DJs freely meld together sounds from the early years of jazz and swing with sounds so forward they sound as if they’re from a future which has yet to come.

Swing bands, once eschewing even amplification, have now taken up the mantle of electronic bass and digital performance. Early swing made a world tour by way of the radio, and to this day has continued to step in time with the forefront of technology. What it’s lost in spontaneity though, it has made up for in community forged through means never before imaginable. Today it is mostly DJ/Producer-centric, albeit with a handful of stellar live bands and live-electronic hybrids however, the early days of swing and jazz in general were a free-for-all of wild improvisation and musical conversation. The music known today as electro swing is often very much apart in terms of performance from the genre we celebrate. Even the Nazis couldn’t quell the thirst for swing’s syncopated rhythms and blasting brass. In Europe, it was a cultural travel-agent, allowing people to leave their homes and scoot across the Atlantic and the English Channel by means of the short-wave radio and innumerable local dance halls. For blacks in Harlem, it meant a means to own their own personage in an era where most minorities were kept from owning land and exercising their right to vote. To many Americans, it represented the opulence of the Twenties, and later an escape from the desolation of the Thirties. Swing has meant many things to many people throughout it’s century-old history. As we envelop ourselves in the re-creation of a genre long thought dead, reviving fashions, songs, and slang, it’s brutally important that we do not ignore the deeper meanings and the historical parallels, as well as the differences between our world and those of ages past.

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