Swing

Swing music, also known as swing jazz, is a form of jazz music that developed during the 1920s and had solidified as a distinctive style by 1935 in the

Swing music, also known as swing jazz, is a form of jazz music that developed during the 1920s and had solidified as a distinctive style by 1935 in the United States. Swing is distinguished primarily by a strong rhythm section, usually including double bass and drums, medium to fast tempo, and the distinctive swing time rhythm that is common to many forms of jazz.

African American "swing" is not, as some Eurocentric musicologists would try to characterize in Western musical paradigms, synocopation, nor does it have a "tripleted feel." Rather, it is a hybrid concept of time/pulse and rhythm: the result of the miscegenation between West African triple meter and multiple rhythmic layering with Western European duple meter and singular rhythm. This "3 inside 2" is a fundamentally a West African-descended phenomenon, found in all African diasporic musics where more than one time and more than one rhythm coexist. Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora developed unique types of "swing"- in Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Brazil, etc. The first recordings labelled swing style date from the 1920s, and come from both the United States and the United Kingdom. They are characterised by the swing rhythm already at that time common in jazz music, and a lively style which is harder to define but distinctive. Although swing evolved out of the lively jazz experimentation that began in New Orleans and that developed further (and in varying forms) in Kansas City and New York City, what is now called swing diverged from other jazz music in ways that distinguished it as a form in its own right.