3

First of all, Dixieland is a term that wasn't applied to the original New Orleans style until it's revival in the 1950s. Traditional jazz is the New Orleans style, often nicknamed tradjazz, and it's the parent style of jazz, originating as far back as the 1890s, with Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton as it's early innovators.

Second is the two uses of the word swing. Swing is a quality that is used in performing jazz. It's a style of playing largely innovated by one man (see below). The second use of Swing is to refer to the period of time of the big bands, roughly 1930 to 1950, with the heyday from 1935-1945.

It was the arrival of Louis Armstrong in the mid 1920s, then the cornetist with King Oliver's band, that elevated the music to the next level. Once Armstrong left Oliver and started his own band, cuttiing the historic Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings in Chicago, that swing came into being. Armstrong elevated the improvising soloist apart from the band in ways traditional jazz had not.

The swing style came into flower after Armstrong's tremendous appeal and record sales (among blacks almost exclusively). Young people were drawn to the new way of playing against time, like Bix Beiderbecke and Duke Ellington. The story of the 1930s is of jazz following Armstrong's lead. When the category of Swing is referenced, it is referring to this period of music, the 1930s and 1940s, when large bands became popular. At first the Big Bands were 7-10 pieces. They eventually grew to 20 or more pieces. With the help of a Benny Goodman nationwide broadcast, white kids became appreciative of the big bands and the Swing sensation reached maturity in the mid-1930s.

Big bands remained popular throughout World War II but waned in the following ten years, 1945-1955. By that time, jazz had seen the innovations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and Bebop was the new direction, returning jazz to small combos.

Answer 4

Emma, someone may give you a very technical answer and I hope they do. But to start with, just listen to some of the music you ask about, alternating dixieland with swing and reading the liner notes with the CDs. You should notice a gradual change in the instrumentation used over the years, that the later music was more arranged [wholly or partly written out] than earlier and that vocal styles became adapted for the microphone and recording studio.

Answer 5

Dixieland Jazz:

started in New Orleans,
small bands (6 members)
among other instruments implements use of Banjo, Tuba, Clarinet,
2/4 time
highly improvisational

Swing Jazz:

Big Bands
started in New York
compositionally based
4/4 time

Answer 6

Some of dixieland can be dubbed as swing, some New Orleans style. But I can't explain it to you, took many years of listening.
Borrow a cd from your local library of THE PRESERVATION HALL JAZZ BAND ....THAT WOULD BE NEW ORLEANS STYLE JAZZ.