Is the Music of Big Bands Jazz or Pop?

[Admin]

I grew up listening to what I believed to be "white man's jazz", the music of Glenn Miller, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Bennie Goodman, et al. I always thought these bands/orchestras to be jazz and the singers that fronted the bands (Julie London, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, et al) to be great jazz singers. However, there seems to be some disagreement on their classification as Jazz.

What's your opinion?

Let's keep this as objective as possible PLEASE. I know the sentiment will create some definite subjective opinions and all are welcome.

So, My vote is yes, this is Jazz!

[earleg]

Not real sure but seems there are songs referred to as jazz standards now but started out more as "pop" in their day.
But then, jazzy versions or arrangements evolved with the famous jazzers. Then again there were tunes though were jazz
like from the get go.

Now one hears rock and pop tunes covered in a jazz style by jazz artists ranging from mild to heavy in format.
A lot of Steely Dan's music was jazz influenced and then later jazz artists did their arrangements of those tunes!

[muddylives]

The simple answer is that the big bands were both pop and jazz. Jazz was the popular music of the Swing era. That said, there were bands that used the big band framework to make commercial pop that had little to do with "blues and swing" per se. In fact, most big bands did that to some degree. Even Ellington and Basie made purely commercial recordings that had only a weak relationship to what we usually think of as the essence of jazz. The Dorsey Brothers, Glenn Miller, and Benny Goodman made a lot of commercial recordings like that. Yet all of them could play good jazz when they wanted to, and they often did, especially Benny Goodman. I would say that the Dorsey Brothers and Glenn Miller were more purely jazz oriented in the 1920s than in the 1930s.